Behind the Bastards - Part One: Stockton Rush: Inventor of the Deathsub

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Robert is joined by Andrew Ti to discuss Oceangate CEO, Stockton Rush. (2 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Oh, what's at the bottom of the ocean? Not you all know what we're doing. You all know what we're doing. Look, nope, exactly. Ha ha ha ha. Oh, this is behind the bastards a podcast about the worst people in all of history. We're all gonna feel like the worst people

in all of history a little bit, making jokes adjacent to this week's topic. Andrew T, my guest today, how are you doing, Andrew? Hi, I'm alive, you know, just striking, but alive. Fightin' against the man, Andrew, you are a writer in the entertainment industry and are on strike like all of the Godfearing writers out there. Which means you have time to be on a podcast. So it's really working out good for me. This is all strike. I mean, here's the other secret of TV writers. We always

kind of have time to be on a podcast. Yeah, anything that can count as procrastination is always always around. Is the wonderful. Iuant my whole whole whole Oh, but you get the hell of a lot of cleaning done instead of yeah, I'd said I was trying to try to do anything productive Now Andrew I end is it's my understanding correct me if I'm wrong because I I come from a slightly different world But while you can't we can't you can't be doing any writing for like TV or whatever We can make a reality show together, right? That doesn't violate anything, right?

I mean, that is what we're doing now essentially. Because I love to get you involved in a project that I've had passion for for quite a while. Basically, I feel a supersoaker with my own piss. And you and I drive around in a van. Basically, I fill a supersoaker with my own piss. And you and I drive around in a van, and whenever we see anybody who looks like they might be famous, like a round road, dayo drive, or wherever, we just, we squirt them with the supersoaker full of piss,

and then we get it on camera. And then we call it, it's a show called Supersoaker Full of piss. It's a good idea, I think. This is not materially worse than anything else on, on reality TV. Yeah, I've been looking to get into politics and I'm thinking about how Donald Trump's career got started by the last writer strike. And I feel like this could be my opportunity, you know, this could be my celebrity apprentice. Yeah, yeah, all the, like the Wall Street Journal is like, this is the super soaker full of

Pist guy. He's never gonna, he's gonna mount to anything. And then like, well, I mean, obviously he's making, he has a lot of ground swell support, a lot of good points. Yeah, I run once in 2028 and everybody laughs. And then in 2032, everybody is like, I don't know, piss Supersoaker, guys, kind of making a lot of sense. He really passionate fans. And it's what, you know, in a normal time, I think people would consider the idea of squirting

famous people with a Supersoaker full of human urine to be silly. But given our topic today, it's downright responsible, Andrew. Because today, I mean, I feel like normally we come in on like, so what have you heard about, you know, X person potentially obscure, whatever. We were all aware of the death sub, right? That imploded on its way down to the Titanic. This is like so tricky because normally,

as far as the audience goes, like the service behind the bastards provides is informing, not that you won't be informing people of stuff, but this is probably where I nearly the apex of broad knowledge about this human being that's only going to diminish over time. Yeah, it's interesting. There's like so much that's wrapped up in this and it's such a, there's a lot that's only gonna diminish over time. Yeah, it's interesting. I, there's like so much that's wrapped up in this and it's such a, there's a lot that's kind of fascinating about what the interest in this and the way people are talking about it says about

kind of like our current moment in media. I've chosen for these episodes to kind of rather than we'll focus specifically on the accident, to focus on stocked and rush. And like his background and kind of where he comes from and how this all got together. But we will kind of be talking about the stuff around it, including, you know, it's interesting.

There's this like a lot of, so the kind of the two big arguments over this thing that have been filling the internet so far, or like, should we laugh when a bunch of billionaires die in an easily predictable accident? And that's between you and your God, people. Like, I can't. And also, it's one of those things where it's like, if you think it's bad to laugh when like people you don't know, die, That's a perfectly ethically consistent point. Also, if you think that it's fine,

I don't really, that's, that's, that's what, it's whatever. It's like, if we're gonna flip out about people laughing at this, like the internet has been like full of shit like this from the very beginning. If you can remember the early days, the Darwin Awards were one of like,

the biggest things on the internet, which was just laughing at people dying in super ways. This really is the ultimate, like Darwin Award. I think I could find that. Of course it is. Finally, come down to the thing, I think I wrote on Twitter was some version of like, look, yes, I get it. It's probably not healthy to like hate these people, but I'm just going to, I think I triangulated

to, I just love them less than anyone else who was victimized in any way this week. And I also love them less than any penny that was spent trying to rescue them. Yeah, that's, that's more or less where I am on this. And like, there's, the other thing that people are pointing out is like, there was just this horrific hundreds of people who drowned in another one of those boats. Yeah, that's, yeah. And it's, you know, I actually have kind of like, a slightly off the mainstream take about that, which is like the thing people are saying as well,

it's fucked up that this got so much more attention than that. Yes, it definitely is. But it's also like, not particularly surprising. Like if you think back, because I started covering refugees moving from kind of Northern Africa to through Europe back in 2015.

I was on the refugee trail for a while. And it was a huge story. People paid a lot of attention. There was a lot of aid coming in. You know, when that little boy, I believe his name's Prince Island Curdy drowned a few years back. Like, that was, there was a massive amount of attention. And then it, because it happens so often,

kind of just became normalized, which is the thing. I mean, it happens with mash, it's not just a thing that happens with, it happens with fucking mash shootings, right? Like, this is a thing that happens, it happens with fucking mash shootings, right? Like it's, this is a thing that happens because people can only sort of like be outraged or horrified about a thing they can't directly affect, you know, which is not to say that like more shouldn't be done

or that the fucking coast guards and some of these, like Italy and whatnot are not doing nightmarish things, stopping rescuers from coming in. But it's not surprising or really a mark that like people are much worse than they've ever been, that like this unique story of a bunch of rich people dying and a subvisiting the Titanic got so much attention. Not a surprise. If like a thousand years ago, a bunch of wealthy merchants had disappeared

on a sea village from like Venice to the coast of Spain, this would also be like, there would be stories being sung in the market square about this shit, that's just how people are. But I guess it is a little bit why, if given all that as true, which it is, I believe, as well. Like that is why I feel like der division is actually kind of an important part of this marketplace of ideas.

Sure. I don't think that's wrong, but that's up to, you know, people can make their own decisions. My job here is to let you know about the specific guy who is absolutely the worst in all of this because whatever you think about the other people on their boat, there is a villain of this story. There is a monster who is directly, and who would have gotten more people killed if he had the chance, and his name is fucking Stockton Rush.

I really, yeah. Just for context listeners, Robert, I've been doing this show for five years, and this is the only topic where I was like, oh, Robert, do we have to, and Robert's like, yeah, we fucking do. So, okay. It would be irresponsible for us not to try and do this.

I just, it truly is like, if you're gonna have this like, an-rand ass name, you gotta go out in an an An Rand ass style. This is the An Randest death ever. Like, yeah, it's so, it's so appropriate for like the guy that he is that this, that this happened. So, let's talk about Stockton Rush.

Now, the first thing you will have noticed is that, yeah, he sounds like he's got, he sounds like a guy who would be in Galt's Gulch, right? Like he's got a very, yeah, an Atlas Shrugdass name. It's a dumb name. And the name, like he has this dumb name because our special dead boy was named for two of his ancestors, Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush, both of whom signed the Declaration of Independence, which for rich white people was kind of like owning a foil charizard in 1999, like it was real special, you know?

So, yeah, and he's a toofer. He has a toofer. For him. And speaking of owning, Andrew, when you hear signed the Declaration of Independence, the first thing you should probably ask yourself is like, did this guy own people, right? And like did this guy own human beings? Yeah, he sure did. Well, these guys, these guys both did, right?

That's right. Yeah, and this shouldn't be surprising. I'm gonna read you first some fun information about Richard Stockton, who is, who Stockton University is named after, by the way. So that's cool. Quote, in Stockton's case enslaved people worked in his family home, a property he called Morvin, built after he inherited near Princeton, New Jersey in the 1750s.

When he died in 1781, and despite assertions during his lifetime, Stockton did not free the people that he owned. They appear in his will when he bequeathed them along along with his other property to his wife, Anastakten. And whereas I have here to forementioned to some of my Negro slaves that upon condition of their good behavior and fidelity, I would in some convenient period grant them their freedom, this I must leave to the discretion of my wife

in whose judgment and prudence I can fully confide. So he's like, I promise these people I could free him, but I'm passing that buck down to my wife. Yeah. What a piece of shit. A prudent time for your freedom. Like is it piece of, yeah, sorry. When's convenient for me for you to be free?

Let me pencil that in for you. Yeah. And it's like that's shitty. It's pretty normal shitty for the day, which doesn't make it less bad. But like, yeah, he's a pretty normal rich slave owning asshole, Richard Stockton. It's also interestingly enough, there's a pretty good chance that he turned trader against the United States. He was like arrested by the British.

No one knows quite. It doesn't seem like there's like conclusive evidence about what he did, but he got kind of let off and there were rumors that maybe he'd like given up information and stuff. Oh yeah. We don't seem to have, yeah, he's a snitch, right? He's a slave-owning snitch. And we finally got him.

Yeah. Poseidon finally got to get that snitch. Put it into that family line. Benedict Arnold's descendants are next. Yeah, Tom Arnold better watch the fuck out. They're coming for him. Stan of the water, honey. Stan of the water. So let's talk next about his other ancestor, Benjamin Rush. This is a somewhat more complex story. And as Rush authored one of the first major pieces

of abolition writing in the colonies, a 1773 pamphlet titled, and addressed to the inhabitants of the British settlements in America upon slavekeeping. Now, that sounds pretty good. Benjamin Rush was an ardent and active abolitionist. He helped organize the first anti-slavery group, and he eventually named the which was eventually named the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Interestingly, we talk a lot on the show about how many abolitionists were still real racist, right? You could be an abolitionist and super racist.

Benjamin Rush was interestingly enough, one of the guys who argued ardently that black people were as smart and capable as anyone else. He authored a 1789 article about the first free black physician named James Durham, and he also wrote about an enslaved black mathematician named Thomas Fuller. He was like kind of writing anti-racism tracts back in the 1780s, which is pretty cool.

Here's where it stops being cool because he was publicly an anti-racist, but privately, he bought an enslaved black man named William Gruber and held him in bondage as his cook for more than a decade. So yeah, I mean, I think that's that like, that's obviously there's all kinds of, you know, poly any combination of politics can exist as we all see obviously in rare, rare proportions. But it does sound like also there's some version of like, you know, oh, black people are an inferior. We're just lucky that we could enslave them. Like what a, what a boon. Yeah, it's, it's, it's really, it's, it's kind of fascinating, like the, like,

what's going on with this guy? Because like, he buys William Groober. He, like, he doesn't just keep him as a cook, but he hires him out for profit to other families. Now, he files manumission papers for William in 1788, but that doesn't actually free Gruber until 1793 when he kind of lets him go with the equivalent of a letter of recommendation. And I write up I found on the University of Pennsylvania library's website seems to argue that Rush was probably kept it a secret

that he'd owned, Gruber, because he's this public anti-racist. So he would like hide the fact that he was keeping a man enslaved in his home, because he's like a public intellectual who argued with racists in like these tracts and essays and stuff that he was printing, and it wouldn't have looked good. And I'm going to read a quote from the University of Pennsylvania Library here. When Gruber died in 1799, Rush wrote a remembrance of him in his commonplace book, It Appears in the autobiography of Benjamin Rush, and it he described Gruber as, A Native African whom I bought and liberated after he had served me for ten years.

The period is not likely accurate. He described Gruber's change from a drunkard who swore frequently to a sober, moral man and faithful and affectionate servant. He remembered especially a night in 1787 when Rush Gravely-Ell was expected to die and William stayed up with him all night. So he wrote man-e-mission papers for this guy like the year after this dude helped like carry him through a deadly illness but still didn't free him for half a decade. That's so weird. Um, I guess it's not, you know, at least he did free him.

I don't know where you want to put that. Like, I mean, I think it is like, like very hard to like, no matter, yeah. I mean, look, this is at all levels. I mean, obviously, when cattle slavery was around hypocrisy is probably a lot bigger deal, but obviously, we all participated in some level of capitalistic hypocrisy, you know? And this is a fucking insane version of that, but it is like, you know, it's some version of like everyone else is doing it. And like, oh, I at least I wrote these papers. He's like the, the Lena Dunham of his day. Like fuck it up.

Yeah, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like,

he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, it's interesting. I don't claim to be an expert about either of these men, but the fact that Benjamin Rush publicly portrayed himself as an abolitionist and a crusader against racism, while owning an enslaved black man could be seen as evidence of what seems to be a long-running family trait that gets passed down to our boy, Stockton Rush, which is the ability to act

like one kind of dude while being the opposite kind of dude. That's true. Yeah. God. It's obviously so fucked up. But if you sign the Declaration of Independence and you only have one slave, you're probably for your peer group on the better side of things. Right.

Yeah. I don't know how you want to like mark that out because also I don't know. Is it better or worse to just be like, yeah, man, I own slaves because I think it's fine or to be like, I think it, I know it's wrong to own slaves. And I know it's wrong. Like I know racism is bad, but also I'm going to do it. You know, like where do we land on that? I don't know. I mean, this isn't, you should think about that at all of you, but like I, behind the

bastards is not where we'll make that, that, that moral deciding line anyway. They're all bastards. It's fine. Yeah, for sure. So that is beyond a shadow of a doubt. So both the Stockton and Rush families continue to be very wealthy and powerful throughout the life of the new United States. Gradually the two families get intertwined through marriage.

You know, it's a pretty incestuous breed, rich people in the Northeast. In 1897, their descendant Ralph K. Davies was born. Davies got a job working as an office boy for a company called Standard Oil when he was 15. He rose through the ranks and became the youngest director in company history. In World War II, he was FDR's petroleum administrator, which is maybe the least directly evil job,

a member of the oil and gas industry ever held. It's like the one job where it's like, well, you know, it was World War Two. We probably needed somebody doing that. I don't know. Right. Right. Yeah, I guess look, it's like,

we're gonna go through Stockton Russia's ancestry Grading on a curve. He's okay, but that curve is He is the member of this guy's family. You're gonna hate the least by the way So after the war Davies moved to San Francisco and his wife became a major patron of the art scene She basically paid for the San Francisco symphonies hall. They donated like $4 million to it. Her name is still on the venue. And I'm going to quote from an article in sfgate.com here. At a high society ball in 1957, Ralph and Luis Davies' daughter Ellen met Richard Stockton

Rush Jr. A month later, the pair were engaged. Coverage of their wedding accompanied by a huge photo in the San Francisco examiner said they were settling down in Berkeley. Talk Rush, as he was known, also settled into the Davies family's line of work, serving as the chairman for Peregrine Oil and Gas Company in Burlingham and the Natomas Company in San Francisco. His 2000 Princeton Alumni Weekly obituary noted that he even served as the president elect of the city's

infamous Bohemian club, which is the Bohemian Grove group, right? Like that's who runs that. So wait, I don't even know what that is. Bohemian Grove, that's that it's in the red woods kind of near the Bay area and it's where it's where like Henry Kissinger and all like Dick Cheney all go to party once a year. It's a bad time. It's a bad time. Yeah. Alex Jones snuck in once. Oh yeah.

And I think all your least favorite people's favorite hang everyone who sucks loves bohemian growth. And there's a bunch of it's a put like in conspiracy world. It's like where the secret masters of the world all meet to plot. And it also is kind of where the secret masters of the world all meet to plot. So that's what it's the the conspiracy is its secret masters. Yeah. The reality is it's the masters of everyone.

Yeah. It's a tank Kissinger and fucking Janey and stuff. Yeah, of course. And it's interesting. I haven't seen this breakout widely onto the internet yet, but we've already started to see conspiracy theories flowing like water through a crack in a submersible's hole here.

David Con Cannon, who is a legal advisor, he's like the lawyer guy for Oceangate, the company that Stockton Founds. He's already like... He's like... He, like, within hours of this going missing, he was kind of trying to drum up conspiracy theories, posting stuff like, you know, we're working on this hard, but like the US government isn't helping us, you know, if they don't fix this and come to R.A.,

I'm gonna make sure the world knows the names of the people who didn't do their jobs. And that's led to, like I found a fucking like Donald Trump juniors been posting shit about how like, everything about this is sketchy, you know, why are they doing this? I'm seeing people talk about how like, oh, you know, how would billionaires

have made a decision so dumb is to go doubt it? That would have been a real lies or thought on to Earth. It was like, oh, you know, how would billionaires have made a decision? So dumb is to go down. That would have never been allowed on Twitter. It was like, oh, I mean, there's no way billionaires would do something that's stupid. And it's like, first of all, also like putting that on Twitter is remarkably like, like particularly, bockers. It's like, this is, Twitter is to the extent that it serves any function now is it's such a direct demonstration that not only our billionaires not better than you. They are actively stupider than you in any conceivable way. Well, yeah, in every conceivable way except for the one thing they made their billions in, modulus luck. Yeah. And it's like, so when I think about what probably conspiracy culture is going to take of this,

there's a conspiracy that's existed for a while. It's never been like kind of top of the world, but there's a theory that I came across, started coming across, I don't know, years ago, that the Titanic was blown up by a bomb because a number of the rich guys on it, like John Jacob Astor were against moving away from the gold standard and establishing the Federal Reserve. It's one of those kind of things, right? And so part of like what people are pointing out is that Stockton rushes wife is like she had relatives who are on the Titanic.

They're actually in James Cameron's movie. They're the two old people who are like cuddling on that bed as it goes down. And so there's I suspect I've already seen some of this. I suspect we're going to see more like, oh, this is like a conspiracy. These guys were going to, you know, had some dirt on Biden or whatever and the what the feds doing with interest rates or some shit, it's silly. I will tell you right now, the fact that Stockton had relatives in the Bohemian club is definitely, you're going to wind up seeing this on some YouTube videos that the algorithm serves you at some point.

Right. Right. Just be ready for it, folks. It's a common. So that Stockton's family background, he is the sion of two very wealthy families who got wealthy through a mix of slavery and exploiting the earth's resources in the most poisonous way possible, right? This guy, he grows up, his family's worth probably hundreds of millions of dollars, at least tens of millions of dollars, and he grows up with that amount of money. In a 2017 Bloomberg profile, he described his family wealth this way.

Rush earned his money, the old fashioned way, he says, I was born into it and then grew it. I don't know, that's not really the old fashioned. I guess it is. I don't know, man. It is. In reality, unfortunately, that is the most. I guess that's not right.

I was way to be rich is by rich my I got it the old fashioned way. Am I grand parents? Yeah. Um, and he notes that like his grandpa made his fortune in oil and gas in Indonesia, which I'm sure makes it sketchier because like boy, how do you? There's not a great history of extractive and distraight in Indonesia. Yeah. So I don't know when Stockton was born actually,

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

And I wasn't able to find an exact reference to his birth date. One article that I read notes that he was 18 when he got his pilot's license in 1980, which would mean he was born in 62 thereabouts. Be-beep, motherfuckers. Hey, Robert here from the future. Since we recorded this, a number of official obituary have come out for Old Stockton and we now have an actual birth date for him. The

New York Times gives it as March 31st 1962 in the place as San Francisco. I'm leaving in the conversation we had around it before we knew that because it gives good context as to how actually like relatively unknown this guy was prior to the disaster, which I find interesting considering how connected he is to so many like rich and super famous people that like very little about this dude before he became very suddenly famous. One of the things that I use sometimes for research is an AI powered search engine called Find PHIND, which is basically like, it's nice because you can kind of ask it direct questions and it'll scrape the internet trying to answer

it. So I asked it, when was he after I couldn't find a birthday? I was like, for shits and giggles, hey, when was this guy born? And find was also like, there doesn't appear to be a clear exact birthday for it. There's not a thing. Yeah, there also doesn't appear to be a clear exact answer as to where he was born. Some articles suggest he was born in the UK, other say California, given how rich his family is, that's possible. Like it's not weird for

like rich people. Rich people don't care. He was probably. Lobs on board on the private plane, you know, exactly between those two points. He's a child of the sky. He was born in superpositioned in Brodinger's Fox somewhere. I mean, it's also, I was, you know, not to go down the AI route, which is not remotely what we're talking about today. But it is like this, this guy will be given that, yeah, there was so little, apparently,

like, like reliable stuff written about him. It does feel like this is, he's going to be one of those examples of like almost every word generated about him will have AI in it already. He's just like, he's like, correct data for the data set already. Yeah. Like, most of my sources for this, I tried to stick to stuff that was written three, four, five years ago before all this happened just because like, well, that would, it wasn't tainted by what happened later. You get more information about how the media was kind of covering him and stuff.

But I think you are right about this because like, he wasn't really a major figure until you got all those people killed. The bulk of shit, the bulk of shit written about him is going to be lies. Yeah, that's really. Yeah, I think you're actually exactly correct about that. Andrew and you know who else loves to lie. The sponsors of this podcast, you cannot trust a fucking word that they say. So please give them your credit card information. How was that Sophie? Is that a good, is that a good ad plug? I think the Reagan coin ad people would like it very much. Yeah, yeah. Buy a Reagan coin. Fucking morons. That's so wild. I love the Reagan coin. And I love our listeners. Here's It's summer time. This is, you know, the best time of the year to go out and camp and hike and go to the beach. And it's important to maximize that time, which is why Hello Fresh

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I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet soup, with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for C.A.I. I'm gonna die.

When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like, follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not certified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steel.

Who are the cops? Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government hover ups from unsolved crimes to the bleeding

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or wherever you find your favorite shows. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Good times. So we're back. Uh, Andrews got his Reagan coins. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is real money. This is company script on my private plot of land. Yeah. As soon as his Reagan coin arrived, David Zoslov sent him a letter saying, like, now you're now you're one of us. You're one of the secret masters of the world. Want to go to Bohemian Grove, Andrew T. I mean, again, what's it not to take a diversion, but Zoslov really feels like like all the billionaires got together just before this writer's strike and had like a dinner for schmucks kind of thing.

Yeah. It's like, who's the most repellent of us? Who's going to take the heat from everyone else and he won slash lost. I was going to, but doesn't realize he lost. I was going to make like a nerdier reference about it, but, but, I don't know. Nobody wants to hear my war hammer 40,000 jokes. So, stocked in rush, probably born in 1962. It's, yeah, he, hard to say exactly, we've probably very likely born in California, certainly grew up in the Bay Area. As a wee lad, he was obsessed with space travel, and he wanted nothing more than to be an astronaut.

His parents assumed he'd grow out of that as most kids do, but since they were super wealthy oligarchs, they were able to humor him by introducing him to a real astronaut, Pete Conrad, the commander of Apollo 12 and the first man to Skylab. It's just like well, he wants to be an astronaut. Let's go find an astronaut, darling. It really brings him in by us in Apollo 12 of man. I like he's a G.I. Joe. It really. We're also at the point where it's like now that now that like some individuals, these billionaires, I start to have resources of countries. Yeah. Like nothing is off the table, especially if you want to do it on the cheap for incredible, you know, shiddy and unethically.

It's interesting. I'm thinking about when I was a kid, I wanted to be a paleontologist for a while, like every kid who grew up in the era of Jurassic Park. Yeah. And we went to like, I think it was the St. Louis natural history museum one day. And there was like, they had an exhibit where there was like an actual paleontologist and a bunch of like, things that they had brought out of a dig site and were actively cleaning off.

And I got to shake that guy's hand and he walked us around. It was part of a thing, a bunch of other families and stuff were there. And it was one of the best single moments of my childhood. And for Stockton, the equivalent of that is like, bring the Skylab man over to the house.

Have him talk to the boy. Right. I mean, he's there. They're at the level of wealth. Like if he'd liked dinosaurs, they would simply have had to get him a dinosaur. Yeah, they would have sponsored a dig and had him just like go, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, so Stockton claims that Pete told him, you know, if you want to be a space man one day, you should get your pilot's license know, if you want to be a space man one day You should get your pilots license ASAP, which is to be fair probably pretty good astronaut advice I don't know not an astronaut, but that does seem like step one In that Bloomberg article, which is as far as I can tell I think the first detailed article about Stockton rushes life and ambitions Stockton claims to have started work as a professional pilot when he was 19. Quote, Rush has been investing in startup companies most of his adult life while also working

at aviation. He was a commercial jet transport pilot at 19 and later a flight test engineer from McDonald Douglas. Now that's not the most detailed version of his early life that I found in a Smithsonian magazine profile from 2019. He gives a little more detail and some of its contradictory because in that, he says that at age 18, he became one of the youngest commercial pilots in the world. From what I could tell,

what I think happened is he got his license at 18. He started working a year or two later, but once he started to get more famous, he started lying and saying that like, oh no, I was the youngest commercial pilot ever. Just a little bit of that fluff cycle, right? It's also... There's also like when your parents are rich enough, you know, what, you know, by what definition are you saying commercial pilot? Like someone who is compensated to move cargo from one place

to another, Like that's also Danny giving you your allowance and say take my luggage to wear out. No, that's interesting, Andrew, because the first article about him just says he was a commercial dread shit transport pilot. You want to guess where he was working when he started his pilot career? You want to guess who his employer was? So remember, his parents, both sides of his mom and his dad's family are both huge oil and gas families helping to run major oil and gas companies. And Stockton's first flying job is taking chartered planes into and out of Saudi Arabia. He's working for the Saudis.

He has a teenage boy. Oh my God. Yeah, that is, I mean, that's also the billionaire version of I drove my friends kids, my parents' friends kids around. Well, you know, the babysitter, essentially a babysitter. When I was a kid, like my mom would help me talk to, when I first started mowing lawn, she'd be like, well, let's go over to the neighbors

and see if they need like their lawnmode and stuff. And for his equivalent is like, well, the king of Saudi Arabia needs like a pilot to take, I don't know, probably torture supplies or whatever to fucking re-ad. Like, it's cool, it's awesome. This is a very, very dumb tangent. But for some reason, the algorithm on Instagram has decided I want to see Saudi fast food

reviews. Oh shit. I bet there's good fast food in Saudi Arabia. It looks wonderful. I mean, it's so funny the way culture works. It's like they're all speaking Arabic in the exact same like TikTok cadence as like English language tech talkers. I don't, I don't speak, um, you know, I don't, I don't know what they're saying, but I'm like, okay, this is amazing.

Yeah, I'm able to pick up a lot more than I otherwise would because you're like using the same patterns as TikTokers all the way to the world. The fast food looks great. Perfect. Fascinating. Burger King in, uh in Riyadh looks quite good. I will say the best fucking Popeyes I've ever eaten at was in the the airport in a mon Jordan. Oh, yeah, fucking incredible Popeyes.

God, I think they're standards, but KFC and Beijing when I went to bed was they apparently still used lard to fry everything and it was so good. I'll bet. I'll bet. Yeah. Not at all. Suppressed to hear that KFC in Beijing slaps. So yeah, while he's working for the Saudi royal family, it's a pilot. He's studying aerospace engineering at Princeton. And yeah, it's interesting, you know, that's a fun career. So he, he's called, like, his description of this is that it was the coolest summer job. Interesting way to phrase that. So he goes to school, he's doing aerospace engineering. For his thesis, he builds his own plane from a kit,

which like, that is like impressive, that sounds difficult. I don't know who feels weird as a thesis because you are just kind of like following a kit, but why not? I'm not an engineer. I, you know, that's like putting it a little, like taking a Lego set to your thesis.

I finished it. I did it. Yeah, I don't know that it would have been possible for him to not get his thesis given the amount of money his parents probably gave to that school, but whatever, you know, I've never built a plane. So what do I know? I've also never built a death sub.

So I guess I have that on him. So anyway, guys, that Smithsonian article continues, the astronaut dream was dashed when Rush learned that his eyesight wasn't good enough for him to become a military pilot. In the 1980s, still the astronaut fast track. So he kind of has the background of that kid from Little Miss Sunshine. Um, yeah, that's the continuation of that dude's life. Instead he moved to Seattle to work for McDonald Douglas as a flight test engineer for F-15 fighter jets.

Then went on to business school. Building on inherited money, he invested in a string of esoteric tech companies, wireless remote control devices, sonar systems. Still, he dreamed of going to space, perhaps as a passenger on one of the private rockets being developed in the early 2000s by the likes of Richard Branson. In fact, Rush traveled to the Mojave Desert in 2004 to watch the launch of Spaceship 1, the first commercial craft sent into space. When Branson stood on its wing and declared that a new era of space tourism had arrived, Rush says,

he abruptly lost interest. I had this epiphany that this was not at all what I wanted to do. I didn't want to go up in space as a tourist. I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise. I wanted to explore. Oh my God. So there's a lot in that paragraph.

Jesus. First of all, the articles I found, and again, no one's really done a super deep dive on this guy. They all kind of take his rent from what he said. He did one. He did, he did one, he did one. But they all kind of take his red that like he built

on his family well through smart investments and made a bunch more money. We don't actually know that. Like his family might just have been super rich. He may have been terrible at investing. We have no evidence actually that he was good at it that I've seen. Well, with that amount of money,

like he can even have made money and still like start- It's good to get an index fund. Yeah, but yeah, but even like with his little like, you know, investing shit, you know, given the way the market is, the real question is like, did he do better than, yeah, like an index fund?

Or like someone who actually knew what the fuck they were doing, it's the same way. Like, you know, Donald Trump has kind of made money at some point, but it's like, yeah, but did he do, did he make enough money given how much he started with? Exactly. Yeah, I think that's like a fair way to look at it. It's also really interesting to me, super interesting to me. I think kind of is the key to understanding this, dude, that he loved the idea of spaceship

one until he realized it was just someone else's spaceship for tourists, right? Because it's Branson ship, if he gets on it, all he's going to be is a tourist. And he didn't want to be a paying customer, like visiting space as a casual rich visitor. Now he describes it's like, well, I wanted to explore, I wanted to be Captain Kirk. I don't think that's actually accurate either I think he wanted to be Richard Branson selling tickets to rich old white dudes who would worship him as a badass billionaire adventurer, right? Yeah, like that's that's what this guy actually wanted

Now the startup costs for this guy's rich his family's rich, but like there's rich in then there's being able to start your own space company, rich. And this guy is not that rich, you know, his family doesn't have that kind of money. Yeah, if he was looking, if he was actually that good an investor, he would have that kind of money. He would have. Yeah. Yeah. Why didn't you, what didn't you get yourself a billionaire first, pull yourself up by

your business, stocked and very, very stupid people have accomplished that. So it's, it's not a high bar, you know? Elon Musk has a rocket company and that dude, what a mess. It's just like the most patently stupid person. It's amazing. But you know, Musk is evidence that like the market's starting to get crowded by kind of the early to mid-aut. So Stockton decides he's got to go somewhere else, somewhere where there's less billionaires

getting involved, which at this point is the ocean, right? Now Stockton has always liked the ocean. He'd been a dedicated scuba diver most of his life. He's rich. His family's going to all these exotic places on a regular basis for vacations. So he's done a bunch of diving all over the world and he specifically, he gets into, because he moves up to Seattle as an adult

and he does a lot of cold water diving off the coast of Seattle. Now as he notes, the diving off of the Puget Sound is gorgeous, but it's like cold water diving is like a whole different beast from like regular open water or regular diving, right? Like where you're in, I don't know, like fucking, I learned to dive in Okinawa, where the water's kind of a perfect comfortable temperature, right? It's one of the best places in the world

for diving. The Puget Sound is cold as hell. So if you're gonna dive there, you've got like special suits, you're carrying extra tanks. It's like more of a pain in the ass. And that's kind of how he describes it. Quote, I loved what I saw, but I thought there's got to be a better way. And being in a sub, and being nice and cozy and having a hot chocolate with you beats the heck out of freezing and going through a two hour decompression hanging in deep water. Now, that's funny for a cup of reasons. Like, I don't know, subs are fine. subs are cool, like I think what James Cameron has done with his submersibles is like neat. But it is funny that this guy is like,

I wanted to be an explorer, but also I want my hot cocoa. Yeah. I don't know man, like read about what astronauts go through. It's not a comfortable process. Yeah, but that's, you know, that's exactly the delatant that winds up exactly. His path is more perfect

than it probably should have been, honestly. Yeah, no, he should have died a lot faster. If he'd gone to space, he wouldn't have hacked it as well because space is a whole mess. Everybody's nasty up in space. They don't talk about that enough, but the space station smell terrible. If you read through the old Apollo transcripts, they're like regularly poop will get out

and it'll just be like floating around the spaceship. They'll be arguing about who shits flying around. It's very funny. Yeah, you wouldn't want to you wouldn't want to be drinking cocoa in that environment. I'll tell you that much. So since he was a very rich kid, he had the power to just kind of go out and spend money to make this expensive whim happen. But Alas, Stockton was stymied because there aren't a lot of private submarines. It's actually pretty uncommon

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

if you ever needed an illustration of why there's not a bunch of private subs. Yeah, we did all get a reminder. Yeah. In 2019, when that Smithsonian article came out, they said there are about a hundred private submarines across the entire world. Chartering them is extremely expensive, but stocked and kept digging until he found a company in London that had was like, we can sell you the parts and a kit to build a mini sub that

was designed by a retired Navy sub commander. You love a kit. You love a kit to build a mini sub that was designed by a retired Navy sub commander. And like, you love a kit, you love putting together your own submarine. That is also just this perfect example of these rich kid billionaires. Building a kit and presenting it as something you made. It is, it's both because, yeah, that is fat, like that, it, like as you said, but it also like, I will say, if I'm going to trust someone to like take me in a submarine,

it, I would prefer it be someone who knows what it's like to build a submarine from the ground up. Like, I will say that, that is probably where you'd start. So so far, he's doing, he's taking the right first step, you know? Yeah. Well, the problem is there's two lessons, two pretty divergent lessons you can learn from that. One is like, wow, look at the care, look at the difficulty building a submarine is no joke. And the other lesson that it looks like Stockton Moore took the heart is, see? It's easy.

I have mastered the submarine. Yeah, building a, building a deciding a submarine is easy. Yeah. And the sub he builds is a 12 foot one man sub. So he's like lying flat in this thing with like his face directly over a port hole. And like that's the way this works. So when we say sub, this is like almost more of like a diving suit, like a rigid diving suit, probably is would be like closer to what this is as opposed to like, you know, the

red October, right? Yeah, Sam Neal isn't fittin' in this thing, you know? Quote, while I was building the sub I was thinking this is stupid. I should have just bought a robot and explored with that. But the moment I went underwater, I was like, Oh, you can't describe this. When you go in a sub, things sound different. They look different. It's like you've gone to a different planet.

Rush was hooked. His entrepreneurial instincts were peaked. I had come across this business anomaly. I couldn't explain if three quarters of the planet is water, how come you can't access it? Now, that's a fascinating thing to think. We're like, he's underwater alone in a submarine looking at like the majesty of reef systems

and underwater life that very few people get to see and his immediate thought is like, why isn't this owned? Why haven't we enclosed this and turn this into corporate property? And also though, clearly his going further train of thought was not just like, wow, this is amazing and beautiful. Why doesn't everyone do this?

And instead of coming to the conclusion because it's very difficult and dangerous, he came to the conclusion because everyone else is stupid. I'm the only one that thought this is amazing and people should see this. Yeah, everyone is stupid and he's not saying people should see this as much as he's closer to business anomaly. He's like, why aren't, why don't more businesses own the sea? Yeah. Is his first thought, right? He is an exploiter. He's not an explorer, right? That's his,

his primary motivation, right? So his immediate goal is to start a business to build small, cheap, submersible vehicles, which he thought could be lucrative for a variety of reasons. And when you, when you read about the guy, you get the feeling more than anything, he sees this as his opportunity to become a self-made billionaire and put himself on an even footing with guys like Branson and Musk. But the private submarine world, you know, it's never been huge. It's never been a big business to be a submarine owner. And it had pretty much collapsed by the early odds.

And his interview with this Smithsonian, Stockton Rush, claims that there were two reasons for this. One of the big markets for private subs had been carrying what are called saturation divers to work underneath. So you've got oil rigs, right? In the ocean, they go down very deep and they need repair work done on them at intense depths. And these are the kind of depths where you don't just like throw on an oxygen tank and go diving, right? It number one, it's too deep. So when you're diving, you can go down pretty quickly, but going up, you have to be extremely careful about how quickly you go up, right? Otherwise, you're going to

fucking die. So when you're going to intense depths like this, and you have to work, so you have to be able to spend a decent amount of time down there to do stuff, what they would do is they would put divers. And these divers don't have oxygen tanks. They have like special formulations of different kind of like chemicals that allow them to breathe in the, the specific like it. I don't know. We're not going to like how diving works. There's different stuff like nitrox. I'm not sure exactly what these guys were on, but they're wearing special suits. They've got special, you know, mixtures in their tanks and a submarine takes them down and takes them back up so that they can get on the sub

and be in decompression without kind of running through. All that way, they don't have to carry as much as many tanks and stuff. Now, this was for a while kind of the only way to do repair work on this stuff, but it was extremely dangerous. Like this was one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. These guys died all the time, not because like the subs

weren't safe, but because diving at that depth isn't... People just die for no reason while diving. Sometimes, it's just like your heart stops or whatever, you get the wrong mix a shit in your blood. It's very dangerous to dive, especially this kind of shit. So once oil and gas companies, once drones and stuff started being good enough, they moved away from having divers do this as much as possible and started having robots do it, which is like, not gonna give the oil and gas company

a lot of credit, but I'm sure it was both more cost efficient and like, yeah, people, it's like a lot safer. So the other reason he claims was that, or the other like business for private submarines was tourist subs, which could be skippered by anyone with a Coast Guard captain's license and were regulated by the passenger of Essel's Safety Act of 1993,

which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection requirements and prohibited dives below 150 feet. The law was well meaning, Rush says, but he believes it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation. So he's like, it sucks that they stopped having divers fix oil rigs because they were all dying

and it sucks that they wouldn't let us take people below 150 feet in subs, because it keeps killing them. I mean, look, as far as money where your mouth is, he is the most like, like, you know, true believer libertarian bullshit guy. Yeah. Listen, you got a hand at to him. You have to hand it to him.

Yeah, you got to, he did put his money where his mouth was. It is funny where you can, there's just all these quotes where he's like, they're pointlessly focusing on safety over innovating. Oh, maybe there's a reason for some of those safety regulations. Stockton. It truly, I mean, you know, when all this is happening,

the, one of my like more fucked up thoughts was like, you know, obviously it wasn't likely that these guys were going to get rescued, but I was like, the cost in the world where they are rescued, it will cost so many more lives in a lot of way. Like, well, and it's, you know, honestly, like this, this will not be news to most people or a lot of people probably, but like, you know, if you pay attention to like the world of people who do this kind of stuff, and I have a buddy who,

there's a book called Blind Man's Bluff, if you wanna read about kind of the shit that US and Russian subs got up to in the late Cold War era. It's a really good book, but like, basically we used to have these fights between our submarines where they would try to force each other to surface, and it was insanely, it's like chicken with nuclear submarines.

It was insanely dangerous shit. But like talking to him and talking to like other people who are in that industry, anyone who has done this kind of like fort, there have been four submarine rescues that have been successful in the history of submarines. And none of them were very deep compared to where this thing was. There was never any chance of saving these people. I don't think. But anyway, whatever, that's not what we've got to talk about today. We've got to talk about today. Yeah, one in a million. So rush calls these needless passenger safety prioritizations, understandable but allotical,

which is very, very funny. But what is interesting to me is that like the submarket falls apart, the real reason is that number one, it's insanely dangerous. The jobs that it was being used for and we found better uses than submarines, better ways to fill those needs. And number two, once we started replacing like the subs

that were being used to transport divers and shit, the only real industry for private subs was private trips for rich people to see shit underwater. And the thing that people most wanted to see was the Titanic. And we're going to talk about that. But first, you know what's also Titanic? The savings that you're going to get if you purchase these products. In the podcast, Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson.

And in our second season, we have an Alphabet Soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio, but who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for C.A. but I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like, follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh like something's going on here.

So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not not specified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm's deal. Who are the cops? Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers, and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science,

history is riddled with unexplained events. We spend a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know

on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. The Road testers and supporters alike are lined up outside the United States Supreme Court this afternoon, as the decision in the most hotly debated case in years is set to be delivered. From I Heart Podcasts Supreme, the Battle for Roe, tells the story of the unlikely champions behind the landmark case Roe V Wade. Sir, I graduated the top quarter of my class. We just don't have a spot for you.

Starring Maya Hawk as 26-year-old lead attorney, Sarah Weddington, for challenging the Texas abortion laws in federal court and Academy Award nominee, William H. Macy, as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman. My chief qualification being, I'm uncontroversial. You know how we both ended up on the Supreme Court? Politics? Damn right.

This may be the longest of shots, but it's also the last chance for a lot of women. Time is not the most important factor, getting it right in. Trying to get you to stand for something, man. Not go to it. Listen to Supreme, the Battle for Ro, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, we're talking about tourist trips to see the Titanic.

So spoiler alert for those of you who haven't seen the movie. The Titanic went down on April 14th, 1912, with a shitload of people on it. Now, despite the fact that like this is the most famous nautical disaster in history, when it happened, and for like decades after it happened, very basic details of what had actually gone down were

seriously in doubt, which is weird because eyewitnesses saw the ship break in half, the way that it does in the James Cameron movie, right? But when that happened, like scientists at the time, and awful lot of the kind of like people who were building boats and were experts on this, didn't think a ship could go down that way. I think the belief was that it would basically get overwhelmed and just all sink at once,

but they didn't think it could break that way. Because a lot of the eyewitnesses were women, a lot of these people got mocked and stuff by the... Anyway, it was a whole deal, which is to say that like when people started going after the Titanic, there was a real reason to want to find it because among other things, you might actually like give some closure to some of these people who had spent their lives being called crazy. I don't know, whatever. There was a good scientific reason to want to find this thing and the, the cruise ship's resting place

remained a mystery until a very cool dude, named Bob Ballard, got a secret contract from the US Navy in 1985. Ballard Ballard is an oceanographer, and like Stockton, he'd always loved the sea. Unlike Rush, he turned this love into a diligent appreciation for the science of oceanography, and he gets brought in, he's basically been pitching,

I think I can find the Titanic, and the Department of Defense is like, well, we got these two US subs that went missing in the 1960s, and we don't really know what happened, but we'd like you to find them and this Titanic thing, like, we'll basically pretend that we're having you do that, and if you find our subs like that, you know, this will work out for everybody. And I think he does fight.

He finds those subs and he also he finds the Titanic because Bob Ballard is very good at what he does. You know, this is, he's also the guy who finds the fucking Bismarck. And because he's the guy who finds the big dead boat, he could have claimed salvage rights to the wreck, which is like, potentially quite a bit of money in salvaging the Titanic. But because he's like a basically decent guy, Ballard was like, I don't want to mine the graveyard of several thousand people for profit. That seems that seems ghoulish. He actually was like, I think that's grave robbing. So

I don't really wanna do that. But other people had no compunctions against renting deep sea vehicles and grabbing shit near the wreck to sell back on surface. And we're actually gonna talk about those people because one of them winds up on stocked in Russia's death sub. Kind of the biggest of them. But over the next years, some 5,500 artifacts

from the tie, over the next 18 years, some 5,500 artifacts, over the next 18 years, some 5,500 artifacts from the Titanic are sold or put in the Titanic Museum. Bob later wrote, it had turned into an ugly carnival and a front to the fate of the Titanic and all those who had lost their lives in her final hours. Now this grave robbing is done by mere subs, which are leased from the Russian government during a period in which like this is kind of low eight, eighties, early nineties, like right after the Soviet Union

fall. So like the Russians, they're kind of needed money, you know. Yeah. So like, my analogous biggest regret is when I did a semester in Beijing, one of the things that this is, this will show my age a little bit, but the Chinese, the Red Arby was enough up for sale that apparently you could drive out to the desert and for $100 shoot a rocket propelled grenade into a car. I absolutely worth it. That's a good price. That's a solid price, Andrew. I didn't, I was too, I take that deal every day of the week. It was very, very sketchy.

So I didn't end up doing it, but I was like, nah, now I, I wish I could. Yeah. Yeah. It is, you know, you got to be careful. Anytime people are offering you rocket propelled grenade launchers. Yeah. Exactly. But it is like, you know, the, and it's one of those things we're talking about how insane

this Titanic, you know, tourism thing was thing was, I actually chatted on fucking Twitter with some guy who said he went to see the Titanic on one of these mere subs. This is pretty safe. These are actual submarines, right? Like with actual crews and stuff like they're rated to be doing this. Nothing bad happens during this. We can talk about like the grave robbing and the ethics of that, but James Cameron films the opening scenes of Titanic, those opening underwater scenes on one of these mere submarines.

And for a while, this is a pretty good way to get down there. The runaway success of Cameron's movie of the same name ignites a new Titanic fever in the hearts of people around the globe. And suddenly there's this kind of burgeoning fan, there had always been, since the Titanic went down, people have been obsessed with this. But obviously the movie takes that to another fucking level. There's all these people who kind of make the ship and its story, the center of their,

it becomes a fandom, you know? In 2005, a company called Deep Ocean Expeditions decides to offer a very wealthy clientele trips down to the most famous grave in history. And over the next few years, they take 197 tourists there and back again. From that Bloomberg article, quote, the last of those trips took place in 2012, the 100th anniversary of the Titanic sinking. Russia assumed that meant the market was exhausted. Then he talked to Rob McCallum, the British-born adventurer who led the trips.

McCallum told Rush that the only reason the trips had stopped was that the Russians quit renting out the mirrors, which have since been mothballed. There was never an inden-site to our market, McCallum says. We just didn't have the machines. So now he's like, oh, well, there's a market and nobody's serving this shit as a capitalist, nature, capitalism of horrors of vacuum. This is this is how I'm going to make my fucking fortune.

So he feels like he stumbled upon a great idea. And the way he puts it in that interview with Bloomberg, which lists some of his earlier ideas for how to monetize some mercifuls and a paragraph that is extremely fucking noteworthy. This keys you went to kind of the most important stuff about what he was really planning to do here. Up to that point, Russia had been thinking about unexplored wrecks, hydrothermal vents, and bizzaro sea creatures. Not to mention the many ways a capable sub could be leased out to an oil and gas company

to service undersea wells and oil platforms. What were research institutions to do surveys of sea cucumbers, or to the CIA, NSA, DIA, to do whatever it is that Spooks do on the floor of the ocean? So that's this guy's ethical basis. He's like, yeah, you know, raping the world for the oil and gas industry, discovering sea creatures, spying on people

for the CIA, all equally valid. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh. So funny. Oh, man. Oh. Yeah. Oh. It's so funny. Jesus. Like, this man has the moral center of like a fucking donut.

It's so funny. We did not, we did not lose a paragon of virtue here. I am truly grateful that Bloomberg profile exists because it makes very clear the fact this guy never cared about exploration or expanding the frontiers of human knowledge. He was an adrenaline junkie who liked planes and subs and wanted to become a billionaire doing something that he thought was cool.

He'd been happy helping Exxon fracked the Marianas trend should that had worked out for him. But it just so happens that there was a bigger market for the initially at least in catering to Titanic weirdos. So he started pouring money into building a new deep sea submersible. The Cyclops and then the Cyclops too, you know, he takes these guys down, he tests them out, he gets, starts getting seed capital from Finns and Family. He's putting a shitload of his own money into this to the tune of maybe tens of millions

of dollars. And at first, he can't really get any big investors involved for pretty good reasons. Stockton cannot get to the Titanic, right? And a lot of people are like, well, he probably is never going to get to the Titanic. At present, I think there are four other vehicles on Earth capable of reaching that thing

with people in them. And they're all owned by various governments. The Chinese Zhao long submersible is capable of going down the furthest for a while famously James Cameron had the deep sea challenger, which had proved that a rich maniac could have a submersible constructed for this kind of feat. But the deep sea challenger, it's not the sort of thing, and I don't think any of these are, that you can fit a bunch of customers in, right? Yeah. Like the deep, the way it works, you've got like this kind of superstructure

that's this sort of weird, almost cylindrical shape, right, around it. But the actual thing that a dude is in and that like the camera's in stuff around as far as I can tell is like a sphere because a sphere is good for pressure. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also like by the time that a stock, a stock stock that's working on this, the deep sea challenger is not operational anymore. There was like, it took some damage just like because it's this is tough on a vehicle. And then there's like a car accident while it's being transported. And they're like, well, it's kind of been compromised, you know, we have to kind of retire it.

Yeah. Which is what responsible people do when their deep sea vessel has been damaged. Now, it's interesting. When he's talking to Bloomberg, Stockton presents both the Zhao long and the deep sea challenger as kind of like, this is what he saw as the proof that his dream was achievable. Quote, people used to ask me, how do you think you can do this if nobody else can? I like to point out that the two deepest diving subs on the planet are the Chinese Xiaolong and James Cameron's sub, the DSV Deepsea Challenger,

which in 2012 carried the Titanic director to challenge your deep, the ocean's deepest point and is now retired. They were both built by amateurs who had never built subs before. The sub is not the challenge. The challenge is the business model and logistics. Now, that is an insane thing to say, Andrew.

And if you have a hammer, and if you're an idiot, capitalist who's only in the money. Yeah, fucking tech, bro. No, the problem is monetizing it, building a sub that can go down the depth of Mount Everest is easy. Yeah, that's why you said that.

James Cameron sketched it on a napkin. He just knows how to make terminator movies. It really is also though, like some, that is some, because you know, his goal was not to do what they did. His goal was to do what they did with the cocoa that you were talking about. Yeah, with the fucking, and passengers, multiple, and it's also, he's, everything he says is wrong.

So he's like, they're all built by amateurs. So the Zhao long, which is that Chinese submersible, which can reach as far as 7,000 meters down, was developed by a designer named Zhu Xun Quanen, Q-I-N-A-N, and he is not, I don't think he's designed as submersible before, so I guess that's what he means by like amateur. But he's the professor at the School of Naval Architecture,

Ocean and Civil Engineering of Shanghai Xiao Tong University. That's not an amateur. He's a professor of naval architecture. He seems like an expert. And like there's a whole team of experts who are like people who build things under this for underwater shit, right? Just a dude!

Just in a, like, you know, you can't walk down the street in LA without hitting a professor of naval architecture, right? That's like running into a guy with a fucking podcast. Oh, God. It's such a funny way to be like, they're amateurs. It's also like a Chinese government ministerial, the people handling the actual construction. And it's a serious project by serious people. That's why it works. Right? Yeah.

And likewise, he's being like, well, James Cameron's just this director and he got to make this thing. It's, you know, an amateur. Well, no, Cameron, Cameron says that like he contributed, he was one of the designers. He helped do some of the engineering. I don't know exactly what that means, but he did not just design a ship and have it built. He is working with a company in Australia, an R&D company called Acheron Project, and the construction is headed primarily by the co-designer, a guy named Ron Alim, who is a professional engineer. If you want to know how serious an engineer Ron Alim is, when they're working on this thing that Cameron takes down to the challenger deep, there's

like this kind of foam that they are using as part of like the pressure system that keeps it safe. And it's based on like the initial thing they tried is there was this kind of like nautical foam for pressure vessels that were meant to go down less depth, you know, I think just a couple of thousand meters as opposed to how far the challenger deep is. And they test out this foam that's already in use. And they find out that it can't handle the pressure. And so Ron Alam invents an entirely new kind of foam for this thing, right? New foam, baby.

New foam, baby. Yeah. So yeah, yeah. In 2009, Stockton Rush found Oceangate Inc. with the promise to deliver man's submersible solutions to the private market. That is where we're going to end our story for today, because we have now gotten up to the point where the death sum is about to be made. So yeah, how we feel in today, hands real, how we feel in about this whole tale.

So fun. I mean, I think it is, it's just like exactly. The only reason this guy is an outlier is because most of these like, again, like tech bro libertarian weirdos, like no on some level that what they're saying is bullshit. And like, do not often put their, like again, go all in on their like half baked or wrong ideas the same way.

Like, like the real thing that you're supposed to do as a tech bro is use other people's money to like and use other people's money over and over and over again until you, you know, hit the right lottery ticket and then say it's your money. And take other people like Musk, you know, they just had a fucking rocket blow up, right? Musk was an on that thing, you know. Like he doesn't even, there's this like like, we're talking, there's this whole thing going on right now where like Musk and Zuckerberg are talking about like fighting in a ring. And it's like, that's not gonna, I don't think that's really gonna happen.

It'd be funny if it did, but I don't think it's really gonna happen. But like, those are the kind of things that the tech bros who are a little bit less dumb than Stockton do, where they'll talk about like doing bold and crazy shit, but if there's actually any risk in it, they don't, because they don't want to die, you know? Yeah, and we're getting hurt. Or embarrassed, you know? Yeah. And on some level, I think they, like, yes, they are over, over, over, over confident. But again, the grift is to be over

overconfident with someone else's resources, whatever that is. Yes. Yes. And like, him not understanding that is the fundamental, like he's the dumb rich boy that like these guys exploit. Yeah. And it's like, to a degree, I don't know, maybe you can say that makes Stockton slightly more in some ways more respectable because one thing you can't say about him, like he did put his money where his mouth was, you know, that is undeniable. I think that's because he was just even more unhinged than a lot of these people, maybe because he grew up even richer than them, like he's not as rich as like Bezos or Branson or Musk now, but I think he was as a kid. He had the money. So maybe he just like never had any kind of grounding as a person. I don't know,

though. I think it's pretty clear. There's a level of money that completely rots your brain. Yeah. And this guy had it for sure. Yeah. No denying that. So Andrew, you got anything to plug? Oh, yeah. You know, as I'm on strike, my podcast Yozus racist is continuing, but we also have a

premium show you can subscribe to at suboptimalpods.com. We just did a very fun watch along with big trouble in little China, where I get dog-don relentlessly. So if you found me an irritating, send us, I believe, eight bucks a month and you have access to this thing. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. So yeah, Yo, Yo is this racist, check it out.

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