True and None’s Brace Belden, Liz, and Young Chomsky dissect the OceanGate Titan disaster—where Stockton Rush’s carbon-fiber submersible imploded at 13,000 feet, crushing five passengers, including Titanic expert P.H. Nargeolet and Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood’s son. The crew mocks Rush’s SpaceX-style bravado, his $265K "first-class" fares, and the sub’s untested Logitech-controlled navigation, while debunking survival theories amid confirmed debris. They contrast the Titan’s reckless tourism with James Cameron’s rigorous deep-sea missions, exposing how extreme pressure turns humans to dust—like the USS Thresher’s 1963 implosion—and slam maritime law loopholes in international waters. The episode ends by framing the tragedy as a cautionary tale of unchecked ambition and the absurdity of treating death-defying dives like luxury vacations. [Automatically generated summary]
That is how I know you go on far across the distance and spaces between us.
Yeah, that's not how that is.
You have come to show you go on.
Near, far, wherever you are.
I believe that the heart does go on once more.
You open the door and you're here in my heart.
And my heart will go on and on.
Love and touch just one time and last for a life.
I'm not doing this real deep with that.
Went into my alto.
Oh, I'm in my alto shit, right?
I'm in my alto bag.
I'm kind of in my alto phrase right now.
Liz, hello.
Hello, Brace.
How you doing?
I'm doing well.
I feel great.
Got two feet on the ground, right at sea level where I belong.
I'm, of course, sitting Swami style on the ground as I record every episode, but yes, the feet are near the ground.
Pressure's normal.
Pressure feels great.
Not a lot of windows in the room we're in right now, to be completely honest with you.
There's one window, but it just goes into another one.
It goes into another.
It goes into an isolation booth, which is where we put me when I'm being bad.
And who am I?
My name is Brace Belden, captain of the HMS Liz.
What?
Yeah, all ships are women.
Well, and I'm Liz, obviously.
Handy-dandy co-pilot.
Nope.
Boiler.
Boiler's mate.
No.
And we are, as always, joined by a little Skippy over here, Young Chomsky.
The cabin boy.
The cabin boy.
And the podcast is called True and None.
You know, wait, I think I have mentioned this on the podcast before, but I'm going to say it again because who knows when I said it.
I used to have this game that I would play at work, my old boss, where it was called the Dream Boat.
And we would say who we would put on a boat that was like all of the people that we thought were like total dream boats.
Yeah.
And it was like the dream boat.
But then they all had positions.
And so you'd be like, this is captain of the dream boat.
This is the boatswain of the dream boat.
Yeah, but then you had the stowways, which were like the people you didn't really want to know, but they were on the dream boat.
Who would be on your dream boat now?
That's private information.
Oh, wow.
What are we doing?
Pedro Pascal.
Women love him.
Who?
Is that on TikTok?
I think he's popular on TikTok.
And he's a famous actor.
Oh, I don't know who that is.
I'd have him as a guy.
Me and my friends did something similar.
We called it galley slave.
And we looked at all the guys that we saw that were kind of larger than us and kind of imagined ourselves either hitting a drum to make them row better or kind of just whipping into the air.
That's terrible.
And so, yeah, it was kind of, we also picked them for hotness.
Hello, everyone.
You know what's cool about last week?
What?
Everyone learned a new word.
Yep.
Felching.
What?
It's all good.
Everyone learned it, but you, apparently.
What word did people learn?
They learned submersible.
Wait, Liz.
I don't.
Mad people had not heard the word submersible before.
Are we so sure about that?
Yeah.
I feel like this is one of those things where you're like, yeah, nobody knew about this before.
No, a lot of people probably had never heard it as opposed to a submarine.
Mm-hmm.
I'm going to.
I'm going.
You're showing you're in white male privilege right now.
Yes, I am.
I think that a lot of people, not here for it.
Sorry, white, yes, yes.
Okay, we like to go down there, see what's going on.
We're going to find Atlantis.
Yeah, people learned about submersibles, and I found out about a little ship called the Titanic.
Okay, let's cut to the chain.
We have to cover this.
What?
The episode that we're doing.
Oh, yeah.
Nobody.
I'm telling the audience this right now.
Oh, okay.
I thought you were telling me, and I was like, no, no, we've got lots of notes.
I want to get you everything out of the way here.
I have been able to think about almost nothing else since the sub first went down or was reported missing.
I have been able to think about practically nothing else except for that submersible.
And I knew what its fate was immediately, obviously.
Everybody who really thought about it did.
But it's consumed me in much the same way as a Titanic consumes some of these poor souls.
Yeah, it's a little eerie how much they mirror each other, which I got to say, James Cameron in an interview mentioned that, and I was like, get out of here.
No, he was rocking.
It's being annoying.
I disagree.
I don't need to hear from this man.
I think he's been down there a lot.
I don't need to hear from him.
Not a lot of guys have.
The Titanic's up.
All right.
So I just, we have been, we had a whole other episode planned that we were going to do.
We even had some notes and everything for it.
But this is, this, we have to talk about that.
That one's going lost.
That's going into the lost tapes.
No one will ever find it.
41 lost tapes now of true and non-episode.
For everyone at home who was, in fact, in a submersible underwater for the last week and has no idea what we're talking about, what we're talking about is this little ship that could not, which is called the Titan, which is a five-man 21-foot submersible, which is operated by a private company called Ocean Gate Expeditions.
No idea if this company is still in operation.
We'll get to that.
Not for long.
This little doohickey dinghy submerged at 8 a.m. last Sunday, which who knows when you're listening to this, but just bear with me here.
Yeah.
Last Sunday.
On Monday.
They lost communications with their mothership at 9.45 a.m.
So about an hour and 45 minutes after they submerged.
But they didn't report it missing to the U.S. Coast Guard until 5.40 p.m. later that afternoon, which I got some questions about.
They were supposed to return back up.
They did not.
What, five days later?
Yes.
Five days later.
They had about 90 hours of oxygen.
I mean, so they reported missing.
It becomes this kind of like, where are they?
Maybe they're just lost at sea for a little bit, but there's kind of like an oxygen countdown thing going on here.
Yeah.
About 90 hours of oxygen on board.
And as of yesterday morning, that 90 hours was officially over.
But by that point, unless you're having really morbid fantasies, like you know that they are long dead.
Well, I think some people were hoping that they could, that maybe it was kind of just like caught on the ship or like, oh, had floated up somewhere and was just like bobbing along on the ocean at the, you know, the top of the ocean or whatever.
It had not, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that they found debris that matched what they believed to be the hull of the little thingy.
The little, yeah, little doohickey.
And it has since been revealed that, yes, in fact, it did implode, which we will get to.
But first, we should kind of talk about a little bit of background.
The Titanic, the big, the elephant in the ocean, the motherfucking Titanic.
Now, Liz, you and I actually met on the Titanic.
You at the time, I believe, were with your husband.
I was kind of like a roguish stowaway.
And I was, you know, I honestly, I met a really beautiful woman on that ship, had a great romance with her, and I married Rich.
And I came to New York sort of on top of my game.
You, of course, were divorced by your husband on the ship, which was one of the first times it's ever happened in naval history.
And you kind of came here as a pauper, and I rescued you.
This is so mean.
Sort of put you in the workhouse kind of thing.
Now, the Titanic, right?
It is, I mean, listen, everybody knows when the motherfucking Titanic.
If you haven't seen the Titanic, the movie, you're weird.
I feel like it's one of the most.
You've seen it, right?
Of course it's.
I saw it in the theaters.
Yeah, me too.
Ice.
Probably one of the first sex scenes I actually ever saw.
Damn.
I think me too, maybe.
Yeah, it was pretty.
It was a late bloomer.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's the, I can fully remember, of course, the hand against sort of horror movie style making a streak against the window in the T-Model Ford or whatever they were fucking in.
Yeah, I remember my friend and I in grade school or whenever we went and saw it.
We, this is such a classic Liz moment.
We went and we were like real, like, sarcastic, like bratty kids.
Like, oh my God, this is going to be so stupid.
This movie looks so cheesy.
Oh, my God.
This is going to be so dumb.
And then in the audience, like, you know, halfway through, just like fucking bawling.
Just totally, oh, you're lying, Jack.
Hold on.
Come on, Jack.
Go on.
So the Titanic, big ass motherfucking ship, very fancy, sort of an affront to God, you might call it.
Kind of like a middle finger to Jesus Christ, Moses, you know, Muhammad, kind of all of them up there.
And of course, because of that, because of its insult to God, it struck an iceberg.
And in the allegedly, possibly.
Well, we'll get to that.
Yeah.
But in their hubris, these people did not pack enough lifeboats.
And about 1,500 people, give or take about 100, died in horrible ways, mostly, I guess, freezing in the freezing cold Atlantic Ocean.
The wreck sank down to the bottom of the ocean.
Now, to get this out of the way, there are a number of conspiracy theories surrounding the sinking of the Atlantis.
Atlantis?
Jesus.
I've got merman on the brain.
The Titanic.
One of them I really like.
Actually, both of them I really like, but both of them are very much unbelievable.
The first is that the Titanic was actually switched out with a different ship and sunk as part of like an insurance scheme, which seems a little unworkable to me.
Yeah, but I like that one because you know I hate the insurance company.
You know, I like doing insurance rod.
Just kidding.
Do not use that against me if you're an insurance adjuster in like three years, please.
I really did break both of my legs on your construction site while walking through to prevent one of your workers from sexually harassing a woman.
The other one is that the ship was sunk on purpose to eliminate opponents of the Federal Reserve.
Wow.
I didn't know that one.
This is, yes.
John Jacob Astor famously died on it.
Isidore Strauss and his old lady, you know, the, who was, I think he was a co-owner of Macy's at the time, not just the full arm, the co-owner.
And Benjamin Guggenheim, they all died on it.
And apparently, they were opposed to the creation of the Federal Reserve.
And instead of ending the Fed, the Fed ended them.
I really like that because it seems way easier to just shoot three guys than sink a giant ship.
Especially on a boat.
Yeah, yeah.
You could easily, listen, I've seen that collaboration.
I've seen a second novel right now.
Yeah, exactly.
You could kill somebody in a boat, no problem.
Just push them.
And what are they going to do?
Throw you in sea jail?
There's no laws out there.
Or just shoot them.
Shoot them.
Throw the gun on overboard.
Anyways, that's the wiser.
Big old wreck blown up by the United States government to destroy the enemies of the Federal Reserve, sunk to the bottom of the ocean, and it has been lying there ever since, slowly being eaten away.
Yeah, it's in two parts, which I think is very cool.
It's in two parts because the thing, you know, it split in half before it sank famously.
And in between it is an area they call the debris field, which is sort of the area where all these belongings and typewriters and all of Jack's paintings of Rose are.
And obviously, you know, the beautiful necklace.
He painted in that?
Yeah.
Oh, draw me like one of your French girls.
Yeah, of course.
I only remember bits and pieces of it.
No, but the reason why I said allegedly hit an iceberg is because I was reading, I was up on the old Titanic web boards.
Yeah, you know.
The other night.
You spent a lot of time on those.
Yeah.
Shout out to Encyclopedia Titanica and the very robust community found their wives.
Yeah.
Sort of a dating app for them.
No, but there's theories that, and this actually came about ever since they visited, they've done some visits to the Titanic, which we'll talk about, that there aren't actually, you know, popular narrative is that the Titanic's, the captain, you know, very, with great hubris, scraped up against the side of an iceberg, and that's what did the ship there.
Shoulder-checked it.
Yeah.
We're shoulder-checked it.
And they say that those scrapes are not visible, which I'm like, who knows?
But there's a lot of people, like reputable people, not crazy people, that have a theory that, I mean, it still hit an iceberg, but it was on the bottom of the ship.
And that's what caused it.
Scraped underneath.
Scraped underneath, which maybe not a big difference, but it would exonerate the captain a bit.
Well, he did go down with the ship, which I do think is a kind of cool thing that captains have to do.
Yeah.
Kind of bullshit.
Because what if it's not your fault?
Like, what if you get torpedoed?
It's like, well, I couldn't really help that.
You know what I mean?
It's not like I have any armor on.
I mean, you have armor plated on the ship, but you know what I mean.
Like, you should be able to get off the ship, but that's neither here nor there.
It's at the bottom of the motherfucking ocean, right?
And it stayed there for a long time.
I want to be – Well, it's still there.
I want to, yes, but I want to be very just honest with our audience.
I am freaked out by the depths.
Of the ocean?
Of the ocean.
Fuck yes.
As you should be.
They're scary to me, right?
It's very scary.
It's much like space, but the opposite.
The opposite.
And there's nothing further because you can keep going in space and then you hit like Betelgeuse or like Jupiter or whatever.
At the bottom, you just hit the Earth, but lower.
Well, many don't know this, but actually, if you get beyond Pluto, there's actually just a wall.
There's a wall, yeah.
There's the wall, and you kind of clank up against it.
Yeah.
But it's a big wall.
It is a big wall.
And it's tough to get there.
It's tough to get there.
So at the bottom of the, like, you know, it's just, it's a big space, right?
And so I think people might be a little surprised to know that they actually didn't find the Titanic for a long time.
Freaked Out By Depths00:14:51
They actually did, they could not locate the actual wreck of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean for quite a while.
Which is kind of crazy because it's a real big ship.
It's a real big ship.
It was found by a guy named Robert Ballard.
Now, Ballard's kind of an interesting cat.
He was in the Navy, Naval Intelligence, actually, for I think something like 20 years.
And after he, I think he quits the Navy and then he returns to them with an offer.
He's like, listen, I need you guys to help me create robotic submersibles in order to find the Titanic.
So he says.
The Navy says, okay, yeah, we'll help you develop this technology, but to look for submarine wrecks.
Now, Liz, I'm going to be, I know a little bit about submarines.
Yeah, we know about your white male privilege.
Yes.
Well, yes.
But I used to, I have a personal connection to a submarine.
There was a submarine that was parked at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco.
Have you ever been there?
Yeah, I remember that.
Next to the Liberty ship.
The big thing.
Yes.
I used to buy Coke from a guy who worked on it.
Like, was wait, what did he do on this submarine?
Well, he wasn't like, he literally.
Was he like a ticket taker?
He was the ticket taker at the little thing in front of the submarine.
But I know that he had pretty much free reign to go in the submarine and things like that.
So he was kind of like, kind of a, I mean, he worked on a submarine.
Am I wrong?
I mean, he worked off the submarine, but he worked next to it on the project of getting people on the submarine for tours.
I think that that's fair.
So I'm kind of like emotionally invested in this because of that.
So Ballard was tasked with finding these two Cold War era submarine wrecks, and they actually kind of sandwich the Titanic in where their supposed locations were supposed to be and where they actually ended up being, right?
And the first of these is actually one I want to go to in a little bit in detail because it has some similarities to our recent Titan accident.
This is the USS Thresher.
That is a very cool name.
Yes, it is.
Yeah.
And it's a very, it's sort of a famous submarine wreck.
This is one of those ones that before we started this episode, I was like, oh, I know what that is.
That one and the Kursk, I was familiar with the stories of because they're both pretty horrific stories.
That was crazy.
The Kursk was fucked.
And ugly as hell.
You thought it was a disgusting sub?
I don't like it.
You don't like it?
You don't like it.
Interesting.
Okay.
You like the way.
Okay.
I'm just going to say, it doesn't have the elegance of Red October.
It does not have the elegance of a Red October.
So, all right.
The USS Thresher was a nuclear attack submarine commissioned in 1961.
Pretty, you know, we're talking Cold War, Cold War here.
And it was still being tested, and it was on deep diving test alongside a Navy submarine rescue ship in pretty deep water several hundred miles east of Cape Cod.
So that day, the sub-rescue ship, like the day that it was lost, the sub-rescue ship hadn't actually seen the thresher, but had communicated with it via radio.
And basically, like via, it's like the sonar thing.
The way that subs communicate to ships, at least back then, was, and still, I guess, is sort of too strange for me to understand, but it involves sonar.
There were indications that there were problems leveling out the sub, and then communications between the submarine and the sub-rescue ship kind of become garbled.
There were two really mangled messages that came from the submarine.
Like, you know, like you only a couple words were legible.
One of which maybe said that the thresher had exceeded test depth.
Then they heard what sounded like ballast tanks blowing and then one high-pitched noise, which everyone can guess what that is.
So they think that it just, it went too deep.
Yes.
So basically, they never really, so this is actually part of the reason that Ballard was sent to find these two wrecks is because they actually still don't really know what caused these problems.
Because what happened with the thresher, right?
It's it's descending normal, normal, normal.
And then the captain of the thresher radios up and he's like, we got a problem.
And he's blowing ballast tanks.
And so that is basically a way to like shoot yourself up to the surface, right?
Right.
And you're not really supposed to do that that far down.
Just like with the Titan, you actually control it with like propulsion, right?
So like you can either, you know, you can basically adjust depth from there.
Right, right.
Ballast tanks will like shoot you up to the surface.
Like crazy, like and so they wouldn't have done that that far down unless there was a pretty big fucking emergency, right?
Unfortunately, what happened is they ended up just sinking much faster.
So sort of the opposite of what you would want to happen.
So they blow the ballast tanks and they actually are just like shooting downwards really quickly.
Oops.
Yeah, you really.
Maybe they were upside down and they didn't realize.
Well, I think it was just like the sub was like uneven, like it was like the nose going up.
Yeah, it was just kind of rocking around.
So the crazy thing is, is what the people experiencing on board must have been insane, right?
I mean, we don't know.
I mean, it was, there was, they, they thought, there's been several like theories put forth as to why this happened.
One of them is that there was, you know, this, this one line was loose and it basically started flooding and you try shooting water in there really quickly.
There's now some indications that it might have been something else that caused it.
Nevertheless, there was probably flooding of some kind.
And with that, like, you know, electronic systems going off, probably fires starting.
And at the same time, they're descending really quickly.
And, you know, imagine you're a submariner, submariner in here, and there's all of a sudden you're very far down in the ocean, like 800 feet down there, and there's water shooting in the sub.
And all that you can hear is the outside of the submarine.
It's just the metal is groaning under the pressure.
The pipes in the submarine are groaning under the pressure.
So these horrible banshee-like streaking noises that are coming from all around you, like you're living inside of like inside of a banshee's throat.
You know, it's this, it's this horrible noise of hell that's all around you.
Meanwhile, the pressure in the submarine is rising rapidly because you're descending really, really quickly.
In fact, much too quickly to be safe.
So at the same time, you're getting the bends, which is just because of the rapid change in pressure.
These bubbles are forming in your blood, and so everything becomes really painful.
So your last moments are spent inside of this like sealed metal tube, groaning metal, like screaming at this point all around you.
There's fires inside.
So you're burning hot and at the same time being sprayed with like tremendously powerful jets of water, probably to the point where you're being very badly physically injured by that.
And your blood is essentially exploding.
And then there was an implosion, and that was the high-pitched noise that the sub-rescue ship heard.
And the thresher was later found to be in six different pieces at the bottom.
This actually led to a revamping of sub-safety practices, but not in time for the USS Scorpion, which was a different nuclear attack submarine that was lost in 1968 with all hands.
And that was lost because, of course, also kind of made badly.
I think the submarine crew was not super well trained.
And they might have had a malfunctioning torpedo that actually launched and then hit the sub itself.
But that was lost with all hands in 1968.
And so these are the things that Robert Ballard was actually supposed to go look for.
And instead, at the tail end of that journey, he found the Titanic.
So not that many people have actually seen the Titanic.
No.
Do you?
I mean, I'm going to be real.
We were like, don't care.
I did a lot of reading about all this.
I don't really get the whole obsession.
Like, there's a lot of people in this story who purportedly have obsessions with the Titanic.
Yeah.
I don't really get it.
Like, even I know that James Cameron has already said a bunch of, like, you know, he's made a movie about it.
He went to it on Deep Sea Challenger.
He found out about 9-11 or 9-11 happened while I was down there.
Which is, that's so crazy, by the way, to be like, dude, you guys are just at the Titanic.
And they're like, we can't talk about that now.
Something terrible.
Yeah, you saw the footage from it.
No, I haven't.
There's really funny footage of him being told about 9-11 after emerging from the sub.
Worst terrorist attack in history, Jim.
We all were very wrapped up in what we were doing, and we all thought it was desperately important.
I gotta say, like, I just don't understand the idea of someone being so consumed by this, like, or haunted by the wreck of this ship underwater that they would find themselves down there, 12,000 feet under the sea.
I mean, I think maybe because it's like the combination of the fact that it was like, you know, this terrible accident, that it was like a really tragic, you know, mass casualty event, a bunch of children died.
And it was like, I think in a weird way, I think it's similar impulses that lead people to want to go see it then that leads me and basically everybody else to be so fascinated with the story of these submersible passengers who died trying to find it.
Because at its core, the story of the Titanic is a story of excruciating, terrible, terrible, terrifying, and terrible mass death in a really extraordinary way, right?
To go from being like, you know, a co-owner of Macy's department store to likely freezing to death as in a sort of silent, an ocean that's completely silent except for some smoldering wreckage and the cries of other people also freezing to death is really both a terrifying, but I think a weirdly like captivating.
It's captivating.
I think it's a morbid curiosity, but I also think it's like the romance and the glamour of this.
There's a, that David Pogue was a CBS journalist who made a, you know, a short CBS segment and then a later two-part podcast on the Titan, interviews this one woman and he, she's like obsessed with the Titanic.
He's like weeping because her trip got canceled, which I get.
You know, it's frustrating to have happen.
I mean, no one likes cancellation.
I mean, are you, do you care?
I mean, you like the Titanic, but, like, do you have any, like.
I honestly don't get it.
I mean, I think that, I don't know.
I think that there's a certain type of person that is, and we, you know, maybe we talk about this further along in the episode when we talk about some of the people that were on board this thing.
But, you know, there's a certain type of person that does not accept limits.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, you see these kind of like billionaire explorer types that, you know, do these sort of like Iron Man, insane Iron Man competitions and push their bodies to these insane limits and, you know, get these crazy injuries.
Or, you know, someone like Richard Branson, who we're going to talk about, you know, who, you know, I'm going to go to space.
I'm going to go to Mars.
I'm going to go visit the bottom of every ocean.
You know, just like nonsense craziness.
These, you know, there's this certain kind of type.
And I think that, you know, we talk about these people on this ship who were all very, very wealthy.
And, you know, they're sort of, you know, in their line of business, they don't see limits to their profits.
And I think they don't see limits to them.
You know, these are the types of people that don't, that have an insane fear of dying in a way that, you know, there's that kind of like bourgeois obsession with death and overcoming death.
Yeah.
And not accepting kind of, it's not acceptance of limits or just a kind of like, I think I like to say like an appropriate fear or like a respect for reality.
You know what I'm saying?
And like, I don't know if.
Like, I'm torn because on the one hand, I do really think like we should push ourselves to like go further and deeper.
Absolutely.
And, you know, there's a way to do that that isn't in this fucking rinky dink tube that these guys found, you know, imploded on the bottom of the ocean.
Well, I think, I think you raise a good point there because, I mean, first of all, these guys aren't explorers, right?
I mean, these tourists.
They're tourists.
The trip down to the Titanic has been happening for a long time.
James Cameron has been down there literally dozens of time.
Well, yeah, Deep Sea Challenger is very different.
Exactly.
That's the ship he took.
But people have been down.
Right.
You know what I mean?
It's not like breaking, they're not exactly like breaking new ground in terms of like, we're going to a place no one's ever been before.
Right.
They're doing a, what's essentially really dangerous tourism, which, you know, I'm not going to, it's, that's, if people want to do that with their money, whatever.
You know what I mean?
But I do think that like that does speak to a certain impulse where I think most people, and maybe we can discuss this a little more too when we talk about some of the reactions to this stuff.
But I think most people sort of look at this and like, you spent $250,000 on like being in this trapped, in this cramped five-foot death trap instead of like, I mean, $250,000, first of all, you could buy a house in many places, but like, I don't even know what I could, what kind of vacation I could take with that, but I could take a very, very, very, very long and very, very, very nice one with that.
But that's what I'm saying.
It's like they're chasing after something to prove that they can conquer and dominate something that, by the way, they just proved they can't.
Yeah.
But it's something inside that says, and I, you know, I really do think that it is, there is that kind of like, it's like a very, it's almost like cliche, right?
That like bourgeois obsession where it is, you know, I can, you know, you see, these are the, these are the types of like biohackers who say like, you know, I'm not going to, like aging is a disease as opposed to just a natural sort of course of life and kind of the flip side of living, right, is dying.
And I think that it's this like, I don't accept limits on the expansion and reach of my profits and my business.
I don't accept the limitations of my own life and my and of this world.
Yeah, yeah.
And I really, you know, I think it's a really, it makes me feel really queasy when I think about it.
It's like out of sync with the world.
It doesn't feel respectful and it doesn't feel, I mean, this sounds really hippie, but it doesn't sound, it doesn't feel in harmony.
Here's my thing.
Wanted Astronaut Market00:16:18
Listen, there's a few things you don't want to fuck with, right?
Outer space and you don't want to fuck with the bottom of the ocean.
Those are kind of the same thing.
Yeah.
And like, there's a reason that, like, would you look at the fucking, look at a picture of the Titan.
Would you go to space in that or the equivalent?
Absolutely you would not.
And so I don't know why these fucking people thought going to the bottom of the ocean in that would be a good idea.
And listen, you know, I understand, I am almost sympathetic to the, to the feeling that these people have of like, I need that rush adventure.
You know, I have been prone to that in my life myself.
But the thing is, these guys aren't like, you're a passenger.
And I, what I don't like and what freaks me out personally is it's the same thing with airplanes and helicopters, any of these things where like you don't, you aren't in full control of a situation, especially if you're not driving, right?
Being a passenger in one of these things, is that any number of minor accidents or mishaps or, you know, a waylaid bolt or something like that, a lose something could result in a catastrophic death for you.
To me, that is just like that being so far out of my control.
I don't, I don't dig that.
I would do something dangerous if I can be, have some kind of choice-making capabilities within that situation, but where that's, that's, you don't have those choices and like you're putting that fully in somebody else's hands and more importantly, into the hands of very unforgiving nature, then that is just, I mean, it's that is unfathomable.
And there is genuinely no pun intended on that for me.
I don't like boats in general.
Well, that we're, we, this is why I never go on a boat party because no exit strategy.
We've got no exit plan.
Because we met on a yacht.
You can't.
You can't.
You got to just wait for that boat to dock.
You're stuck there for like four hours.
You literally hired me to serve hors d'oeuvres at a fucking yacht party you had.
That's how we met.
All right.
Let's talk a little bit more about this thing, the Titan.
And to do that, I think the easiest way is to actually talk about some of the people.
Well, it's not some of the people, all the people.
All the people.
There's only five of them that were on this fucking thing.
The news, the little newspapers have taken to calling them the Titan V. I've also seen the Titanic V, which feels inappropriate.
That's inappropriate.
These are the guys, Stockton Rush, who was the CEO of Ocean Gate, the company that owned the Titan.
P.A.H. Paul Henri.
Nargolay?
Mutton, you deal with this.
How are you going to say it?
That's not, no, that's not it.
I'm going to say Narjolais.
Yeah, Narjolais.
P.H. Narjolais.
Fucking Wes Anderson-ass French exclusive.
Exclusive Munter Narjola.
I actually kind of like this guy.
AKA, me too.
His name, he's also known as Mr. Titanic, which I got to say, that sounds, it's a little like Castro San Francisco nickname sounding.
Mr. Titanic.
You think it's a gay nickname that is a reference to the size of his massive penis.
Is what you're saying?
I didn't even go that far.
It sounds like.
No, you know what I was thinking more?
It's like Beach Blanket Babylon.
Yeah, okay.
Which I got to be honest.
It's like Beach Blanket Babylon featuring Mr. Titanic, played by P.H. Narjala.
Had fond memories of Beach Blanket Babylon as a kid.
Saw it as an adult.
I don't remember.
He saw it as a kid.
I know.
It was like three years ago.
No, they were three years ago.
A lot of wigs in that show.
Hamish Harding, who is known as a British explorer.
I'm like, you don't all get to be explorers.
Explorers aren't real anymore.
Hamish does fit that mold a little more than the other guy.
I think Hamish is more of a like, you know, he's like also like, you know, doing one of the big yacht races.
Yeah, yeah.
He's that guy.
He went to space.
Well, we'll get to him.
Shahzada Dawood, the Pakistani, a Pakistani billionaire, and then his 19-year-old son, Suleiman Dawood.
Yeah.
So those are the five.
They, you know, spoiler.
They are.
Yeah, they died.
They are perished at the bottom of the ocean.
Let's start with Stockton, this guy, because it's really his fault that all this happened.
So something that I was fascinated to find, well, big San Francisco connection here.
Yeah, he grew up in San Francisco, and I didn't find out where.
Not Stockton Street.
No, he grew up very, very wealthy in San Francisco.
There's an interesting profile on him from a couple years ago in Fast Company where he's described as more Musk than Cousteau.
Not something, if you are a true non-listener.
That is a good omen.
That is not a good omen.
Not a good omen.
No.
So this kid, this guy, when he was a kid, he really wanted to be an astronaut, which is sort of like, all right, buddy, get in line.
Yeah, okay.
You're a kid.
Me too.
Whatever.
But he like literally wanted to be an astronaut.
And I think this is like such a wealthy kid that he thought that that was like maybe a possible road for him.
So when I was a kid, I also wanted to be an astronaut because my dad's favorite movie was The Right Stuff.
And so I saw it several times.
But in the process of being a child and discovering the world, I discovered two things.
One, that to be an astronaut, you had to be very good at math.
Yes.
And two, that I had a, what was later diagnosed as a severe learning disability with like a sort of emphasis on the severe by a very concerned woman in my 20s who did a test on me.
And that was mathematics related.
Wait, were you still holding on to the astronaut thing in your 20s?
No, but I was just like, I was so bad at math my whole life that I was like.
We were like, oh, now it makes sense that I can't be an astronaut.
Yes.
I see, I see, I see.
My grandfather really wanted to be an astronaut.
Like, studied so hard and was like, he was amazing at physics, at science, at math, at everything.
And he was too tall.
He was too humble, Brag.
No, he, yeah, he couldn't.
You have to be very small to fit in the rocket ship.
But he became a pilot and he was also like almost too tall to be a pilot.
Yeah.
Yeah, this was shot down guy.
No, no.
But you also can't be very tall when you're a pilot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anyway, Stockton Rush, this guy.
So, yeah, he didn't really figure out he was going to be an astronaut until he was 44, which I think that seems very late, much later than in your 20s.
I'll give you that.
I'm trying to think of like right now at 33 if I was like telling people.
Okay, I make jokes, but Stockton Rush, he was a pilot.
I mean, he studied aerospace engineering at Princeton.
He worked on F-15s.
Like, he was like, I'm going to go to Mars, blah, However, at some point, he also got his MBA.
And I'm like, you can't be that serious about being a pilot.
He got the backup MBA.
Backup MBA at Berkeley?
Come on, man.
So he basically abandons his dream of going to space and just looks down in the ground.
He's like, wait, I'll just go to the ocean.
We have space at home.
Yeah.
He's quoted as saying the future of mankind is underwater, which is not something you want to be quoted as saying when you, in fact, die underwater.
And like this guy, like trying to talk to the rest of the world on land and like 4,000 years ago.
So Mr. Rush says that he got the idea to launch Ocean Gate when Richard Branson announced Virgin Galactic in 2004.
Do you remember?
I mean, we covered some of this a little bit when we did our Elon series, but there was that big rush, no pen and no, I'm not trying to make a link there, but there was a big like gold rush in this idea of like extreme exploration companies in the 2000s.
They're like, oh, we can just have, you know, everyone wants to go to space.
You could just take a Boeing jet to space.
Well, I remember this because I remember, I love space.
I don't love space in the way that I would want to learn about it and like we'll know about how physics works and things like that.
But I really liked reading Robert Heinlein and like Philip K. Dick books as a kid.
And so that I love, I guess I loved science fiction from many years before I was born as a child is what I'm saying.
But I'm fascinated by space.
And I remember when they first sort of started mentioning space tourism was going to be a thing.
I'm like when the Lance Bass thing happened, I was like, wow, maybe someday I'll go to space.
And then I realized that that was not feasible for someone of my means.
So this guy, Stockton Rush, he starts his company with just inherited money.
Yes.
I mean, he's so rich that like I've been to multiple like places in San Francisco that are named after his family.
Yes.
Like very, very old.
I've been to both a symphony hall, like the orchestra hall or whatever in San Francisco.
The San Francisco Symphony.
The San Francisco Symphony.
Their building is named after his grandfather, great-grandfather.
And I've also used to get prescribed Adderall when I was 20 at a hospital building named for one of his family members as well.
Jesus.
Yeah.
The Mark Zuckerberg channel.
That's where I got, that's where they pop my mouth abscess in there.
Oh, my God.
It's pus coming out of my mouth for literally three days.
Okay, so he launches Ocean Gate in 2009.
He's like, we're entering the adventure travel market.
He says that this whole market is worth $275 billion a year, which I think is definitely something you would say if your company is part of that travel market.
That seems a little high.
It's worth that.
I don't think that's true.
He says, I want to change the way humanity regards the deep ocean, which again is not something I think you want to be on record as saying after.
I do think he did accomplish that.
There is, there is, yes, I think he has changed the way that we have to do that.
Any goodwill that the new little mermaid brought, the deep ocean, has been annihilated by the dissolving of five bodies in a catastrophic implosion.
Yeah.
So his idea is simple.
He's like, we're going to launch crude submersibles into the ocean at insanely dangerous depths, namely 13,000 feet below the ocean surface.
There's this old article kind of mapping a little bit more of this company because a lot of this info has been scrubbed, I'll say.
So Ocean Gate originally started out as a company simply by just chartering private submarines.
Now, remember, in 2009, 2008, 2009, this is like, we're going to Uber everything.
Yeah.
Imagine you could, we're just going to charter helicopters.
This is my new company.
Boom, I have a company.
Oh, we're going to charter airplanes.
Boom.
This is my new company.
And this guy's like, I'm, oh, we'll just, we're going to do Uber, but for people who want to be Steve Zissou.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not a big market.
Not a huge market.
He had, he starts off with this five-seater submarine that he bought off some guy that was yellow, which apparently everyone involved hated for the obvious reason.
It's yellow.
It's like, it's a classic.
It's like a yellow.
I mean, I don't, I actually hate the Beatles yellow submarine almost more than any other.
It's horrible.
It's one of the worst.
Honestly, one of the reasons I don't like the Beatles is because I don't like.
Yeah, we'll get into that maybe another time.
I like that.
It's charming to have a yellow submarine, though.
Well, it has been described by more than one person as having a steampunk air.
I'm just trying to give a little vision.
I guess it had a bunch of like colorful knobs and a diver's helmet in there, like an old diver's helmet.
Probably like some old kelp hanging.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Crazy.
Everything's like this crazy like altimeter or whatever.
And like a shrunken head.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, that's not steampunk, but I like where you're going.
Okay, well, apparently he charted it out to some oil rig companies, which is really what he was going after with this market, right?
He's like, oh, oil companies are always like trying to get deep down in there, look at environmental impact, looking for more places to find oil.
That's where you would go after.
Who else would be chartering a fucking submarine, right?
It doesn't make any sense.
So he did some dives for some tourists.
It would just be like a thousand feet off Catalina, like, you know, little wine moms, whatever.
And they'd be like looking at, you know, little fishies and jellyfish.
And that was it.
Makes sense.
Like how Ghelane Maxwell got Stephen Hawking in a submarine for the first time off the little St. James, which she did.
There's a photograph of it.
I forgot about that.
Yeah.
That was crazy.
Weird, right?
Yeah.
Weird.
That's a whole weird thing.
And he's horny.
But all this is to say that the Titanic shit just came later.
Like that was never part of the original company.
The Ocean Gate vision.
No, the whole idea was like, I'm going to create a private company that can charter submarines for big oil companies and make a lot of money doing it that way, because otherwise you got to go through all of this annoying regulation.
You got to go through the Coast Guard.
You got to do all this.
Why do that when we can just Uber it?
Yeah.
That's the basis of this fucking company, right?
So we should talk about Titan, the submersible.
The first version of this thing was called Cyclops One.
And the reason is, is because it has one big porthole that is like a big eye.
Yeah.
Makes sense.
A glaring sphincter.
What would you call the shape of this thing?
I would say, well, it's the shape of a sub, right?
You know, they're all kind of shaped like in that bullet sort of way where they're.
Yeah, it's like a big bulldog.
It's not as tapered as like a like a nuclear sub or whatever.
It's not the most aerodynamic sub I've ever seen.
But I think like smaller submersibles, from what I understand, usually kind of have that like, like if a if a like nuclear sub, if like the thresher is or whatever, like the Kursk is like a 5-5-6 round, like a long sort of skinnier one, the submersibles tend to be like a like a .38 caliber or whatever, like a.38 special, like short and fat, you know?
Like they're sort of, they're sort of wider.
Yeah.
Rather than, yeah, they're, they're, they're, they're bulldogs.
The French bulldog of the submersible class.
Yes, yes, with the sort of abbreviated nose that French bulldogs have.
Yeah.
I mean, that's trouble breathing.
It's like 20 feet long.
It is not big.
Not big.
Not big.
Actually, that's pretty big, some girls think.
Okay, so the first version of this, they've worked with University of Washington and Boeing on it.
Both of those, like both the University of Washington and Boeing have come forward and been like, we had nothing to do with Titan.
Please leave our names out of this.
So take that for what it's worth.
It really, they basically just bought an old submersible and retrofitted to make this thing.
They added these four little electric thrusters.
We talked about that.
That's kind of like, you know, maneuver it and go around.
Meuver it around.
Control that with, and much hay has been made of this, with a Sony PlayStation controller.
So let me explain to you, let me, frankly, let me man-explain to you a little bit here.
Okay.
People use game controllers in all sorts of ways.
Twitch streamers make a lot of money using it.
It's a real job.
No, but they, for some reason, and I don't actually, I can't really man explain this because I don't know any technical details about it.
I just know this is true from my own research, both in that cop episode we did about robot cops, but also from seeing old videos from the beginning of the Syrian Civil War.
People use like game controllers for military purposes frequently, right?
There's an Israeli tank that is driven by basically an Xbox controller.
There's machine guns on the Israel, like that wall they have that Israel has to keep the Palestinians in like an open-air prison.
They have machine guns that have game controllers they use.
Yeah, most of that is because they're really intuitive.
Yeah.
And because every dumb shit kid knows how to use one.
The thing with the Titan, though, is they didn't even use, they used a Logitech off-brand controller, which I think is the really funny thing about that.
Like, because that, the implication, the reason I think that, like, because I think everybody who saw that thinks it's funny in a way, like in a weird way, the funny thing about it to me is the fact that like it belies a certain level of thought or carelessness.
Yes.
Either of which is funny.
It's very funny to be like, we got to save the 40 bucks or whatever the price difference is to not go name brand.
I think the thing is probably like 10 bucks price difference.
Oh my gosh.
I'm like getting it.
Well, there's a lot of corners that were cut.
Titanic Troubles00:14:51
Let's look at.
So that was the first version.
The second version, Cyclops 2, which is what becomes the Titan, is really where they're kind of designing it themselves.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, this is the first submersible with a hole made from carbon fiber and glass.
Okay.
So it's seven inches of razor-thin carbon fiber reinforced plastic.
So just from my own self here, speaking for myself, I don't want to be on a submersible that's trying something new.
You know, like that's like, I don't think that's a good idea.
Like if someone's like, hey, we have a new kind of airplane.
No one's ever built anything like it.
Do you want to go on it?
I would say no.
No.
You know, I'm like, you know what?
Keep me on the thing that they've been doing since like the Civil War.
Well, yeah, flip side of that is I don't want to be on a plane that's like 60 years old.
No, I don't.
I want to be on a plane that's 15 years old, 10 years old, 10 years old.
Yeah.
10 years old.
10 years, but still got a lot of life.
Still got a lot of life.
And you know what?
It's got some character.
And everyone knows how to fix it.
Yes, yes.
Nothing proprietary.
Nothing proprietary.
I don't want to be in a proprietary submarine.
No.
And a bespoke submarine either.
Which is to say that these things are usually made of steel.
Yes.
Not carbon fiber.
Not carbon fiber.
Reinforced plastic.
That's the same material that forms the wings of the 747, which is kind of interesting, but it's not actually ever used.
It's really, really rare for it to ever be used in any kind of deep sea situation.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we'll talk about being exploded by the pressures of the sea later or imploded and exploded by the pressure of the sea later.
But like, I want something that's like steel sounds really good to me.
Steel sounds great.
Titanium.
I know there's some titanium on this, but like titanium.
I really like the way that sounds.
Carbon fiber plastic is not just, that just doesn't sound really like something that can withstand a lot of pressure.
Yeah.
And the rest of it, I got to say the rest of it doesn't sound great either.
One engineer described all of the other parts of the submersible as being, quote, off the shelf.
Not something you want to hear.
This also includes parts that the CEO himself described as coming from a camping store.
Yes, there's in the Pogue interview, he's filming this guy and he's stocked and rushed and he's sort of bragging.
It's like, yeah, we just got some of these parts from like an RV store.
Yeah.
And it's like, oh, that's not, do you really want to say that in the camera?
That's also, there's a hubris in that too.
It's true a tale of hubris.
Yes.
Now, the carbon fiber composite of this thing, it was made by this company called Spencer Composites.
They had previously designed a single-seat personal submarine called Deep Flight Challenger, which I'm just going to say, I don't like the idea of any sort of vessel having the word challenger in it.
I think it's just like a nice.
I totally agree.
That name should have been vetoed with the famous Challenger.
How about this?
Call it the agreement.
You know what I mean?
Like the gentle agreement.
Or just like deep sea friend.
Yeah, the friendly wave.
That's even got kind of a double thing going on there.
Yeah.
So that company, Deep Flight Challenger, it was bought by Richard Branson, who I fucking hate, I had to say.
I think I really, really hate this guy.
I think he's fucking.
Oh, shut up.
He would say it virgin.
Virgin.
That's such a good one.
Me and Branson are at the club.
Calling people virgins.
Getting some funny.
It's so funny.
You're a virgin.
You're a virgin who can't drive.
Okay.
Well, that's not good.
Okay, so Richard Branson, he had this whole thing that he was like, I'm going to do these single-person dives to all five ocean floors.
The man's a moron.
Shut the fuck up.
He was like, I'm going to go 36,000 feet underwater, which is the lowest point on Earth.
Like, I'm going to like knock on Earth's door, basically.
Go down to Earth's door?
Yeah, go down to hell.
You guys got any core in there?
Yeah.
Come on out.
It turns out he had to shelve the whole thing because they found that basically this carbon fiber composite, it would start to break down from the pressure after just one dive.
Yes.
So it could not, it was like suitable for the one time.
Yeah, yeah.
But the subsequent ones, they were like, oh, oh, this isn't going to work.
Don't want a disposable one-man sub.
And that tracks with what we know about the Titan because it had frequently sort of been having to be retrofitted and re-repaired and things like this and worked on quite a bit.
Yeah.
And the thing is, Ocean Gate, the company, was like totally aware of all of these limitations.
There were at least two former employees that voiced concerned about the safety of this fucking thing.
There was one guy, David Lockridge, who, I mean, he claimed in a court suit that there was basically no testing done to make sure that the hole was like sound enough to handle the dives that they were doing.
Specifically, like, I guess it's like the type of glue that they were using wasn't holding because of the thickness of the thing.
Yeah.
And then there was another employee that spoke to CNN anonymously, and they said that they had voiced concern because the hole showed up and it was five inches thick as opposed to the seven inches thick, which is what they had designed it to be, which is like, that's a fucking huge difference.
Yeah.
That's two inches, dude.
Yeah.
Which actually is no, like, there's not really a big difference between seven inches and five inches, but like, yeah, it's basically the same thing.
There's like other people who said the company would basically dismiss.
There's, you know, any kind of contractor that would voice concerns.
The company would be like, shut up, go away, don't say it.
There was like employees that would go to Stockton himself and be like, look, we think that Ocean Gate is like potentially violating the U.S. law because you're not having the Coast Guard do routine inspections.
Like all of the kind of shit that you want to be being done on a submarine or submersible.
I mean, it's crazy.
Listen, I am, I don't think, I don't think people should pay taxes, right?
I think most laws are kind of goofy.
But one thing that I'm very much pro is like safety inspections of things that's very gentle of you.
You know what I mean?
Like, I'm like, that's so sick that sometimes they're like, there's a guy at the airport looking at the plane.
You know, not always, but sometimes that guy's there.
I do think.
What are you having to say too?
I don't think we got enough.
I think we could up them.
We could up them.
I think we could up.
The bonds are pretty good.
After seeing this thing implode, I think we could up them.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, the airplane is more tear, too, because you're going down.
Yeah.
And you get that fear and that sort of, yeah, anyways.
But it's, they, they sort of, there was, there was a titanic amount of hubris here because they were just like, we don't need these inspectors.
We don't need these regulations.
And in fact, they were very much, they were vocal about the fact that basically people were on their nuts about their submarine maybe being unsafe.
Yeah.
And like Rush himself, I mean, the man is a one, he was a one-man quote machine.
The shit that would come out of this man's mouth in the press is crazy.
We should start a podcast.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
It's the podcast that you sent, I mean, it is baffling the stuff that comes out of his mouth.
I mean, listen to this.
I'd like to be remembered as 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.
And he would complain in the press about industry regulations, which is a classic tech guy movie.
I mean, so much of this shit reminds me of early Tesla Elon shit.
I mean, it's crazy.
But, you know, in 2019, he's quoted as saying, it's obscenely safe because there are all these regulations, but it also hasn't innovated or grown because there are all these regulations.
I mean, it's just classic break stuff, you know, worry about it later, guys.
Smooth fast break stuff.
Totally.
Which is just like, I get that if you're like, we need to make an app that makes people have doggy ears or whatever.
But there's a difference between that and submerging very deep in the ocean where the immense pressures could literally boil your blood and explode your body.
And it has.
I mean, the reason that like the private submersible industry, such as it is, doesn't actually exist is because this shit is fucking dangerous.
Yeah, very dangerous.
And like, there's so many industrial accidents in submarine work.
It's crazy dangerous.
Diving is crazy dangerous.
There's a reason why they send ROVs down there instead of fucking manned vehicles.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They basically send drones down because it's much, safer.
Yes.
And because of that, all of like submersibles and underwater vehicles, whatever you want to call them, like have to be classed, right?
Yeah.
In order in terms of like safety.
Yeah.
And Ocean Gate's Titan wasn't classed at all.
And they like like flaunted that basically.
You know, they're just like, oh, by definition, innovation is outside of an already accepted system.
However, this does not mean OceanGate does not meet standards where they apply.
It does mean that innovation often falls outside the existing industry paradigm.
I mean, that was one of their big, their big reasons why, like, you know, if you, if you think of like any small submersible that you may have seen pictures of, where there's this like giant bank of controls, I mean, if you look at the interior of the Titan, it is literally just like two computer monitors and a fucking controller.
I mean, the thing's gotten lost before.
I mean, David Pogue, when, you know, he, he, when, when this whole kerfluffle was happening, he says that the ship got lost, or the Titan was lost briefly for like several hours when he was on the on the mothership and that the crew cut the internet so that people couldn't complain.
But the shit, it got lost down there, right?
Because it's forced to communicate with the surface basically in order to navigate, even basically.
And, you know, there's, there's all these other stories in the podcast of like people going down there in the submersible and they can't find the Titanic.
Yeah.
And like they're being given directions from the mothership and interpreting them wrong.
Like they're going the wrong direction after misinterpreting directions.
That would like, I'm sorry, if I'm on the sub with you and you're being told to move east 250 meters or whatever and you move west 250 meters, I'm going to strangle you and take control.
Like I'm going to mutiny on that because you don't know east from west.
Because here's the other thing.
Down at the bottom there, your fucking compass doesn't work.
Yeah.
They go crazy.
They start spinning.
You're all turned around.
So I would want a big bank of glowing knobs and controls.
Even if they didn't do anything, it would just make me feel better.
Well, you don't got that.
You got a prime day sale Logitech controller.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, they continually compared their company to SpaceX, which I got to say, I mean, you know, to their credit, SpaceX is also a company that is famous for having their vessels blow up.
And the ocean, too.
And, you know, it does look like Ocean Gate was using Starlink for communications, which is very, I mean, I hate to say it.
That is very funny.
I hate to say it.
Apparently, they weren't using that to communicate with the sub itself, but it is very funny because, I mean, certainly they didn't call in anything for many hours.
Although you don't need Starlink to call in anything from a ship, but it is very funny.
So Rush first sets the price of Ocean Gate's Titanic dive at $105,129.
Why is that, Liz?
That is the inflation-adjusted price of a first-class ticket on the Titanic in 1912.
That was so fucking reddit.
I want to blow my brains out.
If only they had gotten here and prevented the Federal Reserve from starting, then we wouldn't have inflation at all.
That ticket famously jumped to $250K in 2023.
I don't believe that is because of inflation.
No, it was like two years ago that it was less than that.
Well, it's gone up quite a bit.
It was one woman that was getting interviewed on the Pogue thing, and she's like, Yeah, when I first heard about this, I think they were taking reservations like before they started launching.
She was like, It was $40,000, and by the time I said that up, it was like $60,000.
And by the time I said it up, it was $80,000.
It's like, Jesus.
So just kept raising the prices because they knew people would pay.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, they really like to play up the scientific angle of what they're doing as opposed to it just being kind of like adventure tourism.
I don't really think it holds.
I mean, they keep saying, like, oh, we're doing missions.
Oh, we're going down there to like study what's going on.
There was a curator of maritime history at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, this guy, Paul Johnston.
And he was like, in my opinion, there's not much to be learned from Titanic that we don't already know.
I got to agree with him.
It's like, what are you studying?
They're like, oh, we're seeing the rate of decay.
I mean, we already did that.
We know the rate of decay.
They know when it's going to be totally decayed.
I get wanting to see it if you're an underwater person or whatever.
Like the French Explorer or whatever.
He was a Titanic expert.
Yeah, if you want to see a merman, too, which those are, I got some complications.
But you can't touch anything.
You can't take anything.
You can't take anything.
It's a UNESCO site.
Which is bullshit.
Why?
Let me take it.
No, you can't.
It's so hard to get down there that if you get down there, you should be able to take a look at the water.
I have a question.
Who you know a little bit about maritime law?
Yes, I do.
That is in international waters, correct?
Yeah.
Does international, when it's so deep, does it become international too?
Like, how does that work?
Does it go all the way down?
Yeah, it goes all the way down.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm just so you hold on.
Let me take this.
I don't know.
I was just wondering.
But it is in international waters, right?
It is in international waters.
So it's jointly, it's probably jointly.
It's like a UN-administered thing.
UNESCO would make sense.
Yeah.
I'm just wondering who's going to handle some of these insurance claims.
Oh, well, I think it is specifically maritime insurance.
And so that'll probably be handled through.
I mean, it would be funny to see if the vessel was like, well, actually, I don't know because they're on, they're like contracting with this vessel.
So I don't know, but like whoever the vessel that actually took them there, the polar princess, Prince, excuse me.
Which, by the way, it's fine.
It's yes.
It's 2023, Liz.
Yes.
But I don't know, but they're going to get sued at the ass.
The maritime insurance has a long and storied history in both the crown colonies and the, you know, the UK itself, which is maybe it's, if it's chartered out of there, and the U.S.
And so they're getting sued badly.
No matter what waivers they sign.
Yeah, no matter what.
Those don't hold it.
These do not hold.
Yeah.
You can't sign away death.
You're fucked.
Titaniacs: The Deep Mission00:07:56
Yeah.
Basically.
Yeah, these people are fucked.
So Rush called the clients of his, I think colloquially, titaniacs.
Titaniacs?
Titaniacs.
Titaniacs.
But he also called, like you mentioned, he didn't refer to them as tourists, but mission specialists.
Yeah, mission specialist.
Look, I went to Space Camp, and I think they also called it.
Fairy space camp.
Yeah, mission specialist.
Fairy space camp.
But he was like, this isn't tourism.
This is mission.
You're a mission specialist.
And like, there'd be like a, you know, a few scientists on board the mothership, you know, going over the, I don't know, doing some kind of studies.
But like, really, this was tourism plain and simple.
Yes.
And that is, you know, basically laid out with the cast of characters that were on this thing.
Although the first one does kind of fly in the face of that.
Paul Henry Narjola, Mr. Titanic.
So this guy is, I mean, this is sort of a classic.
I will be honest with you.
All these guys are kind of archetypes.
Yeah.
Well, most of them are archetypes.
It is a little Wes Anderson-y, I got to say.
It is a little Wes Andersony.
I never saw that little movie, didn't you?
It's not really my thing.
But he's a French oceanographer, Titanic expert.
He's 77 years old, the punk age.
Was 77 years old.
Spent 22 years in the French Navy before becoming an oceanographer.
And actually, I mean, the guy, the sea was in his blood.
He'd been diving since he was eight years old.
Yeah, you look at this guy.
He looks, he's a French naval man through and through.
I mean, his vibe goes hard.
It's good.
It's good.
The guy, I mean, he was also one of the first people to actually see the Titanic with his own two eyes.
He was one, I think he might have been on the first submersible expedition down to the Titanic back in 1987.
And the funny thing about this guy is he actually, he claims that he did not give a fuck about the Titanic before seeing it then.
That he had basically been assigned by the French Navy to go on this like, you know, based civilian mission, essentially, to go like look at the Titanic and I'm sure to do some tests or whatever.
Plant a French flag down there.
And he says that he was like basically awed into silence for about 10 minutes just seeing this thing.
I mean, it must have been a pretty incredible ship.
Huge fucking ship.
Huge fucking ship.
Oh, it was.
Yeah.
I mean, so this was a big deal in this guy's life, and he becomes a real deal Titanic expert.
You know, he is like James Cameron, one of these like Titanic goers, right?
You know, like James Cameron is like part of this like community of people who've been down there many times.
He's actually beat James.
He's gone down there 37 times as Narjolais.
He's brought back things to the surface to study.
And I think this is sweet.
He at one point brought a watch of somebody up to the surface and then gave it to their daughter.
I think that's illegal.
Is it illegal?
No.
I think you can do that.
Salvage.
Here's the thing about maritime law.
It's a heritage site.
I know, but here's the thing about maritime law.
And I disagree with the UN on this and many things.
If it's down in the sea, it's for you or for me.
Like if it's, that's the thing.
Like, nothing should be.
The sea belongs to the people.
The sea belongs to the people, right?
And the things in the sea that once belong to the people belong to anybody.
I think that salvaging wrecks is one of the most noble things that a guy who lives off his wits in the Florida Keys can do.
You're talking about pirates.
Sort of like a Travis McGee pirates kind of thing.
Yeah.
But like, I think that you should be able to salvage from wrecks with no repercussions whatsoever.
Hey, don't wreck your ship if you don't want things taken from it is also what I say.
Interesting.
He seems like, and this is something that all of his kind of friends and everybody was saying, like, this is, if you're going to be trapped in a submersible, this is before that it was confirmed that they had imploded.
You're going to be trapped in a submersible down at the bottom of the motherfucking ocean when the walls are closing in.
The carbon fiber is groaning and people are having diarrhea in the little toilet and that thing, which we have to talk about.
It's not a toilet.
It's not a toilet.
It's a box.
We'll talk about that.
This is a good guy to have down with you because he's a very calm guy.
He's done this a million times.
I do think it's stupid of him to go down in this sub.
Yeah.
But one thing, though, is that 77 years old, right?
This guy's life has basically been defined by that Titanic.
This is the way you want to go out.
Yeah.
You know, this is kind of the way you want to go out.
You want to go out in a sub above the Titanic.
There's a really lovely quote from him in this interview with the French paper where he says, I have received letters from people telling me that they're clairvoyant and that I was on the boat in 1912.
Well, why not?
I love that.
Yeah.
He seems like a very, very cool guy.
He apparently, he accidentally discovered this, this very famous ship called La Lune, which was a French ship that sank in 1641.
It was Louis XIV's famous big ship.
And he had Louis XIV famously like covered up the sinking of it because it was so embarrassing to the crown.
He's like, oh, they actually just went off the side of the world.
But it's this crazy, like, I mean, 1600s ship.
I mean, imagine.
Yeah, it's like this crazy, and it was, it's so French, La Lune.
Like, can you imagine?
And gilded and whatever.
And this dude just like found it accidentally.
Did he get the treasure that was on it?
I mean, I hope so.
You should be able to get the treasure that's on it, especially if you're the first guy to find it.
But I mean, I will say, like, obviously, I find this, I found this whole saga to be, in some parts, amusing, right?
But it is like, if this guy's going to die, this is kind of the place to do it.
You know, like, this is their version of like a Titanic submersible guy's warrior's death is to die in a submersible on the way down to the Titanic.
You know, and it's a pain.
Yeah, well, yeah.
He was joined by some people who were maybe a little less illustrious in terms of their pedigrees as they relate to the Titanic, but were themselves very much world travelers.
So Shahzada Dawood is a member of a very prominent and very, very wealthy Pakistani family.
His father had been like a big businessman who'd navigated the fertilizer and oil trade.
And really, the man's whole empire was built essentially on shit.
I mean, fertilizer is the Dawood family's, like, it's their bread and their motherfucking butter, and it's the stuff they put on their crops of money to make them grow.
The guy is fabulously wealthy.
You know, he's also, you know, not only in the fertilizer business, he's also in the Dawood business, meaning that he, you know, he helps manage all of their, you know, their charitable acts.
Of course, member of the WEF, which many people have pointed out to is the reason he died, which doesn't make sense to me because they also think that, I don't know.
But he's also a member, and this ties into, I believe, our next episode coming out, member of SETI, who's on the board of directors of SETI.
That's very weird.
It is very weird.
Why is he down in the sea when he should be up in space?
And again, it's funny because actually, if I examine all these people individually, I actually feel some degree of sympathy for him.
The guy was like kind of a nerd.
He was an avid science fiction reader.
That was the big thing that he bonded with his son about.
And that struck to me because that's something obvious I bonded with my dad about, science fiction.
And specifically old science fiction.
And, you know, I'm sure that he just wanted to see this crazy fucking thing, right?
Yeah.
You know, he sort of dragged his 19-year-old son, Suleiman, who's a college student along.
And there's some kind of heartbreaking quotes about like, you know, the kid kind of just wanted to go because he loves his dad and didn't really want to go in the first place.
Explorers Club Tales00:07:49
He was super scared.
I got to tell you this.
I love a lot of people in this world.
Trust the gut.
Say no.
Say no.
You go.
I'll stay on the ship.
Part of becoming an adult is learning how to say no.
I am still kind of bad at it, but I'm famously terrible.
Yeah, most people are.
But if people say, but if someone's going to be like, do you want to go somewhere in a submarine?
Sorry, fact check.
Submersible.
Submersible.
Yeah, but I'm going to probably say no because I don't like the pressure.
I think you would say yes to the submarine.
I don't think I would.
I really, I've thought about submarines a lot.
I don't think I would.
No.
Ship, yes, anywhere.
I don't want to go to the Arctic, but I would.
Really?
I just don't want to go.
I don't care.
What am I going to see there?
I want to see the secret war that's going on there.
Well, the Nazis won that, Liz.
And you're not going to, as a poll, you're not going to like what you find up there.
Oh, my God.
You're not going to like it.
Pole the pole.
So the final passenger was a guy named Hamish Harding.
Hamish.
Hamish Harding.
This guy was classic.
He's so British.
Hamish Harding is the fucking craziest British name I've ever heard.
So British.
Born in London, but raised in Hong Kong.
It's also very British.
It's one of the most British players.
I will say this.
Being born in London and being raised in Hong Kong is almost more British than being born and raised in London.
Yeah, I agree.
I will say it's far more British.
Absolutely.
Because Hong Kong, I feel, was like post-war Britain's India.
In some ways, yeah.
Well, post-independence.
Yeah.
Yes.
We know what you're saying.
You know what I'm saying?
Earned his pilot's license in 1985 and had a lifelong obsession with aviation.
Another thing that I do not understand.
Little Dieter Needs to Flyer, whatever that fucking movie was.
Made a ton of money in Logica, India.
Oh, so he did go to India.
He went to India and made a bunch of money in this Logica, not Logitech, to be clear.
Logica, it's an Indian subsidiary of a British IT company.
Could I fix your microchips, sir?
Little chimney sweep shows up and he, you know, he comes and fixes your phone lines.
He started something called the Action Group, which sounds something like a sort of Rhodesian mercenary company, but it was sort of his, which actually, fair enough, it could have been if he had been born maybe 10 years earlier.
But this was basically his investment company, which had these different companies that all had action in the name.
You know, I think action aviation is the one thing that he was sort of known for, his aviation company that was based out of Dubai.
Described as a billionaire, I fail to see how he's necessarily a billionaire unless he comes from some serious family money because a billion dollars is a lot of fucking money.
There's probably a lot of family money, remember, born in London, raised in Hong Kong.
Yes, but it also started a ton of dumbass tech companies early on.
Yeah.
You know, he was the Middle East chairman of the Explorers Club.
Oh my God, I'm so happy we're talking about this thing.
Have you been to the Explorers Club?
Are you kidding?
No.
No, we should go.
You should just go.
Can you just go?
I don't think you can just go, but is it in Life Aquatic?
Or it's like, obviously, like, it's not a real Explorers club.
It's a movie.
Manhattan, I think.
Stop.
No, it is in Manhattan.
Stop.
What?
Why are you making a joke?
I'm saying it was in the Life Aquatic in the movie.
I haven't seen that movie.
I just said that.
But why would I be saying that it's in a different place than Manhattan?
That doesn't make any sense.
I don't know.
Maybe I was like, oh, but I don't know.
You're not listening.
Sorry.
You're not listening.
Sometimes the pressure isn't just underwater.
Sometimes the pressure is in a studio with your friends.
He was the Middle East chairman of the Explorers Club.
Sort of a title once held by old Lawrence himself.
How?
How many dead animals do you think are in that thing?
I would say a holocaust of like hippopotamus heads.
No, you think hippo heads?
Hippo heads are crazy get.
That is that's when you bring a female back to the crib and you're like and you turn on your LED gamer lights around your crazy fucked up like all TikTok furniture living room and the only thing that you have that you didn't purchase on the internet within the past six months is a gigantic hippo head that you slew and saw it off yourself.
That's a pain-a-drop.
But the Explorers Club, for those of you who don't know, is a club of explorers.
And I mean, there's really no better way to describe that.
I mean, really, any of the famous explorers that you know about that have been around like sort of post-1905 when it started were in this.
And like it is, they, their big thing is, is like they have these flags of like Explorers Club's flags that they will go plant on different, like, Buzz Aldrin took one to the fucking moon.
It's like shit like that.
Which also, I think, I got to say, I feel like he shouldn't have taken that to the moon.
Why?
Because you were going there for the Americans, not for the money.
And no, it's a little whack.
It's like putting a Masonic thing out there.
It's like, oh, you can't have like your side project here with you.
You're here on a business trip.
It's like putting your Shriner's hat on Elvis if you're there or no.
You can't.
First of all, go on behalf of the Explorers Club and the Explorers Club.
You finance it.
You figure it out.
You can't just piggyback on the American.
Yeah, I do think it's a little, it's a little tasty.
I mean, there's, I mean, look, there's only so much that video cameras could get in the studio.
You know what I mean?
Someone should shoot that man with an elephant gun.
But I have a little bit, I have met in my life two explorers.
Really?
I have met two explorers.
Several exes ago was a photographer and was hired to photograph this event with this couple who lived in Africa, Derek and Beverly Joubert, who were like lion people.
And I went to go help out.
That's so awful.
No, they weren't lying.
No, they were preserving them.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
They were hunting lions.
They were doing the opposite of hunting lions.
Okay, you really were.
I should have made that clear.
Yeah.
I should have made that clear.
They were doing the opposite.
They were like lion preservationists.
Okay, they are.
And they like lived out in a fucking house they built in the trees in the middle of the savannah to like better be among the lions.
That sounds cool, but very dangerous.
Well, they had been, they told us this.
We hung out with them the whole night.
And I, because for some reason, it was a very, not a lot of people working this event, but there's a lot of people there.
And the guy was like this big guy with a beard and like a tan vest on and like, you know, sort of like we wouldn't have wearing a pith helmet if we were anywhere else.
His wife, of course, just like this sort of like tough, wiry lady.
And they just regaled me with these stories.
And I was like, this is incredible.
They've been shot down.
Their plane had been shot down by poachers at one point.
She got gored by a rhino.
It's insane.
And I was like, wow, this is really, this is a couple who are really living.
And I asked them their opinion on seed oils.
What did they say?
No, I didn't do that.
I would never, I didn't know what those were then or now.
But I was, that was, I don't think they were in the Explorer's Club because I think they probably take a more tender view of animals, although maybe the Explorer's Club has gone woke.
But they were explorers, and I found that very, very charming and cool.
Anyways, back to Hamish.
This guy had been exploring all over.
I mean, he's been to the North Pole with Buzz Aldrin.
He set some world flying record.
And I got to be honest, the Guinness, a lot of people just make up new records and stuff.
So like, I don't really take it seriously.
Unless you beat somebody else's world record, if you're setting a first-time world record, I don't take you that seriously.
No, that's bullshit.
Yeah, you got to beat somebody else's.
Exactly.
It just takes a little creativity.
Precisely, Liz.
And, you know, he'd gone, but he'd been to the bottom of the ocean before.
I think he set the world record for longest distance traveling along the ocean floor.
And he went to space with Jeff Bezos.
He was on that space flight with Bezos.
Shame that one didn't implode.
Stepson's Strange Ventures00:09:01
I got to be honest with you about this guy, too.
What a way to go out.
You know?
I mean, like, yes, I know it's tragic and I know it's fucked up, but like, fine, it would have been more like fitting if he'd gone out in like an experimental aircraft or something, considering his obsession with the air.
But if you are a member of the Explorers Club, this is dying in the line of duty, right?
And it's an honorable way to die if you are of that mindset.
And so, like, yes, it's tragic or whatever when a human being dies sometimes.
But in this case, it's like, it's, yes, it's, you know, sad, but it's also like, that's kind of a, it's what do you, that's a good way to go out.
We got to talk about his stepson.
We have to talk about his stepson.
So you dated him.
No.
So much attention was paid to this motherfucker through this whole event that it would be, we can't not talk about this kid.
Yes.
Brian.
And I, I, part of me was like, is it okay?
What a Brian.
I mean, the thing is, everything about this guy is so right that if that makes sense, like he's the most stepson there's ever been.
Yeah.
And he's, it's, what a Brian, too.
I mean, I didn't feel at part of me was like, I don't know, like, I feel kind of bad about this.
But then I was because he has Asperger's.
But then I was like, I actually have known a lot of people with Asperger's.
They've never done any of this stuff.
So I'm like, I think this guy is just also fucked up.
So to be clear, he's self-described as having Asperger's.
His stepfather is Hamish.
His real father is an FBI therapist.
Like he was a special agent for the FBI who like, I think, counseled other special agents according to his LinkedIn.
He lives in Ohio.
So Brian came to people's attention because he tweeted Liz.
My stepdad Hamish is on submarine, lost at sea.
I'm devastated.
But coming to the San Diego show tonight, so you guys can give me hope and cheer me up.
This was directed at the band Blink 182.
Work sucks.
I know.
Yeah, he tweeted something else that got a lot of attention, which was, it might be distasteful being here, which is not a, you never want to start a statement out with that, by the way.
It might be distasteful being here, but my family would want me to be at the Blink 182 show as it's my favorite band and music helps me in difficult times.
Blackheart emoji, prayer hands.
The blackheart emoji is crazy.
What circumstances do people send blackheart emojis?
I don't know, but I feel like he's trying to do like a hardcore moment.
Oh, like he's trying to do like a pop like a punk moment there.
Like it's like blackheart.
I don't know.
Maybe the black heart, but I don't think the hands, because Liz is doing the hands.
No, I'm just doing that like for myself, but the blackheart is supposed to be more like punk heart.
Yeah, it's like a punk heart.
Yeah.
For me, it's a heart with a safety pin in it.
And a fucking girl with a mohawk giving it to somebody with a fucking skin head.
So, Cardi B shoots back at him.
Cardi B. From the end of the show, Cardi B says, basically, I'm not going to read the quote, but she basically is like, what the fuck?
This is insane.
Like, you're trying to get clout off your stepdad missing, which, yeah, I mean, that's pretty much inarguable there.
Yeah.
Brian called her, he fired back at Cardi B and called her a clout hound who could use some class, which is, I think she's, I don't think, Cardi B, I don't think Cardi B was trying to get clout off the stepson.
That seems a little ridiculous to me.
He then spent the rest of the day responding to, vigorously responding to OnlyFans models tweets and sometimes interspersing those with vague statements about praying for him or his family.
I mean, these were girls who would like post, like, you know, the OnlyFans, like being like, do you want me to, like, what would you do if I sat on your face and farted?
And he's like, please do.
Or yum, like shit like that.
And I think that, that broke me, Liz.
That broke me because I can't even get horny when I'm hungry.
And this guy is like, his dad is at this point missing.
Stepdad.
Is at this point missing.
And he's just like, um, uh, those paintings look fired up.
I will say he obviously does love Blink 182 though because the screen name of the audio guy 182.
Yes.
So then I saw a tweet by sort of a e-girl type pop musician.
I think it's safe to say, like a pop musician who you could mistake for a professional Twitch streamer and who actually might be a professional Twitch streamer.
And the tweet says, well, Liz, could you do the honors?
Hi, the man Brian, who has a photo with me where I signed his shoe, I've never talked to him before in my life other than that show where I did a meet and greet.
I have no idea who he was until later.
He's been blocked and banned from all my shows since.
That photo is of Brian next to her, and she looks uncomfortable.
And he's got a hover hand probably three feet off of her body.
But I was like, well, what?
I mean, I don't understand because there's no real, she doesn't really give a lot of context for it.
And it seems like there's people who do know context responding to her.
So I looked a little bit.
And there's a reference, multiple references that he's been stalking some women.
And then more particular references in some old screenshots where he's stalking particular women.
And particularly this one woman known, an EDM artist known as, and what an EDM name this is, Allison Wonderland.
And these, listen, we're niche micro celebs, right?
Sometimes people do weird things, you know?
This is crazier than a lot of stuff I've seen.
Freaky deeky.
Can you read these tweets that he wrote?
Oof.
I got a tattoo of this bitch.
She fucking dissed me.
And then he says, AW, clearly meaning Alice in Wonderland.
AW, fucking pay.
I will show up to her LA apartment.
I'll fucking find Alice in Wonderland and hunt her ass down.
And you're like, okay, maybe that's just a crazy tweet storm of anger.
People get frustrated.
Okay.
Taking the shit out.
I'm trying to be generous.
You're being very generous, but I understand.
Okay.
But no, he actually got arrested for threatening to shoot up an Alice in Wonderland show.
Yes, in Las Vegas, with Elenium, which I thought that was a festival, and I guess it's a person.
In 2021, he got arrested.
You can't call yourself Elenium after Willennium.
Yeah, and it's also just, it doesn't really, Ellennium sucks as a name to be.
People are like, oh, Ellenium.
You're like, wait, Millennium?
Like the album?
Millennium.
Yes.
I don't think the show was at, well, you know where.
But it was in Las Vegas, and he was planning to shoot it up.
He gets arrested for stalking and harassment, goes to jail in San Diego, and according to a lawsuit, was attacked by his cellmate for being possessed by the devil.
Wait, attacked for being possessed by the devil?
The cellmate attacked Brian because the cellmate believed Brian was possessed by the devil.
And to do, to apparently excise him or exorcise him of this devilish spirit within him, he beat up Brian, but he also bit him very hard on the hand.
And that wound was infected.
And Brian subsequently claimed in this lawsuit to have gone blind from that, although he apparently has fully recovered his vision.
Interesting.
But he was let out of jail after a couple of years.
So fairly recently, I believe.
I looked at his Facebook.
He deleted his Twitter.
Well, we'll get to that.
But I looked at his Facebook a long time back, and he got released fairly recently because he makes several posts about it.
I also saw some tweets by a woman being like, I just found out my stalker is out of jail because his stepdad is missing on the submersible.
Like, this is a different way he's stalked.
Yeah.
And unfortunately, this is not his first brush with the law.
When he was 18, he and two friends had robbed a couple of gas stations at Knife Point.
Their car later gets stuck on some train tracks, and they get out of the car, call a tow truck, and while they're waiting for the tow truck, the car is struck by an Amtrak train.
And they're arrested waiting for the tow truck to get there.
Insane.
That's crazy.
The saga of Brian ends, of course, as many online sagas do, with the N-word.
He said this, quit tripping in my hood.
I can say, beep, without the ER, of course.
I'm down like that.
On the set.
It makes you feel bad.
Saturation Of Fear00:15:25
Yeah, that's not great.
No.
But he deleted his account, and now we never have to hear from him again.
No, no.
It's that was a it was a kind of a it was, I would say that was like a side plot that kept people going.
So much about this story captivated the nation.
So much about this captivated the nation.
But he was a captivating figure in his own right.
But now, as of yesterday, we were recording this on Friday.
It is 2:56 p.m.
And the sub has been declared destroyed.
Yeah.
They seem to have, they said they found debris.
It's a little unclear.
They also say they probably knew that it imploded much earlier in the week than they let on, which is a little confusing to me.
I mean, here's like, I, I, the second I heard the sub was missing, I was like, it imploded.
Of course.
Of course it imploded.
I mean, there was like a number of different, I mean, and I get it.
Like, this is the sort of like titillating, morbidly fascinating thing about this stuff, right?
Is like, I think anybody who thinks about this stuff for more than five minutes, you're like, oh, this thing obviously fucking imploded, right?
Like, these guys have been dead this entire time.
But there was all of these, you know, articles coming out and people talking about this.
And myself thinking about it, it's like, I mean, the alternatives are these guys are down at the bottom of the ocean with no lights, with no heat, in a bare bones tube with a non-working computer screen.
So like in the blackest you can get on earth, right?
Like you are so far down, you are enveloped in darkness, like the darkest dark that you can get.
And you're essentially down there freezing to death as the oxygen slowly runs out.
And then for some reason, people are also like, maybe they're having sex with each other, which I didn't understand because I'm like, dude.
Well, there's a Frenchman.
That's true.
But the only thing worse than being stuck in a submarine, slowly suffocating at the bottom of the ocean, is also for some reason fucking a 55-year-old dude at the same time.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, they would probably just be like getting the anxiety out another way.
Yeah.
By killing the guy by killing Mr. Rush.
And I think there was this like, this, I gotta admit, I mean, I thought about it too, you know, like, it's like you think, what would you feel like in that situation?
And I kept thinking, like, you know, you're hour 30, right?
At some point, you sort of pass out from exhaustion.
There's probably not really any food in there.
There's no seats.
We know there's no food because they only brought a couple sandwiches and a little bit of water.
Yeah.
Oh, the water thing.
That's crazy.
I would definitely, you do not want to be in a water, water, all-around, but not a drop-to-drink situation.
Never want to be in a not a drop-to-drink.
Yeah, you'd never want to be in that situation.
Yeah, and I imagine them like, it's the same reason that I was like really obsessed with the alive plane crash when I was younger and like read that book like six times because it's just like it's it's it's so horrible to think about, you know?
And it's such an extraordinarily like excruciating way to die that I think that is really like people tried to pretend that it was like, oh, I'm like, I'm thinking about this news story because it's billionaires or I'm thinking about this news story because like this says a lot about our society.
But like, no, the reason that anyone think about the news story is because it's fucking crazy.
Yeah.
And there's a potentially one of the most like inventively torturous ways to die possible that is occurring and a race against time to save that.
But that's not what happened.
No, it's not what happened.
The U.S. Navy, like you said, I mean, it like knew from the get-go, right?
It seems like it, yeah.
Or at least a lot, it seems that they knew much earlier than they announced.
Yeah.
Which maybe had something to do with notifying the families and trying to keep some of this stuff, you know, some bit of privacy for them.
But it seems that they knew pretty early on that this thing just imploded.
Maybe they were looking for confirmation, physical confirmation, finding some debris, which it sounds like they did.
But this thing, the Titan imploded basically pretty much when it went, when it lost contact.
Yeah.
So like an hour and a half into the ship.
The voyage.
Yeah.
And we should say, like, there seemed to have been some confusion, which you brought my attention to, about the difference between an explosion and an implosion, which I found surprising that there was some confusion there.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it is, it makes, to be generous again to that person who seems to be confused about that.
I do think because it feels, it's so unnatural to think about.
Yeah.
There is a bit of a kind of reverso.
It's a reverse.
Reverso situation.
And I think it's because the idea of being trapped under the sea is excruciating to think about.
I mean, terrifying.
Yeah.
And the fact that it could end with your insides basically deciding to become your outsides.
And in a full reverso.
What are those going out there?
Is just sickening.
Yeah, it is.
It is like, I mean, that's the thing too.
Like, it's such a morbidly fascinating, crazy way to fucking die, you know, to basically have your body explode.
Because that's the thing is, that's the complicated thing about this too, is there is explosions happening, but they're caused by an implosion.
Yeah.
So everybody knows.
I mean, this is fair.
I'm not, and I want to preface this with all saying, I'm not a science fucking guy, but I am scared of pressure because I always on fucking flights, not always, but this is happening many times on flights, is like during the scent, I guess I'll have my mouth closed or something and my ears won't pop for like hours.
I think this happened when we were, yeah, this happened when we traveled together.
I hate it.
I hate that feeling.
And that's because of the sort of rapid change in pressurization or, you know, this the way your body responds.
The way my body's responding to it.
I don't think my body responds well to the physical pressure around me changing.
And so you'll never catch my ass going up the film.
You don't like to be under pressure.
I don't like to be in, I don't like to be under pressure.
Not for me.
But so I know a little bit about the way that works under the ocean because I've always been scared of it.
But also I've been fascinated by submarines because they're fucking crazy.
They put these guys in these little ships.
Also, because you're tortured and fascinated by that, which scares you.
That's true.
That's why, like, yes, that's, it's true.
And so.
It's a, you know, you are, you're, you know, you fear and love that, you know, I mean, it's the same.
I don't love it.
Well, you're drawn to it.
I am drawn to it, yes.
Well, I'm drawn to it so I can go draw myself further away from it.
Well, yes, no.
So the Titan is designed.
Let's use that word loosely.
It's theoretically supposed to be able to go like over 12,500 feet down, right?
That's like where the Titanic is.
No, it has been down.
It did, but I would not know.
It's sort of the, it's sort of a disposable situation kind of going on there, Branson style.
Yeah.
Down there, the pressure is over 400 times what it is on the surface.
And I could give you all kinds of like, you know, this is the equivalent of that.
It's like having a fuck, just imagine apartment buildings on top of you.
You know what I mean?
Like it's, it's fucking houses on top of you getting swished like a bug.
But this is like, this is a massive, massive pressure coming at this vessel from all sides.
So any small defect in that sub, a sub, which, as you are well aware, is basically made out of like, oh, you know, a, the self-help section or the do-it-yourself section at like a Walmart.
Any small defect in that could lead to catastrophic failure, right?
If the, if the pressure from the outside gets into the inside, which is pressurized, you know, obviously very differently than that, that shit will essentially collapse in on itself.
Yeah.
And that is basically what happened, right?
So like that is like, it'll like, it's the same kind of thing as like the thresher, right?
Like eventually like the pressure from the outside will get in and there will just be an implosion.
It'll sink in on itself.
And this happens so, quickly, right?
The good thing is, is these guys probably had no idea that it was happening.
The scary thing to think about is there might have been a sign, although they didn't give any indication of the surface, but like it could have been like, hey, there's something going on in this seal over here.
And then you have that fear, knowing that you can do nothing about it and that you are going to die in a crazy motherfucking way very soon.
And you have to sit with that for three or four minutes like the guys in the Thresher did, but it's neither here nor there.
So what it does, it will collapse in itself, like, you know, like kind of like when you step on a beer can or something like that.
The way what happens to your bodies, and this is happening at the same instant, is essentially your body is disintegrated because it's crushed by the pressure there.
I mean, other stuff happens, you know, and it disintegrates in different ways depending on the air where the air is and all that stuff.
But like your body is essentially made into dust, as far as I know from an incident like this.
Like these guys' bodies will not be recovered.
I mean, maybe some parts of their bodies will because you kind of explode.
The air can also light on fire, which I think that was probably too small a vessel for that to happen in here.
But like you, it fucks your shit up.
There's another, there's a sort of, I mean, there's the famous, what's the nutty putty cave where like the guy was hanging, hanging down for like 20 hours while he slowly died or the rescue teams couldn't get him out or whatever.
I mean, that's one of those stories that like a lot of people know because it's this horrible story.
You, you know, you sort of imagine yourself in that situation and you take yourself out of that and you're glad it never happened to you.
The situation that keeps getting brought up in reference to a death by decompression, although this wouldn't have happened on the sub, is this story called the Bifer, well, it's about the Biford Dolphin accident.
Something I known about for a little while because I've known actually a saturation diver.
He wasn't the person who told me about it, but I've known what saturation diving is for a while.
I've looked at it sort of out of morbid curiosity because it freaks me out.
It's one of those things that I don't want to go down there.
So in 83, four saturation divers and one crewman died aboard an oil rig, I think off of Norway.
And the saturation diving is, you know, have you ever dove before, Liz?
No, never.
You're not scuba licensed?
No, never.
I would never do that.
I can't do that because I owe glasses.
You need like special ones to do that.
Yeah.
I have a friend who did, though, who does it.
It seems scary to me.
Yeah, I'm good.
But you go down to the bottom, and then, you know, your body is sort of— I'm a great swimmer.
You are?
I'm a good swimmer, too.
We should race.
I would beat you.
You probably beat me.
I feel like you'd be life.
But I'm just completely hairless.
I was a competitive swimmer.
You were?
Mm-hmm.
Not me.
There was no competition.
You know, the thing is with saturation diving is you go to the bottom and it's called saturation diving because your blood gets saturated with nitrogen.
And like it, you know, you sort of adjust to the pressure down there.
And usually what they would have to do is they would have to, like when you, when you resurface, you have to take these little breaks on the way up so that your blood can adjust to the pressure.
And so like these air, these air bubbles, like we were talking about before with the bends so that you don't get the bends because that can be very fatal, especially when you're just sort of free in the water.
What these guys with saturation divers was, is they'd do, they would stay the whole month in these hyperbaric chambers above a vessel or above, or excuse me, aboard a vessel or aboard an oil rig.
And then they're lowered down to the bottom in a diving bell that is pressurized the same way as that chamber, the same way of the diving bell, the same way as the bottom.
So you basically spend the entire month with the pressure that you would feel at the bottom.
And these guys aren't going like Titanic level, but they're going pretty far down there.
So in order to save like all this time going back up and repressurizing, because this takes a long time, you sort of save that for a period at the end of the month.
So you spend 30 days doing this kind of locked in these little chambers on top of inside an oil rig.
You also talk all fucked up because you don't just breathe oxygen.
You breathe sort of a gas mixture that includes helium.
So you talk in helium voice.
And I mean, I've seen a lot of videos.
I mean, these guys like post videos and stuff all the time.
And like they all talk in these sort of chipmunk voices.
When they need to communicate with the vessels, they use a voice modulator, which I think is really funny, like a Darth Vader voice deepener.
But within this particular incident, and this is also like all the other accidents we've talked about with depressurization, happen because of cutting costs and because of safety regulations being lax.
These four guys are in their hyperbaric chambers.
Two of them are about to descend.
Two of them are resting.
And there is the diving bell sort of comes loose before it's supposed to and not everything's sealed.
And so the immense change in pressure has catastrophic effects on everybody.
I mean, it's explosive decompression.
So what happens is, is the diving bell shoots out.
And this is a giant fucking massive heavy metal thing.
Immediately kills a crew member, really fucks another one up.
It sucks one of the divers through a 24-inch hole.
The man was substantially larger than 24 inches around.
And the guy's, you know, his organs ended up basically outside of his body, perfectly preserved, because it essentially bisected him.
The other four people, or excuse me, the other three divers, their blood literally flash boiled in their bodies and they died.
It was one of the worst decompression accidents.
I mean, certainly one of the most horrific ones.
You can look at some of the pictures.
Don't do this, but there are pictures of the bodies afterwards.
It is fucking insane.
And it's one of the most nightmarish ways to die.
Your blood literally boils in your body.
And that is all to say, like, this is not stuff to fuck around with.
Like, if you're a guy who owns a submarine company and you're cutting costs on it and you're being innovative in this way, like you're fucking around.
You're not fucking around with like, oh, this is a new way to like order food online.
Like, you're fucking around with forces like this that can make your blood boil in your body.
Yeah.
Like, that's like, you're fucking around with horrors beyond my comprehension.
And like, it's, that is, that is what basically what Stockton Rush did here.
Yeah.
Like I said, no appropriate fear, no respect.
No respect for it.
No respect for the reality.
Yeah.
And like, I'm just, you know, my word of advice to listeners out there, if you're ever in a situation where you own a company that has the possibility that if your shit fucks up, someone's blood flash boils in their body, I think you should really try to get that licensed by somebody.
You know, some people say that octopi are the aliens of the sea.
That they're actually aliens, but they're in the ocean.
Oh, because they're smart or whatever?
They're so fucking smart.
Crazy Shit Happens00:04:27
But like.
It's so sad.
How smart are they?
Octopus is so smart that.
No, but they are really smart.
You know, a lot of them will kill themselves in captivity.
That sounds, okay.
Well, that sounds stupid.
Because most prisoners just live in captivity.
Maybe they get out.
What is that?
I agree that suicide is a very stupid thing to do.
People always say that about animals, like pigs are smart.
Like, well, can it read?
No, but no one's taught it.
But like, could I teach it to read?
I don't know.
I think you should try.
Coco?
Coco?
Coco's ass was faking it.
Everyone knows that now, but.
Oh, Coco the Gorilla.
That was a mass delusion for a while.
You think?
Yeah.
Definitely, yes.
Watch Coco again, because Coco was saying way more complex stuff than you might remember.
Coco wasn't just like, give me a second.
I think that we had to watch the Coco stuff in that funny theology class I had with the alcoholics.
What was the battery were they taking there?
Were they like gorillas or angels?
It was like a gorillas in the mist situation.
I forgot, but I was wondering if you could.
Remember, we didn't talk about this on our little navel gazing episode, our 300th episode.
What?
If I was thinking back to all my favorite moments, remember the Coomer's in the Mist?
Yes, yes.
That was an early episode.
Are you doing it again?
Kuma's in the mist.
Kuma's in the mist.
I can't remember how to do it.
I need an underwater version.
How far would you go down there?
I don't know.
It's like a pool.
100, I think.
12 feet?
12 feet, 12 feet, maybe some of the bigger ones.
14 feet?
Would you go?
But what about an infinity pool?
I've gone pretty, I'm trying to think of when I was swimming, like we would go pretty deep.
I don't know.
I think I could do like 30 feet.
You do 30?
I'm not going down.
But I don't really want to.
Also, I don't love like ocean.
I mean, I love the ocean.
I love the sea.
I love the ocean.
No, no, no.
I like a sea.
Yeah.
I don't like an ocean.
I love the infinite expanse of the ocean.
But I'm saying I don't want to be in the Atlantic.
But I would love to be in the Mediterranean.
Put me in the Pacific.
Atlantic, I feel like, is evil.
Pacific, well, I've never been like in, I mean, besides like.
No, but I used to walk down like every night and like look at the Pacific and you wouldn't be like in the middle of it.
No, I couldn't, but that's what I would dream of.
And then I got my Hawaii sounds nice.
I got my merchant marine license, but then the podcast derailed my dreams.
But no, all good.
I'll get new ones.
All good, though.
It's all good.
Well, you guys are my dream.
Oh, my God.
And that is a nightmare.
I want to make one more point.
I think there is a tendency when stories like this happen for everybody to try to shoehorn their stupid political beliefs into this.
And I want to state the real fact of the matter is sometimes crazy shit happens.
Sometimes crazy shit just happens, right?
And this is not, if you're trying to make a great case about capitalism from five guys turning into dust in a submarine in like, you know, 300 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, you're wasting your time.
Yeah, you're not making a great case.
Also, apparently that's not how you pronounce Newfoundland.
Newfoundland.
Newfoundland.
Newfoundland?
No, it's Newfoundland, I think.
No, it isn't Newfoundland.
It's Newfoundland?
Yeah, it's a good thing.
That's what I said.
It's not Newfoundland.
Newfoundland?
Yeah.
How come they call them newfies then?
Or it's like Newfound Newfoundland?
Newfoundland?
It might be.
I can't remember, but it's not what you think it should be.
I knew a guy, I knew a killer drummer from Newfoundland.
Newfoundland.
My name is Liz.
My name, of course, is Captain Jocko Willink, Brace Belden.
We have Mr. The Man of the Depths himself, the plumber of the depths.
I can't believe we didn't make any Poseidon jokes.
I don't fuck with that.
The sea gods, I think, are real.
I mean, no, I understand that.
I don't like them.
We are, of course, joined by the old cabin boy himself.
It's the oceans are now battlefields, and here is your oceans are now best friends, and here is your best friend.
That didn't make sense.
What do we see?
Oceans are now graveyards, and here is the gravedigger.