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

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Robert is joined again by Andrew Ti to continue to discuss Oceangate CEO, Stockton Rush.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a podcast that takes you inside undercover investigations. In the second season, we've got an alphabet soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. 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? No, no, no. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm's deal. Alphabet Boys, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm deal. Alpha Bet Boys.

On the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually 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.

Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Last year, Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian oligarchs suddenly started dying, more than a dozen in the space of nine months. Many of their deaths are suspicious with links to the Kremlin. In this new investigative series with me, Jake Hanrahann, we're asking the question, who's killing Russia's billionaires? This is Sad Olegark. Listen to Sad Olegark on the IHART radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

What's still at the bottom of the ocean my worst Submersible in history There we go. That was that was that was nice. Huh? That was good respectful of I mean Sure It's the most submerged Submersible in history Look in terms of being submerged. it did its job with a plum.

Yeah. You know, it is under the fucking water as hell. So none of these other submersibles lasted that, except for maybe the curse. Yeah. But it's right there. It's like a top 20 submersible in terms of how fucking underwater it is.

Staying, yeah, it is super under the goddamn water. Oh, Andrew, how are we doing on this glorious week? Uh, you, you, you having a good one? Enjoying the Monday. You know, good, uh, better than some folks. Let's just say, um, I guess worse than some other folks. Better than some folks. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm feeling better than both submersible, uh, uh, forced and some other folks. Better than some folks. Yeah. Yeah. For the middle. Yeah, I'm feeling better than both submersible, rich people who love submersibles. And I'm feeling better than many members of the Russian government. Yeah, exactly. We've had a little break for there to be a mutiny. I'm very happy there was a mutiny in Russia, you know, outside of a variety of geopolitical reasons, primarily because like how long has it been since we've had a

mutiny? Like in the news, like a real ass mutiny that just doesn't happen often anymore. Listen, maybe it's in me. Russian, Russian revolutions, Robert Barons, the 19th century into the 20th century's back baby. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. The Titanic is killing people again. It's all coming back history never changes.

Beautiful, beautiful. All we need now is for European powers to get us into a disastrous conflict and forget that machine guns exist. We're not going to have everything off one by one. It's gonna go in that direction. Yeah. So speaking of easily predictable disasters with a high body count, let's return to the story of Stockton Rush.

Yeah, good shit. So in 2009, our boy Stockton founded Ocean Gate Incorporated, which is both the funniest name he could have possibly picked for a company that was about to become infamous for killing a bunch of rich people. Yeah, the goal, it is quite a choice, huh? Like, yeah, did you not think about the only things that have been explained? Is there explanation for why? Yeah. My guess is because like, you know, it's your gateway to the ocean and to deep sea exploration, but you are around in the 90s, Stockton. Like, you know what we used that word before.

I mean, the full name of the company should be Oceangate, Princesses, Gate, like a door, not like that kind of gate. Never mind, it's going to be fun. No, no, no, no, no. And Princesses. Not like a watergate thing. Yeah, I would have called it, yeah, absolutely safe submersibles incorporated, but he didn't. So the goal of the company was to deliver

manned submersible solutions to the private market. Now, because Stockton did not yet know how to design submarines or submersibles, we are using the word interchangeably as regular people, but they are two different things, right? And submersible needs a bigger boat that takes it around to places. A submarine is a boat in and of itself.

I think that's more or less accurate. So since he didn't really know how to make either subs or submersibles, he and his partner bought two functional subs and started kind of like hacking them. Which makes sense, right? Their goal was like to have, you know, kind of figure out the basics

so that they could eventually build a multi-person submersible that can handle 4,000 meters of depth. Yeah. So they started... Yeah, he's a kid, he's kid bashing. He's kid bashing his way to James Cameron's status. That's the goal.

They started with a pair of conventional submersibles, the cyclops and the cyclops too. But the cyclops is the cyclops too. But the cyclops is the cyclop eye. I don't know what the plural of cyclops is would be. But the two cyclops submarines couldn't handle the trip that he wanted to make down to where the Titanic is. But having those early submersibles allowed Rush to kind of start building a business. Now, this was not like a money business. Rich people don't have to make businesses that make money, as we all learned from Uber. It's okay to be in continually lighting piles of money on fire, as long as you're establishing your place in the market.

He's playing with basically Netflix. I may have, yes, Netflix, most of of the company is this outside of Apple in like the modern tech industry. Yeah. Jesus Christ, I know. It's it's it's pretty all. So his attitude ocean gate. It would be really funny if Netflix was like, you know what, we're going to go down

to the Titanic now. Everyone who pays $7.99 a month gets a seat in our giant death sub. But no, so his basic idea is like, I'm gonna start taking just rich people on dives, not to the Titanic, but to other, you know, less deep shipwrecks. And that'll get, you know, that'll start building buzz, right? That's kind of a big part of his plan was like getting famous people, taking them down there, trusting that the majesty of the sea and being in a submersible would like make them evangelists

for the brand. And that would allow him to get kind of the investment dollars eventually that he needed to move on with his more ambitious plan the titan a submersible made with all the hubris of the Titanic and their size footprint of a Chevy suburban it's awesome how he was his business plan was like cloud is better than physics yeah well because it's one of those things like people are inherently like intense experiences have a mind altering, especially like ones where you're at risk of dying,

have a kind of mind altering effect. Like if you take somebody to an intense place and they feel like they might die the whole time and then they don't, they get kind of a high, you know? Like that's why war works the way that it does in a lot of cases. Um, so that was, I think that was kind of the idea is like these people would like walk away, just kind of like unable to stop talking about this thing, which is why it's really interesting. He seems to have had a huge base of contacts. There's. Since this all went pear-shaped, a bunch of different famous people have been like, oh yeah, like we were talking

about going out, he offered us a ride. And it's interesting to me that given how unknown he was kind of before the sub went down relatively speaking, how well connected he is. And I think it was because of this, because he was kind of building this this undersea influencer network of like famous people and rich people who just really like to doing this. Not a bad plan at least in terms of like building his company. So the problem with the plan was that he wanted to make this big submersible with space for a larger crew than basically any of the, any of the like the deep water diving vessels had had previously.

You know, you'd have those Russian subs and stuff that could carry a crew. But when you're looking at like, you know, the different national like deep water exploration vessels or like James Cameron's vessel, they were made for like generally one person. And they usually had like the actual, the pressure barrier, which is like the part of the submersible that was meant to actually protect the human being, was usually made out of like titanium

or some sort of special steel, which is what you'd expect. This is the reliable, safe way to do it. And Russ shows not to do the reliable, safe way to do it. And Russ shows not to do the reliable, safe way to do it. Basically, after like this, I think the last big submersible disaster was in like the early 70s. It was these guys who were like laying deep water cable off the coast of Ireland.

And then something went wrong and they got stuck 1500 feet down. They both got rescued. It was like a real, they had like 12 minutes of air left when they got saved. So it was a fucking close thing. Yeah, it sounded like a nightmare, but it was one of those, like, it was survivable because the pressure barrier didn't fail, right? Like, everything else went wrong, but like, they did not explode. And you can survive most things aside from exploding. Yeah. Um, for a while at least. So the industry, I say industry, it's more of like a subculture of all of the, uh, the kind of weird, underseekers.

I think James Cameron calls it a community. Yeah. A community. Yeah. I mean, they kind of the subculture of all subcultures, the subs. Yeah, yeah, it's the subculture. So the literal subculture built a bunch of safety rules about like, here is how you make a pressure barrier. These are the different like things you want to make sure your vessel has. And they kind of voluntarily adopted these standards. And it worked really well because nobody died.

Like in the last, like since everyone listening to this podcast basically has been alive, no one has died doing these kind of like crazy deep water dives. Which is wild when you think about what they're doing. Right. You know, that they're going to a place less explored than the fucking moon. And that it was so safe.

But Stockton rushes like, I'm going to ignore all of the things that they've been doing. I'm going to ignore like all of the requirements they have for these vessels. And instead, I'm gonna make this motherfucker out of carbon-ass fiber. Now, carbon fiber, it's one of those, I, you remember when it was special

when like we would hear about like this amazing space aids carbon fiber and all the, like obviously it's got a lot of use, it's great material for certain things. For over the water things, pretty good. For over things, not in the water, maybe. Not under the water, maybe. Might make a great boat, I don't know. I'm not a boat maker.

That's true, yeah. But yeah, so Stockton was kind of obsessed with the fact that carbonify were has three times the strength to buoyancy ratio of titanium, which he brought up constantly. People who were, you know, didn't think this was a good idea would be like, yeah, but it like has terrible compressive strength.

Like if you, it's great if you're trying to like push it certain ways, but if you're trying to push it the way that pressure works underwater, it's a bad thing. It's also when like metal, the different metals they used for these things have the ability to kind of bend and flex to an extent, whereas carbon fiber is super strong, but when it breaks, it just, it breaks real bad, you know? Yeah. It's a pretty good metaphor for all tech stuff that it just, it breaks real bad. You know? Yeah. It's a pretty good metaphor for all tech stuff

that it's like a space age fiber, the space age material, it works really well at one thing and catastrophically bad and everything else. And it's, you know, it's also a great tech industry kind of metaphor because the defining thing about the defining like cultural aspect of big tech is its inability to leave well enough alone, right? You can't just be like, oh, hey, subway systems can work really well and a lot of the most livable cities in the world have public transit.

You have to be like, no, we're going to dig undersea hole or underwater holes and we're going to try to testless under them. And they'll have no fire escapes. And likewise, it kinda seems like, at least from the reading I've done, it kinda seems like this submersible industry, there wasn't any room to really like disrupt or innovate. Like cameras get a little better, batteries get a little better. But the basics of the thing that goes underwater and keeps you alive is always gonna be the same.

It's a big metal thing. Like a big metal sphere. I can beat titanium is listen, I mean, the whole tech industry is just like the ultimate participation trophy. All these bozos coming up with ideas that already exist and no one has like no one has ever told them their ideas are wrong or bad and then they get to make them and you know and bankrupt existing people. Yeah, and then Uber lights tens of billions of dollars on fire. Yeah, he's kind of doing that. He's just, he's not doing this.

I mean, there's a couple of the reasons it doesn't get into, but yeah. Carbon fiber, bad idea for this sort of boat. Now, people had tried to use it before for submersibles. In the early 2000s, Richard Branson had funded an explorer named Steve Fossett who wanted to make like an airplane-shaped carbon fiber submarine that could basically fly to the bottom of the challenge. I'm sorry.

And back up. Every name in this story is somehow funny. Well, Fossett's really, because F faucet was like a legitimate explorer. He was also like known as this guy who repeatedly nearly died and like would cost various governments to shitload of money, rescuing him. And then he'd be like, well, I'm not, I'm not paying for that. And get himself and do another disaster. You know, he died in the mysterious play.

You want out of your thing. That's, that's the last thing. Yeah, you might not take his advice on this. And he never got to build it because he was involved in a mysterious plane crash that became the most expensive rescue effort in modern history. I guess up until this sub went down. This is a lot of time. We got to stop pig taxes because they just go to these poses once again. Exactly. Exactly.

So that they can fly their planes into the sides of canyons. Oh, I'm not. So anyway, yeah, as kind of he starts moving along and building this and testing it out and shorter dives, various people within the industry, including like literally James Cameron start reaching out and being like, hey, I don't know about this, feels like it might be not the best idea ever, and rush ignores them. He told Smithsonian Magazine,

there hasn't been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It's obscenely safe because they have all these regulations, but it also has an innovated or grown because they have all these regulations. Obscindly safe. It's too safe. It makes me sick.

No one's killed a sub-full of people in decades. He did. He saw his opening and went for it. It's so funny that every quote from him is just him doing like the jack-off motion at the idea of safety regulations. Yes. I'm just imagining him like coming out and like a black turtle neck like Steve Jobs and being like, and now for

something insanely great, a boat that kills a shitload of people. What if we got more people to die at the Titanic wreck? It's all about scale, Robert. It's all fighting the scale. It's all about scale, Robert. It's all about fighting the scale. So, instead of basically, instead of doing the things that engineers had been doing for decades to make this stuff safe, he invented an entirely new kind of safety device. It was called, he called it an acoustic monitoring system, which could detect the sound of micro buckling before it, it being the carbon fiber fails. He called it an acoustic monitoring system, which could detect the sound of microbuckling

before it, it being the carbon fiber fails. Now, nothing like this had ever been used on a submersible. It was untested technology. And again, people who like worked with him, people who knew what he was doing warned him, like, hey, it kind of seems like this is the kind of thing that will only give you a warning right before you die. Like, it'll let you know, like, and that's what happened, like a minute before they all died.

It said, hey, the structure's failing, so they tried to ascend and then it imploded. It's, it's so wild that his big safety plan was a robot that goes, damn, that's just sounds crazy. Yeah. It's like the bad idea, Bob. Yeah. Um, so he gets this fucking carbon fiber hole made, he, he, he, he, he rush orders it too. It's like a two week deal. Um, it's a five inch thick hole made by a specialist and assembled into a submersible with a seven inch port hole, um, put on by Oceangate.

One of the things he does is he attaches carbon fiber to titanium, the end cap of this thing with the port hole is titanium. People didn't do that because titanium and carbon fiber went put together and put under sea water, corrode in specific ways, then it would be bad. But he was like, fuck it, I don't think that'll happen. Like I haven't found a reason why he thought this would be okay. He seems to have just been like, I don't think that'll happen. Like I haven't found a reason why he thought this would be okay.

He seems to have just been like, I don't think it'll be a problem. I thought I saw something where he was like, everyone says you can't do it. So that's, he's like, I was about to, and there we did it. It is sort of shocking how much the engineering of this thing is just a Pringles can.

It's like really wild. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's only, basically everyone says, as everyone points out, there's only really two shapes, something like this could be made. The ideal one is a sphere, or you make the less ideal shape, Pringles can, as you call it.

He goes with Pringles can. And I want to play this clip of him, because it really, it makes, it gives you an idea of how fucking arrogant this guy was. You remember as an innovator. I think it was General MacArthur said, you're remembered for the rules you break. And I've broken some rules to make this.

I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fiber and titanium, there's a rule you don't do that well. I did. It's a. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha the guy who, the guy who attempted to invade North Korea and then got his ass kicked. Like Douglas MacArthur, just like, yeah, he got, he got a lot of 19 year olds killed. I feel like I could too. Good call, man. I mean, good call.

It is, it is like, honestly crazy how much every single thing he says is wrong. It's like shocking. It's like, if we learned that he was a time traveler sent back from whatever, he got vaporized and that sent him to the future and then he figured out how to wait to send himself back. And his only goal was to save the funniest possible thing about his death. It's crazy. Now I'm, I'm trying not to like, I'm trying to like really ride the middle of the, of the not being too crude about this line. But now I'm thinking about like maybe stocked and rush came from the future. SkyNet and over and like the billionaires on this sub were all the guys who invested on the

ground floor of that and he's like look the terminator thing that created too much of a mess we don't want a big shoot out with the LAPD I got to find a quieter way to stop SkyNet from getting off the ground like invite Miles Dyson to go underwater with you. He's a big Titanic head. That is a thing that really like Terator 2 gets wrong is like how easy it is to kill billionaires simply by like you don't need guns or tech people or billionaires just like appeal to their idiot ego. They'll fucking kill themselves. It's great. It is funny that the least realistic part of the movie Terminator 2 is not like the time travel

or the robots with living skin, but the fact that when Miles Dyson was told, like when this tech entrepreneur was told, your product will kill the world. He was like, well, time for me to die stopping it. Instead of being like, oh, I better do another round of VC funding. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. So when they finished building this, Harris stupid key. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. When it was done, they first did an unmanned test up to,

I think around 10,000 feet with this thing. And then as soon as like it didn't explode, Stockton took it down alone, past 10,000 feet. And against all expert advice, the experts were like, she probably do it more than once before you put anyone in it, right? Like human life is generally, oh, you don't think it's precious. Okay, it's fine. That's whatever. You know, and at this point, honestly, that's fine.

Like if this had remained a crazy man who wanted to build his own terrible submarine and he had died alone exploring the bottom of, that would be romantic. People would be writing songs about him, you know? The lone maniac who just loved the ocean so much and didn't really understand carbon fiber enough. But of course, his plan is again,

to sell tickets on this thing. Now, there were some signs in his maiden voyage that this thing was not safe. It stalled out at like 10,000 feet below the surface for a while for reasons they couldn't determine. And then it lost contact for like a couple of hours with the team on the boat. And he didn't notice he was like so excited piloting it that he didn't even realize he'd lost contact for a while. And I'm gonna read a quote from Smithsonian here. He had chosen to pilot Titan alone

in case anything went unexpectedly wrong, he said. But he also wanted to be only the second person to travel solo to at least that depth. The other being James Cameron, who in 2012 took an Australian built sub into the Mariana Trench reaching challenger deep, the ocean's deepest point, touching down at close to 36,000 feet. That's a nice club to be a part of, Rush says. And that that kind of makes it clear, he doesn't, he's not a scientist. He wants famous explorer, right? He's not saying, I want to test this, I want to do this, he's saying,

I want my name on a list, right? I want to check off the box on the famous explorer list. That is just kind of... I think that's been hard is how much of this conversation this last couple days has been, like, these people were explorers. And it's like, they really weren't weren't like they were not figuring anything out. Yeah. Like look guys aside from very niche facts about how boats under water decompose,

there's nothing left we're going to learn about the Titanic. It's we did it. We did it. Like we've done a lot of time spent a lot of time looking at that dead boat. And yeah, it's like the, it's just, it's clout, it's all clout seeking. And yeah, that's kind of the, that's like why they went with, that's why he went with, you know, this less safe shape is because he wanted to be able to take people with him so that they could then brag

about this stuff. He just wanted to make sure he was first. He was also the reason why ultimately, he's making this out of carbon fiber is because that will make it light and that will make it cheaper than the other methods of making submersibles. And that means that it'll be like a big, heavy titanium

or metal diving vessel, it takes a big boat to bring it around because it's so heavy. Whereas he thought this thing, you could take it around on smaller boats. You could make a bunch of them and you could have them operating for a lot less money. And a fast company review. I just wanted to say, you got to kill people with scale. That's the key that he found. Yeah, exactly. We got to be able to get a bunch of these out. It's like Uber's long-term

plan was to get profitable by making autonomous cars and forcing out drivers. And his plan is to flood the ocean with these dangerous submersibles so that he can sell them to a bunch of people. The long-term, this is what he told Fast Company. The long-term value is in the commercial side. Adventure tourism is a way to monetize the process of proving the technology. Like, that's, and again, his plan is still, I want to sell this to the oil and gas industry. I want to sell this shit to the CIA. Like, his plan is to make money in extractive industries and like the defense industry. He's just trying to subsidize that by getting rich people to go down and look at the Titanic. Technical problems continue to plague the craft between that and bad weather.

It missed several dive windows. In subsequent interviews, Rush tended to ignore this period of time, where it was repeatedly kind of like failing to make depth. They're having to return because something would go wrong. But there were people within Oceangate who worried he was being reckless. From the very first dive the Titan did, people inside could hear crackling from the carbon fiber body. Now, one of the industry folks,

like a sub-maker that he brought with him was like, that is the sound of your sub-failing. Like, this is a serious problem. I can tell you exactly where it's compromised. Like, no. This has to be dealt with. Otherwise, you can't take people on this boat. Jesus. But Stockton tended to kind of brush this off as like a quirk of the not know the rule.

Do they not know the rule, though, Robert? What's the rule, Sophie? Do they not know the rule? The rule is snap crack crackle, pop. Yeah, yeah. And so this guy, it's in 2019 that this happened. This guy, Carl Stanley, who's like, runs an exploration company,

goes with him on a 12,000-foot dive. And it's like, yeah, that's part of the whole breaking down, bro. And rushes like, no, no, no, it's fine. We've been listening to the whole breakdown and it's doing it less now. So we feel like it's pretty good. And the sky's like, I don't know,

I don't think you should take, you can't take customers on this thing yet. Like if you think it's safe, that's great, but you should wait until you've done like 50 deep water dives before you decide that this thing is safe. And he brings up, he points out, because Russia's comment to that is like, will you just pick a random number?

There's no reason 50 is safer than three or four, which first off, that's very dumb. But second, this Stanley is like, well, with skydiving, 50 is the number that you have to hit to reach your like B license. So we should probably, you know, seek to be at least as safe as the skydiving industry. Oh my God. And it rushes just like now that's you just have to take the number out of that.

You're just a physical significant man. Yeah. Yeah. It's like these people that claim to be these like numerate hard science, like whatever. It's just like, uh, 350, whatever. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about, man? Yeah, it's a, anyway. So one of his employees takes action in 2018,

a guy named David Lockridge, who is a, he's a submersible pilot who had been hired to be the Oceangate Director of Marine Operations. That meant the safety of the crew and customers was legally his business. And he was like, he takes a look at this thing and is like, what is that?

And I'm responsible for not killing people. And this thing is a death trap. I have some problems with this. Right? Like, he responds, simply, Lockridge is like one of two people in this entire story who does their fucking job, right? So they had built a one-third scale model of the Titan

in order to like do, you know, pressure tests and stuff outside of, you know, the deep ocean. And those tests had shown that consistent, constant pressure cycling weakened the carbon fiber over time that it degraded, pretty rapidly. Lockbridge also found flaws in the visible carbon in samples for the Titan. He was like, we hit this was not made well enough and it degraded very quickly over time. So he wanted the company to perform more extensive tests to see if the Titan had already been

compromised. Stockton refused these tests. He claimed, quote, no scan of the whole their bond line could be done because the whole was too thick and the equipment to test it didn't exist. He was like, this thing is so well made, we can't even test if it's, if it's safe. Bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, you can't even test this shit, bro. Yeah, it's too thick, man.

It's too thick, too thick to, but also he's at the same time, he's like, it's safe because we're always monitoring to see if there's fractures. And it's like, well, but what, both of those things can't be true, stocked. You can't be monitoring the whole for problems and unable to monitor the whole for problems. But Lockridge, so Lockridge, I think notices this and he keeps digging, he finds other problems. For one thing, he'd always been concerned about the viewport, which people would note seemed like it flexed at depth a lot more than it ought to be flexing.

And so he was like, what is this thing rated for? And he like digs into it and he finds out that the viewport is rated for 1,300 meters. They're going down to like 4,000 meters. So he's like, well, that seems like a real problem. And Stockton's general line is, oh, 1,300, they just put like that number on there. It can actually handle a lot more. It's all, there's not any reason why he thinks it can handle more.

He keeps saying engineering, what he means, because I fucking felt like it. It's so bizarre. Yeah, because I fucking felt like it. It's so bizarre. Yeah, because I fucking felt like it. What do I get? Yeah, it's it's pretty good. But you know what can withstand up to 4,000 meters of pressure. The food boxes that blue apron ships out every single one of them guaranteed to survive the pressures of the deep. And in fact, if you want to go see the Titanic yourself, you can't use this sub anymore, but what you can do is dive into the Atlantic with a box of blue apron food.

And it'll keep you safe. You will not die if you leap alone into the frigid North Sea with a, with a box of blue apron, vegetables. Keep you alive, Sophie. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. How much time do you spend on other people every week? And how much time do you spend on yourself, particularly taking care of your mental health?

How do you balance the two? It's easy to get caught up in what the world needs from you and never take a moment to think about what you need from yourself. But when we spend all of our time giving, it can leave us feeling stretched thin and burnt out. Therapy can give people the tools to find more balance in their life,

so they can keep supporting others without leaving themselves behind. If you're thinking of starting therapy, you might wanna give better help a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire and get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Find more balance with BetterHelp.

Visit BetterHelp.com slash behind today to get 10% off of your first month. That's BetterHELP dot com slash behind. Again, that's better help dot com slash behind for 10% off your first month starting today. 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 the 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, 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 bleed-eat-edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We've spent 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.

your favorite shows. We're back. So this guy, David Lockridge, finds a bunch of shit that's a problem. In addition to the port hole not being rated for depth and the fucking carbon fiber being shit, he also finds out that there's hazardous flammable materials inside the vessel that the customers are not being informed about. Like, hey, you can all burn to death inside a carbon fiber tomb is a problem. And they just didn't tell people.

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

here are all of the defects in this process. Here are all of your... You really could die in a lot of ways that you are not even thinking of burning to death in that tube under the ocean is the most like post-modern way to die, I feel. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, find the tech bros innovating, disrupting the ocean enough that people burn to death and cite it. But truly, yeah. Yeah. So, lockrage brings all of this to Stockton. And according to lockrage, Stockton grows enraged and then fires lockrage. So lockrage, ocean gate sues lockrage for disclosing confidential information.

And he counters sues and claims like, well, I'm a whistleblower because I think he's going to get people killed. Now, none of this becomes major news. While people are writing articles about their Ocean Gates first successful Titanic drops, like this is all available. Again, within like 12 hours of the boat going missing, this winds up in news stories.

Anyone could have found this. And by the way, like billionaires, especially billionaires with their own companies, tend to have like crews of people who like look up shit or them, you know, who make sure that vet trips that they're doing, vet people they're working with. They have like intelligence wings,

they tend to hire people for this. They could have found this too. Like nobody was looking for this shit, but it was not hard to find. So two months after Lockridge filed this suit, Oceangate has another potential PR disaster on its hand. Because around 40 leading figures in the industry, including deep sea explorers and oceanographers, right and open letter to Stockton in which they warned that his experimental craft is unsafe

for passengers. Their primary issue here was that he had chosen not to get his submersible rated for 4,000 meters of depth under the pH V.O. or pressure vessels for human occupancy standards. This was not something he had to do again. He's not like required to do this. The boats registered in like Canada, he's in international waters. There's not really a way to stop rich people from paying to build subs like this and taking them out in the ocean, you know. If Canada made a law against it subs like this and taking them out in the ocean. If Canada made a log and said he would have registered his boat in the Caribbean or some ship, right?

It's boats. You can't stop rich people from doing what they want on their stupid boats. Up to and including needing to be rescued by a public entity, this is the perfect libertarian story. This is as libertarian as this should get. Why they always take to the sea and it always goes so badly. There were a lot of other issues that people, or a lot of other people who brought up issues. One of the guys who kind of like points out some potential risks kind of directly to Stockton is a guy named Rob McCallum.

And McCallum is kind of a dude in the industry and he is in direct contact with Stockton. Stockton's trying to get him to like get on this boat and be like, hey man, don't you want to like, don't you want to, you know, go see the Titanic with me? And this guy responds like, I think you're potentially placing yourself in your clients in a dangerous dynamic. And you're raised to the Titanic, you're mirroring that famous cat ride. She is unsinkable. And stocked in response, we have heard the baseless cries of you are going to kill someone way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult. I mean, you can't make someone learn. Like if he's going to respond to, no, you really can.

So many people have been telling me, I'm going to kill someone that I've insulted. Like you cannot fix that. That is like billionaire brainworms that cannot go in. Yeah. When I was in a little kid and I was in the Boy Scouts, we had this one camp out and I was one of it at this point. I was 14, so I was one of the older boys and we had a couple of the younger boys that we were trying to teach the basics of camping and stuff to. It's nighttime everyone's sitting around their fires, cooking food, and they have this

nice cooler that one of their dads had brought out with them. And they've got it wedged up right next to the fire and they're sitting on it like it's a chair. And as I'm doing a walk through, I'm like, hey, that's kind of a bad idea guys. It's pretty close to the fire. It might catch on fire, get melted or something. It looks expensive. And like one of the kids just looks at me like I'm an idiot. And it's like it can't catch on fire. It's got ice in it.

So we just like, we go over to like the adult who's running things and he's like, just let it happen. You know, like they'll learn a lesson. And I wish, I feel like if that had happened to Stockton as a younger man, maybe all of those people would still be alive. One melted cooler could have saved a lot of lives. Yeah, it is like, yeah. Just face a consequence once or twice.

Minimum, please. Yeah, yeah, learn that when other people give you warnings, they should be heated sometimes. Learn that maybe your instincts don't always take you in the right directions. He does not ever learn this lesson because he's he's born super rich. So all of these warnings were super correct. And this gets proved in 2020. And I'm going to quote from a summary published by MSN live right now. Quote, in 2020, the CEO told GeekWire the whole of the submarine was showing signs of cyclic fatigue, one of the same technical issues Mr. Lockridge allegedly warned about as the

company continued to test the craft, including with a 4,000 meter deep dive in the Bahamas. As a result, the company temporarily downgraded the Titanic's submarines' whole depth rating to 3,000 meters, a thousand less than the Titanic's depth, according to TechCrunch. So they have this problem. They have like recognized the cyclic fatigue and they decrease the depth rating while they get material to rebuild the hub, the hovers they do in 2021. Now the fact that they had to rebuild the whole that quickly is kind of worrisome. But what's extra worrisome is that they also cut costs on this shit.

So yeah. After the Titan imploded, travel weekly editor and chief Arnie Weisman wrote that he had been due to take a trip to the Titanic that year, and he'd known stocked in a while and liked him. He'd gone out with him a couple of times. But he expressed that like they'd been talking one day and Rush had told him, quote, he had gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan and a big discount from Boeing because it was way past its shelf life for use and airplanes. Hell yeah.

And so he tells this to the guy he's trying to convince to come down with him and Arnie's like, that seems like a really bad idea. Like, it seems really dangerous that you're using expired carbon fiber and Stockton's response is like, nah man, they set the shelf light dates on those like way earlier than they ought to be. It's actually like, it's the argument I make when I take expired glycadine that like a friend of mine has an a medicine cabinet and they're like, oh, we should just throw that out. I'm like, no, man, this stuff's still good. This is a he's as cavalier with multiple people's bill multiple billionaires lives

as I am with like, is this takeout still cool? Like, yeah, it's a right spin in the fridge too long. Like, as the fuck you can, right spin in the fridge too long? It is so wild, and he just admits this to someone he's trying to talk into getting on his boat. Yeah, you know what's extra cool? I got a deal on this carbon fiber because they say it's not safe for airplanes anymore.

Let's go under the sea with it. I am not getting in your boat if you're saying that. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's breaking about cheaping out on your fucking submersible is so wild. It's so wild. It's funny too, because like a big touchstone with this story is obviously Jurassic Park, which is the tale of a, you know, insane, insane rich man killing a bunch of people killed through heurus. At least the book, Hammond, is a bad, very much a bad guy in the book. But I do, at least he's like smart enough to brag that they spared no expense.

Like they cut corners everywhere in Jurassic Park, but like he doesn't say that. He's not like me, like, you know, we made, uh, we made all these T-Rex enclosures that are turkey wire, lot cheaper than the stuff that these experts said I needed to use. Yeah. I just, I just, I wish is that every Silicon Valley Titan of industry has the, like, you know, has the self belief to live their lives according to what they really believed the way that Stockton rushed it. I think he is a hero and a model for everyone of those guys. Yeah, I think he, I agree with you entirely. And I think this is why I've heard that they're remaking doing like a TV show version of Jurassic Park

that's based on the book. And I actually think we're ready for that because in the actual book, Hammond, rather than being a sweet grandfather, is a psychotic tech entrepreneur who gets brutally murdered by one of his own dinosaurs. And maybe we need that right now. We may in fact need to that version of Jurassic Park war. Yeah. Um, fictionally, yeah. So the, the weirdest thing about what I just told you about him getting cut right carbon fiber for his death stub is that he may have lied about that,

which is this wild thing to lie about. Um, it's hard to say, but like journalists reached out to Boeing to be like, are you guys selling discount carbon fiber to the deaths of guy? And Boeing was like, we have no record of any kind of sale of this sort to Ocean Gator to stock in rush. Now, Boeing is very like possibly a liar in this situation. I'm not like, it's Boeing. I have no need to defend them.

But also, stocked in rush would be the kind of guy. I'm not like there it's Boeing I have no no need to defend them, but also like I Stockton rush would be the kind of guy I find it equally likely that he'd sheeped out on life-saving parts or that he actually bought better stuff and light about getting a deal on them to try to impress some guy Like either of those things is possible those things is possible. There's no way to know. No, no. Yeah, so many possibilities. It feels like there's also something like, he seems like the guy who doesn't actually

know where his shit is sourced from. Someone just told him a place and like basically Boeing and like fucking fight out. Who knows? Yeah, yeah, who knows. And it is also, I should say, this is also part of a pretty fun pattern for him because Stockton had a history of bragging in his interviews. You know, he had he would he would take people on and they would see like Oh, there's a log attack controller as like piloting this thing and like the interior lights are just like shit You bought from camper world seems kind of janky for a submarine that you're expecting to keep you alive at like 12 or

13,000 feet below, you know, the surface. And Stockton to be like, well, yeah, you know, we, you know, this is like a rough and tumble outfit. We had to kind of hack, you know, certain shit. But like, when it comes to the stuff that really matters, when it comes to the pressure barrier, that is the best stuff available, you know, not only is carbon fiber space age material, but we designed the whole pressure barrier with help from NASA and from Boeing and from the University of Washington. You would bring up those three names every single time, like somebody pointed out that it was janky.

And since all those people died, journalists reached out to Boeing, and Boeing was like, we didn't have shit to do. I don't know what he's talking about. We didn't help this guy with anything. Like, we have no idea what you're commenting on. I have not seen NASA answer those, like to that yet,

I haven't seen like any sort of response from them as to whether or not they had any role in this. CBS notes quote, in a statement, the University of Washington said it's applied physics laboratory provided engineering services to the company in rush from 2013 to 2020, but on a different submersible. The one they helped with was the Cyclops and at that point was steel hold and only meant for shallow dot.

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

Yeah. I think that's what he's doing. So it is, I know you said a moratorium on 40k commentary, but it is shocking how much this is just an ork mech that we're talking about. It is. Hey, if this was an ork mech, it would have made it down there, right?

Because all of these guys believed in this stupid thing, you know, that would have kept it safe. Yeah. He's a, he's a, R p to the number one war boy. Yeah, he. I, people always want us to do like a war hammer episode, which I won't do because there are only like 30 people who appreciate war hammer enough for that to happen. But you didn't think I would be one of those. No, no, no, no, I'm proud.

That was proper use of a warboy. I there. There are there. Oh, yeah, I think from the old Armageddon campaign, Orch and Medis actually did build a work submarine. There was a during the Armageddon games. There was like even a little model that some people have together for.

There you go. Good stuff. Yeah. Orchimedes, better subdesign. It's been the sky. It's been sucked in the rush. A lot more concerned with safety. Yeah.

Jesus. Okay. All right. Sorry. Sorry for that. So at this point, I want to get to the thing that I've been most excited to show you because I found an ad that Ocean Safe was using to sell this thing and it is bug fun. I am so excited for you to see this fucking thing. We're gonna play several clips But here's how the here's how it starts expedition

It offers you the once in a lifetime opportunity to be especially trained crew members safely diving to the Titanic wreckage site. Get ready for what Jules Verne could only imagine, a 12,500-foot journey to the bottom of the sea. So you see, they start right off with like, it's safe. This is a safe journey. It's a safe journey that Jules Verne would be jealous about. Jules Verne, who famously wrote about safe submarine jazz. Yeah, seriously. I know billionaires, again, just have brainworms, but anytime you're paid, the fact that they call

these people crew members or whatever, like anytime you have to pay money to ostensibly do a job, you should realize you're being scammed. Yeah, it does have a little bit of that like going to a, yeah, I don't know exactly where to draw the line here, but it does have a little bit of that like, no, we call our, at this restaurant, we call our customers guests or whatever. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it is, I just want to play the next clip from this because the kind of, the different, by kind of paying attention to the verbiage he uses here, you get two things, which is that like, he's really obsessed with making sure people think this is safe and he's really obsessed with making sure that they don't consider themselves tourists, right? Like, he, there's, we'll play some more from that, but like, there's a couple of points where he like, really emphasizes, we'll play some more from that, but like, there's a couple of points where he like, really emphasizes this is not tourism. Now, by the time this video was published

like two months before the sub kills everybody. So at that point, Oceangate has done two different dives, to successful dives to see the Titanic. And each time they're doing this, I think they're going down more than once, right? They have a boat and it's got like a number of people on it and they do is, you know, a couple of trips. It's included me exactly how many times a sub reach the bottom, but they brought a few different groups of people down there, which meant that they had some

customer testimonials to play, which gives this thing kind of like the flavor of like a TV info commercial for, I don't know, like a shop-backed like Sophie played again. Other trip like this, fewer people have been to Titanic and you're going to space. It's tougher to go to the bottom of the ocean than it is to the far side of the moon. So we saw things that maybe human highs have never seen before. This is like some global cop shit. This is what's playing on the TV during Robocop.

This is a company that exists in Robocop and every week they do get people killed, but it's not a problem in the Robocop. The second guy you hear in that, the dude like talking about how, you know, you could see something no humans ever seen is a former astronaut named Scott Perisinski. Scott was in NASA for 17 years. He's the first person to fly in space and to summit Mount Everest. Now, I'm not accusing Dr. Perisinski of any illegal or an ethical behavior, but he is the major selling point of this video, right? He is on this more than basically anybody else. He's constantly there to like let his job is to both let potential customers know number one. If you do this, you'll be an explorer like me, the cool astronaut guy. And number two, I think this is a good

idea as an astronaut. This seems like a safe thing to me. I guess I am accusing him of something that is unethical. I mean, in a 2000, I just don't know. He's probably the best, most charitable version of this. He's like, what, how bad could it be? It is, I think you're right. I don't think he maybe knew, but also I think he, he is a doctor in an astronaut. Of course, you're not. And like, guys who wrote for business insider found this, this from his former employee warning that the vessel was unsafe a day after this thing went down I have to believe

Dr. NASA man would like have found some of this like it wasn't hard again Business insider not the greatest publication in the world and they they locked this stuff down right this publication in the world and they locked this stuff down, right? So anyway, in that 2019 Smithsonian article, Dr. Perizinski is falling towards Stockton's genius. It's not easy to take a white sheet of paper, come up with a new submersible design, fun, did it test it and mature it. It was an incredibly audacious thing to do. Fair enough.

Certainly audacious. You know, not that hard. It turns out, but short, not easy, I guess. Yeah. You know what else was audacious, that guy who shot the Archbishop of Austria, Hungary. Got a lot of people killed too, but audacious. Audacious. Yeah, truly. So anyway, cool stuff. Scott's job is again to make potential clientele feel cool, right? These are mostly a lot of the kind of the cash crop that's stocked and is hoping to harvest is like late middle aged super rich guys who want to feel like Indiana Jones, but don't know how to do anything but shuffle VC money into different startups

and hope that it makes them a profit, right? And so Scott's job is to be like, no, if you do this, you're an explorer and you'll be in this kind of like private club of deep sea explorers with me, the cool astronaut guy. So a big part of the work that this ad is doing is to try to incite that feeling in people. Well, also pruning away the sense of embarrassment,

they naturally feel about paying a quarter of a million dollars to see a grave site. And I'm gonna have Sophie play you another clip from this fucking video. This is not a thrill ride for tourists. It's much more. It is an eight day, one of a kind experience. You will be trained as a mission specialist

and record valuable findings. A citizen scientist is also involved in the science. They are doing jobs that are essential to the scientific research, not just busy work. We are looking at the process of degradation at the site. We are trying to make a really good map of the site and its current state. This is not tourism. You're contributing. It's not a ride at Disney. There's a lot of real risk involved and there's a lot of challenges. We partnered with... All of these things are what you tell a five year old when you quote give them a job.

Yes, this is bonkers. Yeah. Guys, we're really going on a Star Wars ship, kids. You know, as you take them to the Disney World Star Wars experience, it's so funny because too, they keep talking about like you're doing real work, but the closest they get to like saying anything scientific they're doing is like, yeah, we're going to look at like how it's fallen apart. Like go down there. Yeah, the boats still all fucked up guys.

It's not, it's not, not sailing again. It hasn't reconstituted itself. Oh my God. And yeah, it seems like Oceangate, they really wanted their customers because they're, it's very interesting. They cycle between being like, you know, this isn't a tour, a throw ride. This is, there's real danger here,

but also like, you're not going to die. Like, they have to get, it's interesting. They have to get both of those things across to the clientele, both like, you're in danger because they don't want it. People don't want to feel like this is safe. They want to feel like they're explorers, but also you will not die if you do this.

Those are the two things they're trying to get across in this video. Is this next clip will help to make clear? The communication for a die. It's very well engineered and very safe, but then the team is very focused on safety first. The communication is really key, I think, knowing that they never lost communication. Not one second of me experiencing anything from Oceangate had I ever felt unsafe.

As I pointed out on the bridge earlier, your safety plans are on vessel. All mission specialists get to dive down to the Titanic, but the full experience entails much more. and tails much more. So hold that for a second, so if I may have you play another clip, but like that's really interesting. Number one, it's come out since it went down that they were just lying on that part where they're like at no point. Maybe that lady was selling the truth, but like there are repeated stories from numerous clients of it, like losing

contact. It was regular that it lost contact. And the attitude that fucking stocked and tried to push was like, look, this is, you know, an experimental sub, something a little, you know, stuff's going to go wrong all the time, you know, as long as the big, as long as it doesn't employ, we're fine. If you listen to James Cameron, Cameron, who was another guy who started as an amateur and got into doing this stuff, right? So he is kind of a good person to bring in here. Cameron's attitude was very much like, well, no, something shouldn't be going wrong every dive.

And when something major like, comms goes wrong, you should go back to the drawing board and fix it before you keep going back down there. Cameron's vessel had three different methods of communicating with the ship above. It was so reliable that he would like take calls from his wife, like while he was doing dives and shit. Like again, because he was taking it seriously. Say what you want about James Cameron after he nearly got Ed Harris killed on the set of the abyss.

He took undersea safety, a lot more serious. It is like this thing where you're like, we all see James Cameron is like, I guess he's just the ST or Dillatant, but it is like a little, you still kind of roll your eyes when you're like, oh, he did it. And then you like, now you see how a true Dillatant could have done things and you're like, oh, all right, we simply must hand it to James Cameron. Yeah, it is it is funny because like Cameron's background prior to becoming a film director was I think he'd been a school bus driver and dropped out of college.

Hey, everybody quit correction. James Cameron was a truck driver and not a school bus driver before he got into directing. Sorry, I didn't mean to fuck up on my big gym lore, but yeah, James Cameron. Interesting dude. But, you know, he's not, I think what it is is that like all these tech dudes need to have that Elon Musk. Elon Musk puts a lot of effort into making people feel like

he's an actual inventor, like making these impressive things that his companies make. And Cameron, on the other hand, seems more like a guy who's like, well, I want to do this. I want to be like diving down there, but I'm going to find the very best people in this industry and listen to whatever they have to say. As opposed to like, no, everyone but me is wrong. I'm going to make a sub that kills three billionaires. Yeah.

Anyway, very funny. Mike Reese is a rice, is a former, he used to be the show runner for the Simpsons. And it tells you how much money used to be in TV writing, that he was able to take four trips in the Titan, including one down to the Titanic. And he says that the ship lost comms at some point in every one of his four villages. Here's what he told ABC. Quote, with no GPS,

Rice said it took his crew three hours to find the Titanic, despite landing just 500 yards from the ship. Rice who served a showrunner for the Simpsons said he signed a waiver that mentions death three times on the first page. It is always in the back of your head that this is dangerous and any small problem will turn into a major catastrophe.

Yeah. Which is, I guess we'll see how well these, these, uh, these disclosure or whatever, um, permission slips go off and court. Yeah. Uh, speaking of the Simpsons, when it win all this shit about their liability waivers came out, I kept thinking about that scene where Seymour takes them all to the Civil War like fourth as a school trip. They get in trouble and he winds up leaving several kids behind and it's like hugging the permission slips. God bless the man who invented permission

slip. You did this. You did this. You said this is your fault. Oh my God. So David Pogue, a journalist with CBS News who went on a trip with Oceangate, also mentioned this formidable waiver. And once the Titan went missing, he noted on Twitter that while he was on the boat reporting on the company, a tour went out and got lost for five hours. He notes that after this,

because this was so scary, Stockton considered adding a beacon. But didn't, and this wound up not being the thing that got them all killed, but it shows you the level of like safety consciousness they have where it's like, oh wow, this is a real obvious danger, better not do anything about it.

I mean, I guess in fairness, his point of view is, like, this thing isn't gonna get lost. A beacon is truly wasted, buddy. I know how this thing is gonna, how the end comes for this thing. I know how everyone's gonna die. We're good. No one's, no one's suffocating on this thing.

That is like the stock to rush guarantee. No. Yeah. Yeah, the problem is not going stock to rush guarantee. No. Yeah. Yeah, the problem is not going to be that you run out of air. Don't worry guys. But you know who never runs out of oxygen. The sponsors of this show. That's right.

Immune to dying. In the podcast, Alphabet Boys, Immune 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'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 iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts 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, saying government cover cover-ups from unsolved crimes to the bleeding

edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We spent 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 Propefters 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ah, and we're back. Yay, so, I'm talking about Mr. Stockton Rush. There's a point, like when that ship went missing on Pogue's voyage and has gone for like five hours when they can't communicate with it. Pogue noted in that Twitter thread that like they shut down the internet as soon as the boat stopped communicating. Well, and that actually that's a thing I will defend. People have been like, well, that's really shady.

I actually disagree with that because if you're running a trip like this, right? Even if it's not like a death sub, right? If you're just like taking people out on a boat and one of your boats goes missing. If I'm in charge of that boat, first thing I'm doing is turning off the internet because if a bunch of people just died, they shouldn't find out about it

because some like TikTok dude posted it yet. You know? Oh. Like, I'm not gonna give Oceangate a lot of credit, but that is what you would do in this. Right, right, right. They did, they did the right-ish thing for obviously, I think we could all be confident they did it for the wrong reason. I'm sure they had a shady reason for wanting to do it, but there is a justification for

wanting people to not find out that they're like, I don't know, I guess it is one of the real fucked up things to me is that like the the wife of that that billionaire, the Pakistani billionaire who went down and like his son, she was like on the boat when they went to miss out. Like she's on the like, which is when they went missing. Oh God. Like she's on the, like, uh, which is, 10, pretty bad time. Real fucked up.

A lot of fucked up stuff. So, the thing I keep coming back to is that all of the shit we've talked about, about how, like, all of the evidence that this thing was dangerous before it went down was easily available somewhere online prior to the, the titan setting out on its final voyage. Like credible people had pointed out that this was dangerous. And one of the things that I most frustrated about

is that like none of the people in the media who are covering this thing, once it starts actually getting to the Titanic, bring any of this stuff, right? And it's very interesting because like, David Pogue's of CBS goes on a tour. And like, a Pogue, I think his like coverage is absolutely irresponsible.

Like, there's not really any investigative rigor. He's not pointing out any of the signs that this thing is like dangerous. And his article is, or the video in the podcast that he does is basically pure praise, right? It's like Puffpeace. It's a Puffpeace. Yeah, it's a disgusting Puffpeace, right? Like, that's piece. It's a puff, but yeah, it's a disgusting puff piece, right?

Like, that's, that's, like, there are parts of it that look almost identical to that video, whether he's like showing him around the, you know, all this footage of it diving and footage of like, life on the boat, like, it is super fun. Pope did mention briefly that one of these, but like, one of the trips got lost and they lost comms and stuff, but like, he brings it up as like they lost comms and stuff. But like,

he brings it up as like, well, it's still, you know, not super tested technology as opposed to like, well, this is a major problem and the boat shouldn't be back out until this gets solved, you know. There were other basic problems that should have drawn more scrutiny from journalists for one, like outside of the CBS report, stockedton also invited a BBC team to come film one of their dives as a PR thing of a jig. And that trip captures the looming disaster feel better than like when the documentary about this gets made, they are going to use clips from that BBC documentary

because during this fucking dive that the BBC is there to film, I think two of the thrusters on the set are installed backwards. Like they put the engines on wrong. And so the boats spinning around in circles. And because there's a film crew there, they don't want to just scrub the dive to fix it. So they figure out a way that the guy piloting it can like hold the controller sideways. So that it works

right? It's so, it's so, it's so janky. I mean, there's two video game spirit. They're basically on, take the cartridge out and blow on it mode. It's wild. Yeah, and I want to play you a fairly long clip from this because it gives you an idea. It's kind of cutting between, you know, mission controller, whatever in the boat, as they try to figure out how to fix this.

And it shows you how janky this whole process is. Oh no, we have a problem. When I'm pressing forward, one of the pressors is stressing backwards right now. It's not only I can do right now, it's a 360. On the stick now, the actual cum sticks. I can do right now since 360. On the stick now, the actual come sticks. Yeah. What is left and right?

The right stick, that's forward, back, turn left, turn right. And what's happening is he's going forward, he's getting a turn. Got it. What's left stick? Down and up. Okay. Yeah. What would cause that?

They swapped out one of those restaurants. So they mounted it wrong way? I mean, if you're a directional restaurant, yeah, it should be, but something happened. Yeah, what you can do, so on the controller, you have the up-down left-right arrows, and you could set them so that one was going and then every time you hit the crew the button you would go forward. I hope he knows how to do this. I just... I had a drone stocked on Wendy's phone, just called it back, if you get a chance we

get a question on the dive right now looking to see if there's a way to remap the PS3 controller Thanks, so They are just like you and your friends playing like video games and like someone's 13th birthday party late at night They're they're getting tripped up, rebapping a PS3 controller. Like, wow, these fuckers are under water. God, it's janky. It really is. I should people of this. Yeah. People flipped out a lot about the fact like they're using, you know, a gaming controller, which is not super weird for stuff like this,

like a lot of times it gets used because controllers, gaming controllers are pretty good at this kind of motion. But like, this is the, the jank. Like you should not be having to remap on the fly because whatever checklist you had for this thing before it went off, didn't make sure the engines were on right. Like, that's, that's pretty bad. Like if I get on a plane and they're like, hey guys, we gotta go back,

somebody put an engine on wrong. So we're just gonna, we're just gonna like figure it out in the air, don't worry. No, I am opening the emergency door and rolling out onto the tarmac. I'm not going up into sky in that thing. So they're like, we just gotta twist it and then it'll go in the right direction.

Don't worry. It's so, um, oh God, I'm sorry. There's nothing really to say, but it's so fucking bonkers that this was a lot to happen. It's, it's, yeah, it's, it's nuts. Um, and it's nuts that again, guys like Pogue are just talking about how cool this is, what a great, and it's, of course it works this way. For one thing, David Pogue is the kind of quote unquote, journalist you bring in, if you need, like a guy, a dumb guy with a platform to make your tech product look cooler than it is. Like that's his actual job,

is to like pump up bad ideas from the tech industry. So he's a great dude for Stockton to work with here. And it's also Stockton has a kind of gut level understanding of how awe-inspiring being this deep below the ocean is. And the fact that when you put people through and experiences that intense, it creates a bond and a sense of emotional loyalty between folks on the journey and between them

and the company. And he makes a lot of conscious use of that, even in testimonials on this ad. The lady that you're about to hear first from on this clip that Sophie's gonna play is a former master chef contestant who paid for a trip to the bottom of the sea on this thing. And here's here talking about

that kind of like emotional bond that people form on this thing. Here instantly became family. And that's something that you take away for life. Prep. And like, you know, that's a silly thing to say about spending eight days with a bunch of people on a boat. But I have no doubt that after it's an intense peak experience, I'm sure she felt that way, you know, as they're all leaving

from their time together. And Stockton understands this psychological phenomena and he was making kind of very concerted use of it in order to pump his company. And this is made unsettlingly clear in how he responded to a lawsuit against Oceangate that was launched in February of this year by a Florida couple who sued him for refusing to refund their $105,000 tickets to see the Titanic in 2018. The trip was postponed repeatedly and they asked for a refund and Rush keeps trying to get them on other dives. He's like, don't get a refund. Just come out with us in a year. Come out with us the year after that. You know, I can't give you your money back. Basically.

Oh man. So they sue him. The case goes to court and David Concanon, who is the the Oceangate company legal advisor. We heard from him earlier. He was the guy trying to blame the Coast Guard for not working fast enough. He offered the federal judge who was hearing the case, Rebecca Smith, a free trip on ocean gates like boat to go down and see the Titanic, right? Like as she's judge, he's like, look, judge, you can't properly, you know, adjudicate this

case if you haven't been to see the Titanic, you know, why don't we, why don't we take you on a free journey to the Titanic, which number one seems illegal. Like both, both in terms of bribery and now in retrospect, make incredible death threats against the sitting judge seems like it shouldn't be a felony too. Well, what's wild is, according to the New York Times is reporting, she seemed down to it.

Quote, perhaps if another expedition occurs in the future, I will be able to do so. The judge wrote in May, adding after many years of hearing cases about the Titanic wreckage, that opportunity would be quite informative and present a first eyes on view of the rec site. By the way, what the fuck is God? So, because this is like, you know, there's legal cases around like shit that gets pulled up. That's why they declared that they can't like sell random shit from the Titanic.

They had to like take it all together. They could sell access to it as like, we've got all this shit in Vegas. You can pay to go see it there. You can make money from that, but you can't just sell random shit. That got adjudicated in this court, which is why when the ocean gate got sued, it wound up in front of this judge for whatever reason she was like the district or whatever that they've picked for Titanic shit. And so basically, like, there was kind of a quasi-adjustification. You can see the judge being like, maybe I should go. Maybe I do need to see the Titanic.

But it's also clearly stocked in trying to get her in his weird little boat cold. Yeah. And it's what's equally unsettling is that in this legal filing, where the judges like this seems like it could be a good idea, there are serious unreported issues revealed with the Titan quote, on the first dive to the Titanic, the submersible and countered a battery issue and had to be manually attached to its lifting platform. The company's legal and operational advisor, David Concanon wrote in the document, which was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The submersible sustained modest damage to its exterior, he wrote, leading Oceangate to cancel the mission

so it could make repairs. So, yeah, it's cool that this judge was still like, I don't know, maybe I'll go, no one can calculate risk, I guess, is the clear lesson of all of the really like the Titanic. Like that's the lesson of the Titanic. People are bad at calculating risk. And it's also the lesson of the Titanic fandom, but they're bad at calculating risks. Yeah. So as we've talked about in the ads and the PR materials, Oceangate made a big deal about the fact that their customers are citizen scientists. One of the things that's weird to me about that David Pogue interview is that Stockton does not

treat them this way when he's talking to Pogue. Quote. So we have clients that are Titanic enthusiasts, which we refer to as Titaniacs. Some of their, some of those folks are affluent and some are not. So we've had people who have mortgaged their home to come and do the trip. And we have people who don't think twice about a trip of this cost. We have one gentleman who would won the lottery. The first tickets had been sold for $105,000 to $129. The inflation-adjusted cost of a first class birth on the Titanic. But according to Pogue, then Stockton Rush saw how much people were really to pay to go to space and he thought, man, I'm leaving money on the table.

So a couple of things there. Number one, it does feel like you're kind of tempting fate by being about like, well, let's charge as much as it costs people on the Titanic to go die. But then to both have gone through that and then see Jeff Bezos fly people up and be like, oh shit, we can actually make way more money off these robes. Right. Very cool. Great science that you're bringing these, these, these citizens scientists and yeah, you're a scientist, a citizen scientist. Get the fuck out of here. Yeah, we're gonna do an expedition to see how much money I can make off of you.

Gonna really expand the bounds of human knowledge, RE, how much cash I can take out if you're fucking wallet. And again, I haven't actually found any evidence of like science that resulted from the trips that these guys did, because they took like 28 people or so down before this all went to shit. I haven't found evidence of like real science that they accomplished. But when you watch the ad, it becomes very clear that the primary purpose of the, because they have scientists, actual scientists and other experts that they bring on every voyage

and their job is to make these customers feel special. Again, it's a mate, they're larking, right? It's like if you brought in, like, it's like if you were doing, I don't know, like a fucking Ukraine warlarp and you hired some like actual veteran Ukrainian soldiers to come in, so that like some fucking air softers would feel like they've got the real trench experience,

you know, which I'm sure is gonna happen in like six months, right? some fucking air softers would feel like they've got the real trench experience. Right. You know, which I'm sure is going to happen in like six months, right? Um, but yeah, I want to play you another clip here. Maybe best of all are the one-on-ones with experts like Commander Paul Henri N'Agele, leader of 30 dives to the Titanic rec site. He and other world-class experts will be on all our missions to give you an unrivaled up-close and personal ocean gate Titanic experience. To set up for me, it's very well done because it's simple.

You see, on a lead, there are a lot of equipment and a lot of switch. And on this one, you don't have because you work with a screen and with a keyboard and it's very easy to do that. You are not only a passenger seat and waiting at the time is running and just looking outside. You can do something inside. You can be really a member of the team and that's that great. Oh my God. It's like a checklist at the rainforest cafe. It's like a little scavenger hunt. It's so exciting. It is sad. And it's like at one point,

fucking Stockton gets asked, like are you basically coming up with busy work? And he was like, well, yeah, kind of. That's, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they're all like seven year olds that you want to give them a job. Hanem, a fake cell phone.

Let them pretend that they're taking a court notice. Yeah. Yeah. A little child steering wheel. They can just turn back and forth. The French guy that we heard there was Paul Onary, Narsule, or P.H. as like he tended to be called. And his nickname was Mr. Titanic,

because he's done more dives down to the rec side or he's done more dives down to the rec side or he had done more dives down to the rec side, like 35, I think, than anybody else. He was a sub commander for the French Navy. And when, when, when everyone died, folks were like, it's a bummer that this like working class, you know, dude went down with them. Again, I'm not going to say, you know, cheer these deaths. Don't cheer these deaths. He was not like a, he's not like a blue collar leather neck with like a copy of fucking Bruce Springsteen album

and his, in his, in his hatband. In addition, he was, you know, he's obviously, he was a, he was a, he was a, one of the most accomplished submersible pilots in history. He also like, ran, it started and ran several different deep sea like equipment companies, which he

sold. He was on the board of, I believe it was an LLC that had the salvage rights to the Titanic. He was one of the guys. When we talked about this process of taking a bunch of shit, 5,500 items from the Titanic, which then wound up like touring Las Vegas and stuff as a thing people could pay to go see, he's helping to run the company that does that as well. Bob Ballard kind of insinuated that this stuff was grave robbing. I'm not calling a dead man a grave robber.

I don't know that Ballard was, I think his exact status within the industry is kind of unclear to me. But he's not just a working class sub-pilot. He was worth about one and a half billion dollars. He's also like an entrepreneur, right? Now, Narshalay is again definitely a respected figure for his diving acumen. I suspect one reason that he was brought onto the project is because he's huge within the Titanic superfan community because he's done so many dives down there.

And his fame would act as an advertisement. Specifically, Narshala's fame would act as an advertisement to the people who are like real big Titanic nerds. And David Pogue talks to one of these customers in his series, a woman named Renato Rojas. Renato worked for a bank. She, I think probably would describe herself as like upper middle class. She's not a billionaire.

She says she's not even a multi-millionaire. So I think this is someone who is well off, but not like a plunge of crap, right? Not someone who can like buy an election. But she's got enough that she could spend $105,000 on this because she's kind of nuts about the Titanic, right? Which is one chunk of it, you know? I maybe stocked and was lying when he said people mortgage their homes for this, but like, that's not outside of the bounds of like, there's definitely Titanic fans who would do something

like, you know, burn their life savings to get to go on this thing. Those guys exist too. Which is interesting to me. And she makes the note, or she says like when she's interviewed by Pogue, Pogue asks like, when, you told people that you were spending almost the price of a small house to do this one day trip, did you get any reactions? And Renata was like, most people think I'm crazy by spending all this money and trying to go down to see Titanic.

My response is dreams don't have a price. Some people want a Ferrari, some people have children. Some people buy a house. I wanted to go to Titanic. Oh. And I feel like, first off, I feel like that's kind of crazy. I do. I feel like that's nuts. But also, that's fine.

Like, you know, if you're willing to die or risk death to go see this boat and you're willing to burn up all if you're money to do it. Sure, you went on. Like really when it comes down to it, I'm not going to get burnt out of shape when you die, but like, okay, everyone has the right to love something so much that it kills them. Even if that thing is objectively stupid. I do believe that, right? So I guess whatever. Now I will say I am happy that like when this thing went down, it's again, all of the people

on this boat with the exception of that 19 year old had the resources and the experience to know that what they were doing was silly and like they killed them, right? All of them had the ability to be informed of everything I brought up in this episode about how like slip shot this thing was. I am glad that like Renata or some other harmless Titanic maniac was not on the sub when it went down. You know, it was people who absolutely had the resources to know better. I don't know, you can feel about that however you want, but it seems at least less fucked

up to me than if it had been a bunch of people who saw that the movie 77 times in theaters and like poured their pension into fucking Russian gate. And the Titanic movie is kind of the thing that looms over all this hubbub. From the day that it sunk, the boat captured people's imaginations, both because of how many people died on it and because they were all rich and famous. There's all this mystery. James Cameron turned that fascination into a modern fandom, which I will say I don't think it's cynical for James, like he wasn't doing this to cash in on the Titanic.

Like obviously he's obsessed with it too. He is the biggest of the crazy Titanic maniacs, right? Like, does seem legitimate for him. But Oceangate definitely kind of callously cashed in on the film. And you can see some of this in the ad, which, apparently, when you finish the dive, they would let you pose with like a replica of the heart of the ocean and take pictures. Like, which is, it both a fundamental misunderstanding

of the movie, right? She like, dumps it in the ocean, because these guys are obsessed with it, and it's like disrespectful because of all of this person she loved, died, all of these people died, and all they care about is the stupid piece of glittery jewelry, right? Like, I think that's one of the things

that Cameron is saying in the movie. And then they're like, hey guys, pose with this thing. Take a picture with it, right above the graveyard. Anyway, I'm playing the clip, Sophie. Next dive. Excitement, thrills. Hey, world! An adventure on the high seas.

I just loved every minute of it. It has exceeded anything I thought it could ever be. Titanic is the ultimate dream. I mean, this is definitely probably one of the most unique, interesting things I have ever done. Even going to, you know, I've been to Everest. But this is more unique. This... Oh.

Of course I can't spend Everest. I think there's more in the clip, but of course that guy is meant to Everest. Yes, it was the dream come true. But as I look back, this will no doubt be the best experience of my entire life. I can't. Come join us on our next expedition. Don't miss the opportunity to be part of history. The ocean gate tied Tannic experience. There's truly nothing else like it. I mean, that is true.

There is nothing like imploding, you know, it is a unique, you know, lots of people that look, ton of rich people know what it's like to die of gradual hypoxia, a top-mount Everest, you know, very few rich people have imploded at the bottom of the sea. You could be one of the few. Mind blowingly, they're blissfully ignorant. They're choosing to not educate themselves. And it's sad. Well, and it's also just, you can see, it's such like a, he's marketing this. Again, he's really is like a modern Hammond figure from Jurassic Park.

He's marketing this as like, this can be a part of the, oh, your friends did Everest. You know, they paid 100 grand or whatever it takes to like force or to like make, you know, they paid all that money to have locals like stop them from dying on the big stupid mountain that rich people want to climb because it's on the big stupid mountain that rich people want to climb because it's it's the one that rich people climb. Well, good news. You can impress your friends with the thing that they haven't done. You know, they haven't been to Titanic yet.

So you'll have something to brag about. You know, I've loved him. He fucking Elron Hubbard. First off, Elron Hubbard absolutely would have loved this. And second LRH never would have gotten on that. Oh no. If there was one thing that you would have said, you would have said it was self-preservation. Yeah, you would have said children. You would have said children. You would have had a kid film it for him. You would have one of my boys down there. Honestly, the fact that like, like a Tom Cruise type, or I guess

Tom Cruise specifically hasn't been on this thing has to be due to the fact that Scientology Handlers literally Googled this and when he inevitably was offered and they were like, nah, you're not doing this. I, you know, I honestly, I feel like Tom Cruise never would have done something like all of the ins, he's like James Cameron, right? He'll do Insane shit that's a risk, but he's going to like do it methodically by best practices Because he doesn't have a death wish right and he's not like there's a degree for whatever else is going on in Tom Cruise's head He's able to rationally appraise risk to his body. Yeah, you know, absolutely It's wild appraise risk to his body. Yeah, absolutely.

It's wild. But these people were not. Now, I haven't seen like a perfect list of all the folks who went down on these trips or who had booked tickets. The success of their first trip to the Titanic in 2021 brought a lot of new investments. That's when they started really getting money, like pumped into them. But from what we're shown on screen and in the customer testimonials, I tend to suspect that the client list was an even split of like super rich people who are doing this to impress, just to impress their friends, right? They're in the, their like Hamish was, right, where they have this, their adventurer travelers, right? They're paying for these kind of peak adventure experiences. And then the other half of them are crazed Titanic fans, some of whom are also super, super rich, and some of whom are just kind of like

normal rich, you know. So, Pogue story gives us some context on one of the crazy rich adventure seekers too. Most of our fellow expeditioners were rich people seeking adventure, like a hedge fund guy with his son, an artificial intelligence pioneer who'd sold a bunch of companies, and Shinric Baldota who runs a massive industrial clunglamor in India. Pogue and you have a nickname? Shinric, yeah, they call me the Wild Monk. Pogue?

The Wild Monk? Shinric, yeah, because I look like a monk. I'm very calm, but I have these extreme interests that I do. I'm going to a live volcano in Vanityu, two times to Antarctica, on the edge of space flight, it's 70,000 feet in the MiG29, swimming with the blue whales, catching crocodiles in Botswana with national geographic. So like, again, he's just like listing this,

like a rich kid, lists like everything he got for his birthday that year. He's like, it's like a this this and I get to autograph the blue whales. And, you know, I get to go to space and then MiG 29. Man. Yeah, it really is. Like, just like, you know, toxic masculinity will continue to kill people, but this is genuinely pathetic.

Yeah, and it's such an insult to like actual exploration. I think about like the Apollo, like, whichever, I always forget, was it 11? No, it wasn't 11, it was the first one that actually made it there, but like the moon landing rise, right? All of whom had like one of the, I think it was Apollo one, like it, it fucked up on the landing pad and caught on fire inside and because there was like two heavy O2 in the mixture, like all of these guys like burnt to death horribly, nightmarishly, and like the dudes who landed on the moon were their friends and knew that and like, and still knowing that decided like no fuck this shit, we are like we are going to go into space and

do this thing because it it will expand the bonds of human knowledge and achievement in a way that matters. It's worth our lives to do this thing. Like this kind of like breathtaking and honestly to a degree like selfless willingness to explore, which is, you know, you see the same shit with like Yuri Gigeron, right? It's like speaks to some of the best things in us.

And then these guys being like, what if we come out of like, I am willing to commodify this. I want to buy a ticket so that I can pretend to be that guy. As long as you promise me I'm safe, you know? As long as like, I want to, afterwards I'll play up the danger, but like, I don't really want to die. Yeah, there's a story that came out a couple of weeks ago about this,

this fucking, I think he was an Instagram influencer who did a bunch of mountain climbs, would gram, and maybe it was a TikTok guy. But he was one of these dudes who does these things and films himself, so everybody thinks that he's, oh, what a cool adventurous life you lead. And things went wrong on Everest. And one of the Sherpas on his team

carried him down the mountain on his back, which is that guy is risking his own life for you. It is so hard to save people on Everest. Like not only is hiking down a mountain, like hiking down a gentle hill slope with a human being in gear on your back, is a lot for most people. And this guy goes down Everest that way.

And afterwards this fucking influencer dude like blocks him on TikTok or Instagram, whatever, he's happy is because he doesn't, he's ashamed that like the guy had to save him, that like he didn't get to pretend to be the big bold adventurer, like it fucked up his brand that he had been saved by this. Like, any reasonable person, somebody does that for you,

like that dude's going in the will, right? Like, you know, like you take care, like that's like the most incredible thing a person could do for another person is like gamble their life to save you. And like it speaks to the attitude of these fucking adventure traveler dark tourist freak ass motherfuckers. Yeah. It presumably has been what it's always been. We just now have like the evidence of things like blocking someone on Instagram or whatever that

yeah. You know, it's not like they were they were better before. You got to imagine. But. No, it's not. I mean, some of them were, I know the guy, I think it was Edmund Hillary, who was like one of the, the first, like he and Tensignor gay, who was a Sherpa, like, were the first to summit Everest. And if I'm not mistaken, they both worked it out

to where like, they basically would not let anyone know who was the first. Oh, yeah. That was kind of important to Hillary because he wanted, he didn't want to just like, for Norge to get forgotten, right? Because he was like, well, obviously I wouldn't have made it up without this guy. We did this together. Like, again, the difference between an actual explorer, which Hillary for sure was and what

these people are doing, you know? Yeah. It's even the difference between like fucking James Cameron and what these people are doing. You know, it's even the difference between like, fucking James Cameron and what these people are doing. Anyway, big gym. So, what do we got to do? I don't know. So there keeps being stuff come out about this. Like right before this episode went out,

I ran across a story about a guy named Arthur Loybel, who was, he's one of the guys who went down to the Titanic with Oceangate. His first trip was delayed by five hours because of electrical issues, and the second dive was abandoned for unknown reasons. And then on the Titans fifth dive, which he was down for, before it left a bracket

from a balancing tube on the vessel broke off and they reattached it with zip ties. Oh, man. And like, you know, again, plenty of signs. Look, it's one of those things if like loybole had been on this thing when it imploded or shinrick. Yeah, I don't think I would have cared too much about it. And I don't really, I don't feel bad.

Everyone here should have known what they were getting themselves into and they made a choice. Hamish Harding made his money in the private jet industry and was a seasoned adventurer tourist. He had every opportunity to understand this was a bad idea. I think he just wanted, you know, he was a gambler in a lot of ways. And I think he was kind of addicted to this.

And I don't know about Narjalee, James Cameron didn't appearance because he and pH were friends. And he was like, I don't understand it. Like it doesn't make sense to me why he did this. I don't know the guy. I'm not going to try to psychoanalyze him. I did find interviews with him where he would talk about stuff like when he was at the bottom,

you know, in earlier dives near the Titanic, he would find himself almost staying to the point where his batteries couldn't handle it anymore or where like his oxygen was kind of low and have to remember like force himself to come back up. He was just so entranced down there. And I don't think he obviously, I'm not saying I don't think he was like suicidal, but he talked a lot about how, you know, if it goes wrong, you're dead before you realize anything is wrong. He was an old man.

He was in his seventies. I think he had just kind of made peace with the fact that this was what he loved. Yeah. And he would take, do anything he could to get down there and, you know, if he dies, he dies. Um, so I, I don't feel bad for him. Again, he made a, a, certainly an educated choice to be in that situation. I certainly, the only one I'm actively glad about is Rush because he got all these people

killed. He would have gotten more people killed and he would have like become a made money helping to frack the planet if he could have like fuck that guy. I mean, he's like, he's basically smirking piece of video too, really does just like this, you know, it's, if you're not going to feel like any something like this is justified, you know, fine, but like the man was literally asking for it several times on video. Yes. He desperately did what he begged the universe to kill him at the bottom of the ocean. desperately what he begged the universe to kill him at the bottom of the ocean.

And like, so I will say the only person I really do feel bad about on that boat was Suleiman Dawood, who is the 19 year old son of Shazawa Dawood, who was a Pakistani billionaire. He was obsessed with the Titanic. He was kind of an adventure tourist previously. He desperately wanted to do this. One family source says that Shazada, or that Suleiman, his kid, was like really scared and didn't want to do this, but like it was Father's Day. This was like kind of their Father's Day thing that they were doing and he felt like kind of pressured

to go with his dad. Another article I read said that he was gonna try to do a Rubik's cube at the bottom of the sea and like be the first person to do that. I don't know. Like I feel like he was the one who was both being pressured by his dad, which is not a situation that's like most 19 year olds are capable of being pressured by their parents. And also not doesn't have the life experience to have known what he was getting himself into.

I don't feel it all bad for the rest of them. They all made their bed and now they get imploded in it. Yeah, I know. That's like the clear, dark moment in this and then everything else that's really like, especially the more you learn, it is like these people are unbelievably repellent. Yeah, they chose this, they chose to make a dumb gamble. Yeah, it's like feeling bad that somebody

puts their life savings on 21 black on a craft table. Like, well, I guess that sucks for you, but like, did you really think that was gonna work? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. Anyway, yeah. This is like, this is like to put your money where your mouth is. So if like all my apes are gone, like, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Are you laughing at the fact that like, you know, you lost their life savings? Thank you for having me laughing at the fact that this one is by by far the least. This time we we could we could have a chuckle. You know what? And maybe maybe yeah. This is also one of the first episodes I've been on where something resembling justice happened. So, I don't know where I am. Like, one thing I'm frustrated about is that from what I can tell a lot of like mainstream

sources are trying to portray him as like this, this tragic figure where he was, he just loved exploration, he was pushing boundaries so much and you know, this horrible, horrible thing happened. We're like, no, this is the story of a drunk driver, right? Like, this is like, it's like if a guy crashes his fucking car into a screw bus because he's hammered. And he's like, well, he was boldly experimenting with how much cocaine and vodka he could manage

a motor vehicle on. You know, he was pushing the frontiers of human knowledge. He's certainly pushing a little bit. But it's like, come on, motherfuckers. A dumb one. Yeah, like what's the dumbest boat that you can get people killed by? Yeah, like again, and you know, for the folks

that get all on re about like, well, people have died. So we have to like be super somber about it. You know, if that's the way you want to react, we can. But like, I do remember how the most popular thing on the old internet was the fucking Darwin awards and say what you want about it. But sometimes people do stuff that makes it hard to be sympathetic for them, you know? Like, if you, if you, if you paid a compete in the international Russian roulette championships, I'm not going to feel bad if you, if you cheat yourself, you know, like you got, you, you were the

one who chose to do that. No one made you do that. And I think it's just like all the sympathy stuff. It's like that is so unbelievably asymmetric. You know, again, I think my response to that, I think I said the last episode is like, fine, if you, if you don't think it's appropriate, you know, to, to quote hate these people, I just know that I personally love them less than anyone else who was inconvenienced unfairly last week. That's all. That's where I'm at. I love them less than any amount of money we spent trying to find them.

But that's fine. I love quote unquote. money we spent trying to find them. But that's fine. That's a whole other conversation too. Because I don't know. I think the coast guards attitude is reasonable where they're like, well, we don't talk about what it costs. We do not make rescuing people into a cost-benefit sort of thing, like that is not what the Coast Guard's job is. I do feel like maybe we as a coach should have a conversation about like, when do we make rich people pay for getting rescued in situations like this?

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It's probably good for the Coast Guard to not ever think about things that way, right? Same thing with like any kind of search and rescue people. Yeah. That's not what they're there for. It's like a fire foot, firefighters shouldn't be calculating, you know, to what extent is this, how much is this house worth versus how much is this costing? But like, if you choose to live in the middle of like a fire plane and like burn your trash every day, maybe, I don't know, maybe some of like, if there's a fire, maybe you should get. Maybe, I don't know, maybe if there's a fire,

maybe you should get in trouble. I don't know. Whatever. Yeah, the common point to that though, is that firefighters, maybe not individual firefighters or fire captains, they're not exactly calculating the value of a home, but the fact, there is asymmetric service for different areas.

And those just so happen to line up with race and socioeconomic. So like, there's a world where like, you're getting it a soft to policy that gets violated in like soft ways is actually contributing more to the inequity. Like, again, lots of other people died, even at sea last week. And, you know, these guys for sure got top tier service. No, they got more money has been spent on them than has been spent like rescuing refugees whose boats, you know, capsized in the Mediterranean,

probably ever, like maybe ever. And again, I do think, you know, look, Miyakope here, I just spent a whole week talking about Stockton Rush. And it's because like, I don't know, I thought it was interesting and this is what I decided to read about. Of course, right?

There's an extent to which like, I was just following the story because I'm fascinated by stories of like hub, especially tech-assol hubris. And at a certain point last week, it was like, oh shit, I ran at a time to research anything else. I guess we're talking stock and rush. But what I do think is amazing about this is that it is like a perfect, perfect, like, Icarus story. Right.

Like, it really is like the whole thing, like every beat down to the last, but like, last story. No, it's amazing. If I may, it's, anyway, it's Dicoris. Dicoris. Yeah. Yeah. That's what this motherfucker is.

Yeah. All right. Well, listen, folks, that's the episode. If people try to tell you, you know, this guy was an explorer, you can now tell them why they're wrong. But if a friend of yours, someone you know or whatever, brings up a conspiracy theory about how like these people got murdered because they're going to expose that the Titanic was blown up with a bomb to stop people from opposing the federal, you know, or the Fed or the moving away from the gold standard, right? If you want to do this, if that's, if that's, if that gets brought up to you, just make sure that person knows that stocked and rushed as granddad or whatever was running bohemian growth, throw that in there. You can make the problem worse. Why not? At this point, you

know, might as well. Right, if they're going to believe that shit, there's no saving them. Yeah, give them a little something more to think about. Yeah. Andrew, do you have anything you want to plug? That's it. Yeah. Oh, I'll just I'll just do a quick plug. I know we're off sync. I'm timing. Okay. Yeah. Let's see. My podcast is Yo is this racist and we do premium episodes that you could subscribe at subahtonlapods.com, which is where we do the non-racist fun stuff. So yeah, if you've enjoyed Eddie, Eddie of my bullshit, check it out, please. Whoa.

Yes, check out Andrew T. Guest Extruder. Thank you. And the next time, the next time, multi-millionaire, you know, son of an oil dynasty, asks if you want to see the bottom of the ocean. You know, do whatever you want to do. I'm not your fucking dad.

Pretty sure Robert saw your dad. Okay, bye. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. From more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHART radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys is a podcast that takes you inside undercover investigations. In the second season, we've got an alphabet soup

with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI, all mixed up in the same case. So you do personal security all over the world and you had somebody call you and say, can you get renamed and done for this guy in Colombia? No, no, no. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm deal, alphabet boys, on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually 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.

Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. Last year, Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian oligarchs suddenly started dying, more than a dozen in the space of nine months. Many of their deaths are suspicious with links to the Kremlin. In this new investigative series with me, Jake Hanrahan, we're asking the question, who's killing Russia's billionaires? This is Sad oligarch. Listen to Sad oligarch on the This is Sad Oligarch.

Listen to Sad Oligarch on the iHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.