Big Technology Podcast - My Experience On The OceanGate Sub — With David Pogue

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

David Pogue is a correspondent on CBS Sunday Morning and host of the Unsung Science Podcast. In November 2022, he boarded the OceanGate sub for a voyage just months before it imploded. Pogue joins Big Technology Podcast to share his story. In this interview, he offers a nuanced view of the sub, OceanGate, and its CEO Stockton Rush. We discuss his experience aboard the Titan submersible, his confidence in the safety of the sub at the time, the lessons learned, the merits of risk in the name of exploration, and the media's coverage of the disaster.

LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Our guest today is David Pogue. He's the host of the Unsung Science Podcast. It's a great podcast. You should check it out. And he's also a correspondent on CBS Sunday morning.

And in his role as a correspondent there, he was aboard the Ocean Gate Titan in November 22, yes, the sub that was going to explore the wreckage of the Titanic and itself imploded last week. So today we're going to get into his experience aboard the sub. Of course, what happened to it. And then we're going to go deeper into our discussion, the merits of risk and exploration. David, so great to have you here. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. So just to start off, how did you first hear about this sub?

because, you know, it does strike me that so many people have, you know, heard about it, but it was news to most of the world. So where did you first encounter it? Stockton Rush, the now familiar name, the CEO of Ocean Gate and the designer of the sub, was a fan of our show. And he sent over an invitation to our producers that said we could accommodate three of you on our support ship for one of our nine-day expeditions. and there's room for two of you on an actual dive to the Titanic.

Somehow the producers thought of me, maybe because my science background, science explaining background, and I was so excited. I see a lot of stuff online about like, his boss is probably forced him to do that or risk firing. I'm like, it wasn't like that. I was my answer was in all caps let me at it.

So I was, I mean, I could not imagine a more thrilling sign. But you're going 12,000 feet under the sea, and you're going way deep. And there must have been, we're obviously going to get into some of the safety stuff. But what sort of goes through your mind in terms of safety? Is it just like, oh, well, this guy is going down there anyway, so we should probably be okay? Or what are the calculations that run through your head when you get an invite like that? I mean, one thing that's been missing from all the discussion about me, not that this is about me, but I have been lynched on Twitter.

One of the things that I don't think most people understand is that I've been, I've hosted 20 specials for Nova on PBS. These are science specials. And the team I work with there has a philosophy of really telegenic experiments. And so to illustrate various scientific points, they've had me ride in a demolition derby car. They've had me hang gliding. They've had me swimming with sharks. They've, you know, tried to freeze me in a chamber. it's all in the name of you know making interesting memorable television and i always agree

because i just don't think anyone would want to kill me on camera i don't think that would be a good look especially Oceangate whose purpose of this is obviously to draw attention to their outfit um i i just took that as a given that they want to look as good as possible as it turns out they were very unhappy with the story but Oh, really? Well, because, so there is this moment in the story where you talk about how, it's a great story, by the way, if you're listening, I recommend folks check it out. But there's a moment where you highlight how so much of it has been jerry rigged effectively where there's a light from, I don't know, something like a home, a camping store. And it's, now this is apparently standard with subs, but it's controlled by a retrofitted PlayStation controller. And there's this amazing scene in your report where you're like on the sub descending. And he shows you the place. station controller and you kind of lose your mind. I mean, what's going through your mind? So you obviously trusted the safety. You're not going to get, you don't think you're going to get killed on camera. I don't know. Like I would imagine you'd want to do a little bit more planning than that.

But then you see the way that this thing has been built and there's like only the only way to open it is from the outside. Are you starting to question your decision to go on that when you see that stuff? Like what is going through your mind then? No. There were so many reasons to believe in the safety of this sub. First of all, he told us it had been designed in collaboration with NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington. We should talk about that at some point. Secondly, it had made 20 uneventful dives to the Titanic depths and back without a blink.

Thirdly, probably the most famous, one of the most famous living Titanic explorers in the world, P.H. Narjolet was on board as an Ocean Gate. employee he had been looking over the design construction and testing of the Titan submersible and fully approved. And this guy has been on every Titan submersible, every Titanic submersible there ever was. He was on the mirror from Russia. He was on the Nautil from France. So he's seen them all. And he approved the design and went down on it every trip. And he ended up being there when it did implode. So he lost his life. He died as well. That's right. There is a very obvious culture of safety among the crew. I mean, this thing is run like a rocket launch with long

countdowns and checklists and inspections and mandatory twice daily briefings. Even if you're not diving, you have to be there where they go through every single line of every single spreadsheet about every single component and confirm that it's been recharged and refreshed and ready and polished. They canceled these dives on the least, with the least provocation, you know, the tiniest thing. Our CBS dive was canceled at 37 feet down because the way they, the way they do this is they have a big floating platform, maybe five feet high and 20 feet square. The sub is bolted on top. sink the platform, let the air out, until it's 35 feet underwater because the water is calmer under the sea. So that's why they do it that way. It's much more dangerous to try to launch

in bobbing waves. And then they send scuba divers to detach the sub from the platform and the sub drives away. So on our dive, there are these black four-foot oval floats at the corners of the platform that just keep it facing the right, keep it upright. And on this dive, two of them came on tide and started floating away on the sea. Well, that has nothing to do with the sub. The sub was fine. We were done with the platform part. I just thought it was a stupid reason to cancel the dive. And I was annoyed. But again, now it looks different as I look back on it. And part of their culture was we don't even tolerate little things. So there were many reasons to think that this was okay. I didn't sleep the night before just because, well, the ship was rocking badly and I had a lot

to process and I had a one shot chance at this. This is our only chance to go down. And maybe there is some lizard brain screaming for survival in my subconscious. In some way. So one of the things I've wondered about this the whole way through is, is this sub, like, was this sub something that was pushing forward exploration, or was it simply a very expensive Disney ride for people who wanted to go see the Titanic? Well, this is something else that not a single news report has mentioned. It was a combination science expedition and extreme adventure tourism opportunity. So what I mean by that is there's five seats on the sub. there's always a pilot, there's three paying passengers, and then there's a scientist.

On board, every dive, there is a scientist. He is there to show you what you're looking at. There's a marine biologist. There's an undersea archaeologist. And if you think about it, Stockton Rush could have sold that seat to another passenger. He could have made another quarter of a million dollars per dive, but he didn't. he in effect the passengers are subsidizing science and there was a long interview I did with two of these scientists and I mean they are doing publishable actual research one of the things they were doing

that no one else can do is longitudinal studies of the wreck and what that means is over time so this outfit goes down five times a summer and this was its third summer So for the first time in history, these scientists can observe the Titanic over time, not just the deterioration of the hull, but also what's growing on it. On our dive, they were doing E-DNA, which is this really cool technology where they grab water from around the wreck, and then they bring it back on the surface and analyze the DNA. they can tell every critter that's been near the Titanic in the last 24 hours. Amazing. And every time they do that, they see new critters, including species that have never been seen before. So this was very much a scientific endeavor as well as a consumer one.

And Alex, have you ever heard that in any of the news reports? I have not. So it's good that we're here talking about it. One thing that I also wonder about going down to the Titanic is that it feels almost a bit macabre like the fact that people, like people who came up on the sub that you were on seemed overjoyed about the photos they had gotten and the views they had gotten of this wreck. But effectively, effectively what they just did was visit one of the world's largest underground graveyards, right, where so many people lost their lives in one of the most tragic ways possible. So can you help, like, explain a little bit about, like, the thrill of seeing something so historic balance with the fact that it's really a tragic place to visit, not an exciting place to visit, or maybe it is. But we do that, though. We visit Gettysburg.

We visit the Taj Mahal. These are graveyards. We do that to honor the people who died in those events. So I had a long conversation with Stockton Rush about this. And he said, I think the people who object are wrong. Because first of all, this wreck won't be there in 50 years. It's going to be a lump of rust. And if we're not there, filming it, shooting it, making models of it, then it'll be gone

and no one will be able to learn anything from it. And he did joke, we don't have a gift shop, but we are no different from any other famous gravesite that people go to show their respects. Absolutely. just pretty wild. I mean, how the Titanic has been just this thing that's stuck in the globe's consciousness. I mean, it is, there's something about it, right, that just captures people's imagination. Maybe they put themselves in the place there. I'm curious what you think it is. Is it the, maybe it's nature pushing back? I mean, it's kind of ironic, right? But it is nature

pushing back about humans, you know, belief that they can control the world and pose their will on it. I mean, I think, I think that's most of it. I mean, there have been many shipwrecks, some much more dramatic, some much more cool looking underwater. But it's this one because it was the ship that couldn't sink, and it was its first maiden voyage. And, of course, the movie, the James Cameron movie, kind of made it a popular pop cultural icon.

So I think all those things continued to, make it a singular icon. Yep. So what was your first thought when you heard that it had gone missing? The first thing I thought was, oh my God, these media

making a big deal out of nothing. You know, I'm sorry to say. But, I mean, I knew I had been with this thing long enough to know that it glitches all the time, all the time. They all do.

The mirror, the Alvin, the Nautil, all of these submersibles glitch all the time. And through all this, through this whole conversation, let's keep in mind what Ph. and Arjali told me, all submersibles are prototypes. These are not mass produced.

There was not a 1.0 and this is 2.0. They are all one-offs. And that means there are no spares. There's no mass-produced parts to swap in. So things go wrong all the time. James Cameron had to cancel dives. The Alvin had to cancel dives. The Nautil had to cancel dives. There's a Chinese one and a Japanese one. All of them glitch all the time. On our, week over the Titanic. You may remember that there was a team of paying passengers who went down and got lost. I don't mean they were out of contact with the surface ship. I mean, they were lost. They didn't know where they were. They couldn't find the ship. There's no such thing as GPS underwater. So what they do is in the control room on the surface ship, they can see

both the sub and the pieces of the wreck and they direct the ship using text messages sent as acoustic pulses through the water radio waves don't travel through water either by the way so only acoustic pulses and i have this great picture of the codes that they use the text messages are like are like three characters long you know like you know xx y means we've reached the bottom and so on. So the control room on deck has to direct the sub which way to go to find the Titanic. And on this occasion, for some reason, the Ocean Gate GPS system and the ship's own GPS system were disagreeing with each other. So they kept sending instructions down to Stockton in the sub and giving him bad directions and we had a GoPro in there and we recorded all this and you

can just hear them going you just said we're 100 feet off it to the right and now we're 500 feet off it to the left you know what's going yeah um and they came up they came up after four hours they never saw anything they saw a boiler but they didn't see the ship um and so when i heard that the thing was missing, I thought, oh, okay, so it's a, it's a comms glitch. Then I heard a couple hours later that this news was coming out 24 hours after it lost moms. That's a different matter. Then, you know, my stomach dropped out of my body. Yeah. And so, okay, you were initially like pretty hopeful after hearing that it had gone missing. It had been 24 hours. But, the scenarios that you were thinking about was that like they had potentially just lost

communication right so so once they'd once they'd been gone for 24 hours i mean i didn't i didn't like to think about this but there are really only three things that could have happened and so much of the speculation online was so uninformed the only things that could possibly explain a loss of communication are number one it imploded number two it got to to the bottom, it lost power, so therefore couldn't communicate. Because remember, it wasn't yet to the bottom when they lost communication. It was only an hour and 45 minutes in. So the second possibility is they lost power and they got snagged on something on the bottom, either embedded in the silt or caught on the Titanic. There was a submersible a few years ago that got hooked on

the Titanic's propeller and they had to wiggle free. That seemed like a stretch. And the third possibility is they lost power, and so they were on the surface somewhere, bobbing. Another thing that nobody else reported is that this thing had so many redundant life support systems. It had seven different ways of returning to the surface. They could dump construction pipes. They could dump sandbags. They had an air bladder that make a balloon. They could dump their legs and so on. Some of these were designed to work, even if the electricity went out. It was a manual mechanical lever. Some of them were designed to work even if the hydraulics went out.

And one of these backup systems would work even if everyone inside was unconscious or dead. It was a time release, 16-hour dissolving sandbag hook. So if they were floating on the surface there without power, that would be a really horrific way to go. Because you'd be looking out at the porthole at the air you need, but you can't reach it because you were bolted in. So I was hoping that if they had to die, that it was implosion because they would not have seen that coming. It would have been just cessation of consciousness.

Yeah. And James Cameron, when he was asked about it, basically said that he knew that it was implosion from the beginning. There's a tremendous amount of pressure. We can talk about that. That ends up, you know, being pushed on the sub. And what he pointed to is that carbon fiber was actually like, it's very good for keeping gas in, keeping pressure in, but very bad for repelling pressure outward. I'm curious what you think about that.

I mean, you got to remember, this was this was not a science experiment. This thing had been designed with experts that had been tested many times. Stockton first made a one-third scale model. Nobody talks about this. He took it to the University of Washington, subjected it to pressure, pressure, pressure, until it imploded to see. see what the level of pressure was that it could handle. The carbon fiber also had an acoustic monitoring system. Carbon fibers are actual fibers. They're like hairs. And when they break, they make a little crackle. And he had eight microphones embedded that could pick up on the

crackling. And he said, you know, in testing, they'd take it down to a thousand feet and they'd hear crackling, and so they'd come back up. Then they'd go back down a week later to 1,000 feet. No crackling. This time, they'd go down to 2,000 feet until it started to crackle. Then they'd go back up. In other words, the weak fibers had already died. So they tested it and tested it until there were no more fibers to pop. Right. So CBS News posted on the CBS News website the complete transcripts of the four interviews I did with Stockton. And if anybody actually cares about the science of it or the background or the testing they did, they should go read the transcript.

I'm not, you know, of course, I'm not a Stock and Rush apologists, but my God, the things people are saying, you know, they make it sound like he built this thing out of Lego and threw it in the water. It was tested and it was inspected by some of the greatest minds insurmersibles. So it's not as simple as the guy was shooting blind. So how did this thing implode that? I believe that I interviewed a veteran Navy pilot for CBS, and I believe that he's correct, meaning submarine pilot,

that it's not the carbon fiber. It's the dissimilar materials connected to it. So the titanium end caps and the plexiglass porthole, seven inch thick. What happens is each of them has a different coefficient of compression and expansion. In other words, under pressure, under temperature change, they each expand and contract a little bit differently. And I keep saying, wow, he'd been down 20 times without an incident. That gave me reassurance. But this theory says, no, no, that shouldn't have given you reassurance. That's what should have terrified you because that's called cyclical fatigue.

Every time the thing goes down and back up again, you're weakening it. So I believe that the carbon fiber did not give way. I think that his acoustic monitoring system never went off. But what happened was all it takes is a couple molecules of water in the seam between the carbon fiber and the titanium or the titanium and the plexiglass and it's over. David, I mean, you were like a couple months away. Like if you had been there a few months later, you'd be dead. How do you feel about that?

It's worse than that. After our aborted dive, they made two more that week, the one that got lost and then the one that was successful. And then we came back to shore and they brought in the last group of the summer. And they made it down once. And so if you think about it, the only thing that separated the CBS crew and the fatal dive, was three dives. I was, it was like, it's like Russian roulette. So, um, it's honestly been a lot to process.

Um, this has been a really rough week. You know, there's, there's anger. There's little survivor's guilt. There's unbelievable gratitude, you know, at the luck. And, uh, yeah, I'll, I'll be thinking about it for a long time. David Pogue is here with us. He's a correspondent for CBS Sunday morning and also the host of the Unsung Science podcast,

which you can get on your podcast app of choice. On the other side, we're going to talk a little bit more about merits of risk and exploration and a little bit more about David's experience on the sub. Back after this. Hey, everyone, let me tell you about the Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending.

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He is the host of the Unsung Science Podcast. He's a correspondent on CES Sunday morning and also the author of many books. You can go check them out on Amazon or with your local bookstore. David, actually, this is like the second time we're talking on a podcast. I don't know if you remember,

but you were on my first podcast, which I started like 10 years ago. I probably should have kept it going. It was called On the Program and it was kind of jerry-rigged. Well, anyway, I won't make a comparison. But we talked about your very creative proposal video. And, you know, we didn't really

have sound. We didn't really have an audience. And so I appreciate it. I guess things have changed since then, but it's good to be back on with you. Thank you. You too. So let's talk a little bit more about the merits of risk in exploration. There was a line, we talked about it on the show Friday when we were going over what happened. But there's a line that Stockton Rush used where he said at some point safety is just a waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed. Don't get in your car. Don't do anything. You know, in retrospect, I'm curious what you think about that line. People are saying, I mean, this is kind of what we spoke about when we were on Friday. We do a show on Friday talking a little bit about the week's news.

But basically, like, there's a difference between, like, being open to risk and preparing for every possible outcome and then also just taking reckless risk. So actually, like, actually hearing you now, I'm thinking, okay, maybe this wasn't as reckless as I thought in the beginning. But to hear that line about safety, it does, I think that's kind of what set off a lot of people about Stockton saying, well, come on, come on, man, what were you doing? I mean, he did a lot of sort of swashbuckling for the camera, and it did not age well. I mean, he said all kinds of things.

And on our follow-up story for CBS Sunday morning that appeared on Sunday, you can find it on YouTube, you see more of that kind of stuff where, you know, he, I mean, his other line is when you think outside the box, all the people still in the box think you're crazy. and he says it when you'll see on camera he's saying it with a smirk he's trying he's trying to be a little provocative he fancies himself fancied himself with a little bit of Elon Musk a little bit of Steve Jobs to whom he compared himself often um and I have to say that's not a red flag um no because you don't know I mean, it seemed like he'd done it. He'd done it 20 times. He built a sub that nobody said could work and done it to the Titanic depths 20 times. I should also say there's another part of this story that nobody's talking about, and that is that he started out as an aerospace engineer, and he built and flew his own airplanes.

He made his first plane out of fiberglass, composite material, and all the experts said exactly the same stuff. You can't do that. It won't work. You're going to kill yourself. Today, guess what? Every airliner in the world is made of composites. He's very proud of that. And I think that had a big effect on his psyche.

I think that made him feel like I do know what I'm doing with these unusual materials. And when people started saying you can't use carbon fiber for the sub, of course he's going to say, oh, my God, I've seen this movie before. everybody says you can't do it a new way and trust me you know 20 years from now everybody will be doing it this way and he said that he said that i asked him if carbon fiber is so great and the reason he loved it is its strength to buoyance rate buoyancy ratio in other words most of these subs are made of titanium they're very heavy if you put him in water they sink this thing if you put it in water it floats so that's a good thing for a sub to have and that's why he loved it. But he said, I asked him, if it's so great, why isn't everybody building the submersibles

this way? And he said they will. Would you get in another sub built out of carbon fiber after seeing what happened? I mean, I would, I would need to know if it's tested and stuff. But, but yeah, I don't think the carbon fiber failed. I don't think. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll turn out to be wrong. And I will be sorry I appeared on your podcast. But it seems to me at this moment that the most likely thing that happened is something in the scenes between the different materials. You know, you've referenced it a couple of times that there's like a national narrative or an international narrative and then your belief of what happened. And it's kind of interesting for a journalist because typically we're on one side, like we're telling the story and the subject is like,

come on, like you got some parts wrong. You kind of are in this really interesting position where you're both, you know, you are a journalist telling the story, but you're also someone who's experienced this and in some part subject. And even though in your report, they complained about, but I'm curious what your perspective is having been so deep inside the story and then seeing the way that the story's been told nationally. Like, can you reflect on that for a minute? What's that been like? It's been like nothing I can possibly describe. You and I both know how social media works. We both know how misinformation propagates. But this thing was nuts. I was on one show at one point, one TV show, and I'm waiting to go on, and they are, they're reporting on the disaster, and they put up a graphic.

This is a national network. It's a schematic of how you sit in the sub. And it shows the five people sitting like a conga line, like with my feet on either side of your butt and your feet on either side of the next person's butt, all facing forward. And I'm like, what? That is this. And then. on the side are four bullet points, all four of which are wrong. The first one says, only one person can stand up at a time. What? That doesn't make any sense for like multiple reasons. No one can stand up. And if they could, why would it only be one person? It's a cylinder. Anyway, yeah, it's been really distressing. And, you know, the hate that I've had to endure, much of it was based on this information on the fourth of our five days above the wreck there was this

dive as I mentioned they could not find the Titanic and they spent four hours tooling around in the dark and then had to come up and so everyone's like why didn't you report that you lying sack of I'm like I did

would you look at the video would you listen to the podcast of course I reported that of course. I was the one who broke the story of the jerry-rigged parts. I was the one who reported how often they canceled the dives. It just, it's, anyway, you know, you know people on Twitter. Of course, yeah. One of the things that I think have made people skeptical, well, not of you, I'm talking about of these Ocean Gate people, is that they work so hard on message control, right? And that's kind of something that you did bring out in your reporting, or maybe more recently,

that they had actually shut off the internet when they couldn't connect with the sub. And that prevented anybody from tweeting about it, including people who might have widely followed Twitter accounts. So talk to a little bit about it. I mean, I feel like if you're there in the name of science, you allow whatever, you know, the transparency, you know, to flourish. But that was not the case with Ocean Gate. You know, I've spent a lot of time focusing on that moment.

So during the time that the sub was lost on the seafloor, the CBS crew, and actually everybody else, was on the bridge of the ship with the control room people, which is primarily Wendy Rush, Stockton's wife, ran the comms and the various experts and scientists, and they shut off the ship's Wi-Fi. So we couldn't tweet, we couldn't get email. And on Sunday, just after the news broke, I tweeted about, you know, this is a little. isn't the first time they've had a disaster, you know, a problem with the sub. On my week, the sub got lost on the bottom. And in fact, they shut off the Wi-Fi, so I couldn't tweet

about it. And what, so what actually happened was I went up to one of the Ocean Gate staffers and said, dude, what's with the Wi-Fi? And his answer was, we, if this is an emergency, we're going to need the bandwidth. We're going to need, you know, to call postcard. We're going to need communications and we can't have a bunch of people tweeting and uploading pictures. It's a plausible answer. I don't know if he was lying. Maybe they were just trying to prevent bad news from sneaking out to the public. There's no way to know. I was being a little bit cynical that day and I said it was to stop us from tweeting. We'll never know. There's also, if you want to draw a line between the data points, you know, a similar question is, why did it take

them so long to notify the Coast Guard that the sub had gone missing? I think it was a number of hours. But again, there's also a plausible explanation, which is these things glitch all the time, and usually it comes back. Right. So do you launch a very expensive taxpayer-funded manhunt if it turns out that it was just a fluke that comes back? Yeah, I did get a question about this on Twitter from someone, this person, Joran, who was asking why taxpayers have to pay millions to rescue the people who took this huge risk aboard an unlicensed vessel. Like, for instance, if you want to climb Mount Everest, you need to get a permit. So, do you think it's like, this is a big point in the story that people have talked about. You know, it's very big government rescues that were basically sent out to people who did take a risk.

And, you know, we have, and this, the other thing that's been talked about is there was this, you know, boat of migrants that went down off the coast of Greece. 800 people died. And you didn't see half of the government resources marshaled there. So talk about that. I mean, it just makes my blood boil. I mean, it's the white girl in danger scenario. I don't know if you heard this term, but when there's a white girl in danger, it's national headlines or pictures on the front page of our newspaper. If it's an identical black girl, you just don't hear about it.

It's the same thing. It's billionaires in a submersible to the Titanic. That's news. That's exciting. That we care about. But that hundreds of migrants in that ship went down in Greece. And, I mean, honestly, of course, I was up to my neck in hell last week. But my son comes in and goes, did you know that the ship went down?

At the same time as the sub and no one's talking about it, it's a conversation we need to have. When you think about government resources, do you believe the government resources should go? I mean, if you're like, let's say you're the allocator of government resources, do you go to do the search and rescue on the sub? Or do you send it towards migrants in distress? What do you think that? I mean, it seems like an obvious answer. Yeah, it doesn't seem right. It does not seem right.

I mean, the Coast Guard was asked this question, and their answer was, we are here to serve. It doesn't matter the situation. That's what we do. But, I mean, I remember one time I, on my honeymoon, I went to Australia, and we got to climb O'Buru, that big bizarre rock, airs rock. It's also called in the middle of the desert. and everybody gets seat stroke, everybody passes out, everybody has problems,

they have to do daily rescues of dumb tourists who bite off more than they can chew. And so I read that a few years ago, they just said, that's it. Nobody else climbs Uburo. And I mean, that's,

I mean, besides like saying you can't do this and the government forces will save you, Is there another option? It's hard to say. I mean, it's more like where do you want to allocate resources versus like, because ultimately they have to, governments always make choices.

That's sort of like the whole idea of governing. So where do you decide to deploy? Yeah. It's interesting that, I mean, one of the things this really highlights, like actually your story about that rock, stories of Everest, even in New Zealand, there was this white island that has this volcano that was another big story where lots of tourists got caught in this volcano. There's Everest, of course, and now we're starting to see even more space tourism. What is it about humanity's desire, the condition of people that makes them want to go

explore despite the dangers? I mean, I think that's it. I think you just said it. Is there's a romance to it. There's an achievement factor when you do something dangerous and survive. I mean, you've outsmarted death. You know, on the follow-up story on Sunday morning, I said, you know, is this going to be the end of adventure tourism? Are they going to shut all these things down? No, I don't think so because, like, you can't stop people from having that itch. For some people, and I think Stockton Rush is one of them, you know, cheating danger, cheating

death gives meaning to life. And I'm not really one of them. I've never been skydiving or, you know, visiting a volcano. But I certainly know people who are like that. And they are driven. They are driven to these extremes. After the six. Yeah, go ahead.

I mean, just like in the end, if they know the danger and they are aware, I think people should be allowed to do what they want. after this experience do you think i mean you're your big space guy like a lot of your coverage is about space do you think you'd you would get on one of those ships and go to space oh man um probably not i feel like something changed within you yes yes um i think uh rockets still had too poor a record um i i to me this sub was far safer than a blue origin or a SpaceX. I mean, obviously, that looks insane now.

But it imploded. Yeah, I know. But there was before and then there's now. I had different set of information then. But then what about your rule that if someone wants to take you on, you know, take you on something, they don't want to kill you? So that's altered a bit. Yeah.

It has. It has. I mean, I'm not sure I would be able to do any more of these extreme... television stunts anyway just because my wife says it's not it's not happening i mean when i saw her after this news broke she just rushed in and she just she just held me so tight and she was crying and you know that the fact that we were three dives away from the end yeah it's a lot to process okay last question for you i mean i think this is the first story that you've reported on where like the subjects of your story died doing the thing that you were reporting on.

So what is that? Yeah, just reflect on that for a bit as we end here. You know, when I watch the footage of these interviews we did with Stockton and Ph. Narjali, I mean, it was so recently they are, you know, usually when we see footage of older people who died, you can sort of tell by the medium, you know, it's VHS. quality if it was the 80s. It's black and white and jerky if it was the 1920s. You could tell by the medium that this happened a long time ago. And something inside you says, you know, that they're dead. Of course they're dead because they lived a long time and then they died.

This is different. It's it's 4K. It's high. It was 11 months ago. And it just, it just doesn't seem right that those, there's a mismatch to think that those people I was just talking to. have died. Yeah, I haven't gotten used to it at all. Yeah, David Pogue, thank you so much for joining. Really appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Thanks, everybody for listening. We will see you on Friday. I want to say thank you to Nick Watney for handling our audio, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. And yes, we'll be up again on Friday with our news breakdown. We'll see you next time in Big Technology Podcast. Thank you.