Bittersweet Infamy - #123 - The Wreck of the Titan

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

In the finale of our Titanic April series, Taylor tells Josie about the discovery and exploration of the Titanic's wreck, and the deadly 2023 implosion of the OceanGate Titan submersible. Plus: learn about Charles Joughin, the infamous "drunken baker" who seemingly survived the sinking of the Titanic with a bit of liquid courage.

Welcome to bittersweet infamy, Titanic April. New stories about the Titanic every week in April. From the maiden voyage where the unsinkable did the unthinkable. To the echoes of infamy that ripple across history's surface in its wake. All aboard. Josie, can you believe that this is our last episode of Titanic April? I can't. I can't.

I'm shaking. Look at me. You gotta put a coat on and start rowing. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Keep warm. It's craziness appropriately. Episode 123, we are in 123 years since the sinking of the Titanic. No fucking way, are you kidding me?

A little irrelevant there perhaps, or maybe it's just a coincidence. It's hard to tell in these Titanic stories what's a coincidence and what's fate. It's so true. We tell the whole story of the sinking of the Titanic in episode 120, the sinking of the RMS Titanic and we've been building on it since then

in kind of different smaller subjects. Feel free to listen to them all. I've had a lot of fun and they've been pretty good, I think. Yeah. So I wanna propose a little bit of a smoke and a few got'em session. What is something or what are some things that you have learned about the Titanic over the course of your research

that you weren't able to fit into an episode, but are nonetheless either relevant, interesting, or tonally appropriate for this show? So, Mitchell did bring this up, but there's a marked grave in Halifax with the name J. Dawson, and apparently it has the most flowers out of any of the grave sites there, and it's very beloved. Who's J. Dawson, Josie? Well, everybody thinks that it's Jack Dawson, but it wasn't Jack Dawson, because there was no Jack Dawson.

Who's Jack Dawson because there was no Jack Dawson. Who's Jack Dawson? Jack Dawson is the figment of James Cameron's memory his memory of Titanic. Who's James Cameron, Josie? Keep keep dancing. Why is the sky blue? James Cameron director of 1997's Titanic which we will be watching and discussing on the Bittersweet Film Club. Become a subscriber, head over to ko-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy. That's K-O-F-I dot C-O-M slash bittersweetinfamy. Wow. You busted that out.

That was really impressive. I even spelled out dot com for you all, just in case. Yeah, don't take for granted anything really. That's what Titanic teaches us. Yeah, that's the main lesson. Don't take anything for granted, including that your podcast listeners can spell the word palm correctly.

Well, you know me, I'm a dot org girl, so. You are a dot org famously, you are a dot org girl. Did you learn anything about the fate of the Carpathia? No. Did you do any Carpathia research? So Carpathia ends up getting drafted into military service as so many of these big liners seem to probably the fate of Titanic had it survived and it got sunk with a loss of life of five, I think, in World War I.

And locating the wreck of the Carpathia, much like locating the wreck of the Titanic, becomes something of a quest for people to do. And it ends up getting found by Clive Cussler, the author of Raise the Titanic. Oh, shit. So he's another one of these like James Cameron, like I don't just write about it, I live it, you know?

Yeah, yeah. I'm deep in it. It's in my blood. But yeah, Carpathia got like painted dazzle camouflage, they said, so it must have been quite a sight to not see. Yeah. You know? I did learn about a nurse who worked on Titanic,

or she was a stewardess on Titanic and she survived the sinking. And then she went on to become a nurse in World War I and she was on another boat that sank. She survived that sinking too. Damn. Yeah. Where's her unsinkable hillbilly movie?

I know, right? With weird music that doesn't quite tonally make sense all the time. What's her name? Do you know? Violet Jessup is her name. Could you imagine if your life was like just sinking ships all the fucking time? It'd suck. I would imagine it was probably something that could be the case whether you liked it or not in that era, right? Both in terms of the precariousness of ocean travel and then also war if you're a nurse. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I did end up going back and watching The Six,

which is the James Cameron documentary about the six Chinese passengers on the Titanic. That was pretty interesting. I watched it on something called Magellan TV, which I got a week's free trial of. It's like documentaries and things like that. High minded things, you know? And I liked this documentary. I thought it was interesting. It sort of told the story from a Chinese perspective because the Chinese, as we discussed, became big fans of Titanic

in 1997, like the rest of the world. Yeah. And then sort of discovered that there were these Chinese passengers on it, eight Chinese passengers, six of whom lived, which is really remarkable considering these were third-class men. Yeah. They point out that like all of the Austro-Hungarians died, all of the Bulgarians died. These are dozens of people in these groups. But these Chinese folks, these eight men who were there, six of them survived, and it sort of traces the stories of basically we look at the names in the ledgers

and the first thing that we have to contend with is that these names are anglicizations of Chinese names as understood by whoever the British registrar was taking it down. So there's a lot of misunderstandings at first around what these people's names actually are. In terms of the escape, four of these Chinese guys are on the collapsible boat D, which is the last one that leaves with Ismay on it.

Oh, okay. Yeah. And there was an accusation that these four guys had stowed away on the boat hidden from view. Oh. Which first of all, I think I just innately take exception to the idea of stowing away on a lifeboat. I think that's just using a lifeboat.

Yeah, that's not, yeah. Once you're in the lifeboat, because the ship is sinking, I don't think you're sneaking in there. I think you're just there. Yeah. But the second thing is, we know that Izmé was the last guy on the last lifeboat leaving.

So if they were already on there, by then we were boarding mixed gender passengers, and it was whoever happened to be conveniently around, and at that point they haven't stowed away. But even independent of that, they go through a process of like debunking the way that these men were said to have stowed away on this lifeboat and sort of like, I guess, vindicating them of that particular slight against their reputation. Yeah. Well, good. Absolutely. And then they go into each individual man and his personal history, and I won't go into all of them,

but I will talk about this guy named Fang Lang, who was saved from the wreckage of the Titanic. He was the person who was in real life floating on a door the way that Rose was in the movie. Like that's where they pulled it from, was this guy, Fong Long, he's on top of the door. And there's actually a deleted scene from James Cameron's Titanic where you can see this guy getting discovered. And it sort of, we track the story of Fong Long

and at the same time we track the story of another guy named Fang Wing Sun, who is a man who had died at the age of 91 in Chinatown in Chicago and his son and his family have just like collected stories over the years that add up to him having been on the Titanic and just like this kind of like anecdotal evidence. So what they do is they investigate all of Fong Wing Sun's various stories to see if he could be this guy, Fong Long. And it's really interesting.

We get a lot of really good like detective work of like documents of like, here's how we rule out this lead. Here's how we know that they got on this ship to leave. All eight of these guys were workers who were being called back to New York to work because they basically they were supposed to be out working but because of this coal strike there wasn't anything for them to do.

So they were getting called back on the Titanic as so many were because of this coal strike. That's right. The coal strike was kind of a big deal in the preamble. We haven't even gotten into the coal strike. You know what I mean? Let's strike that coal. By the end of the movie, we get to see that

Fang Long and Fang Wing Sun were seemingly in New York within a month of each other. And we think that that is when his name was changed as part of his naturalization. And they go into the reasons that many Chinese immigrants would change their name as part of naturalization of America, da, da, da, da, da. His is the most like full and coherent narrative

that runs through the movie. But it's interesting how we do or don't know things about these gentlemen. That's really fascinating. It was sweet, give it a watch. I liked it. Magellan TV, you heard it here first. This new up and comer in the streaming space, Magellan TV,

with their one week free trial. Don't break the bank. On that kind of same vein of like, oh, fuck, I wish I'd use this or like, I guess in this case, I wish I could use it because it's not quite out yet. But I recently found that an author whom I like a lot, her name is Caitlin Doughty. She has a few books out, but one of them is called Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, which was a recommendation of Erica Jo Brown, friend of the podcast, previous guest host of episode 108, Satan's Last Stronghold. She lent me this book. She not only recommended it, she put her back into it and lent me the book.

I did give it back. She didn't give me the book. But the book is called, she put her back into it and lent me the book. I did give it back. She didn't give me the book. But the book is called Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. It's a firsthand account of working in a crematorium and like working in the funeral business. But Caitlin Dowdy went on to found the Order of the Good Death, which is like education around funerals and dying and death. And she does a lot of like advocacy work around that specifically kind of like death cafe stuff. Yep. And so she's had two other books out since then, Smoke Guts in Your Eyes was her

first one. And they're all kind of about this process of learning more about different types of death and different views of death. But her most soon to be recent book, which should come out, I don't know when, hopefully soon, is an exploration of Titanic and all the death that happened either at sea or on land connected to Titanic. Interesting. I know. From what I could glean from internet and her own Instagram, she got seriously Titanic-pilled. She was just like, oh, I'll just do like a little, like I'll do a little light research.

She has a really great like YouTube documentary show. No such thing as light research of the Titanic. It doesn't work. Cause then you're like, wait, that has what? And then you click and then it's over. Exactly. Yeah. And then all these things just tumble out of you. Yeah. So she will have a book about the death and dying of the Titanic, which I'm looking forward to. Yeah. Let's dive in. Infamous. So this story comes from a few different places, right? Because of course we've done a lot of research and we've like found little threads here and there. But I was telling my dear friend, Chelsea Rose,

that we were doing Titanic April. And she was like, Oh, are you going to do the story of the Baker? And I was like, what? And she's like, the Baker, the guy who survived who like he was the Baker and he survived, he was the survivor of Titanic. And I was like, huh? I mean, I recognize a Baker from 1997's James Cameron's Titanic. There's a Baker in there. He does. He's not like a titled character speaking role, but he's he's in there. We see the iconography. But having watched A Night to Remember 1958,

A Night to Remember, that baker shows up quite prominently and is definitely a character of the cast that we see again and kind of follow his narrative. And she was like, yeah, you should, you should do that one. That one's fun. So I was like, okay, this is for Chelsea Rose. I think Rui might've told me about this last night, maybe. Oh, really? And I just forgot it because I was drinking.

Okay. Which we'll see how that actually comes into play. Okay so yes it is the same. Yes you told me about this last night and I was a little tipsy and I forgot. So Charles Joplin he was Titanic's baker. So you might think like okay so he just like baked some bread on Titanic, but he actually was the chief Baker. He had 13 Baker's dozen, if you will, of a Baker's under his leadership under his command. And he was in his early thirties,

but he'd been working on ships since the age of 11, which, you know, another indicator of those times, child labor, people love it. It was very in vogue. Very in vogue. Yeah, yeah. It's probably coming back if you're into that. If you're into repeating history, how am I going to come back?

Which is nice. So he got into work so early because his father died and his mother, she worked as a nurse, but that wasn't enough to support him and his brothers. So he started working. He grew up in Birkenhead, England, which is very close just across the river from Liverpool, which we know is where Titanic was quote unquote from. It was like, like the Beatles, like the Beatles. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Built in Belfast. 20th century was Liverpool's oyster in a lot of ways. You think about it. Yeah. Culturally.

Yeah. So he had all this experience of being a baker. He was given the opportunity to bake on Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic. The Olympic? He had to make his little creme brulees a tenth smaller. It was really just like an eighth smaller. One eighth. That's all. It was by heart. Yeah, mathematically precise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He was pretty good at it. So he was given the opportunity to work on Titanic, White Star Line's biggest ship ever,

because he had done so well with his previous work. So he's on board in Belfast and they steam down to Southampton to pick up passengers. But also this steaming for his role as the baker included making sure that everything worked perfectly. Making sure everything's working perfectly on the Titanic, man. What a task. What a task, I know. Why don't you make sure everything's working perfectly, Titanic? Why don't you get some more lifeboats? How about that?

Tell me to do my fucking job, making sure you're fucked you. Enough forks. Yeah, there are plenty of pats of butter. We're good to go. Oh, did you ever come across the Titanic had its own potato room? No. What? Because they had to have like 1500 bags of potatoes on board just for this fucking trip, right? Oh my God. So it had its own like big potato depository,

like a large potato room. Oh my gosh. So you'd find me. Just Scrooge McDucking into the potatoes. Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Taking big bites out of them. Big raw bites out of them. Big raw bites out of them. I do know that they had 75,000 pounds of fresh meat on board.

Wow. 1000 bottles of wine, 2200 pounds of coffee. And just for the bakers, so just in the pantry that our boy Charles could get into was 250 barrels of flour, which is a lot. Wow. It's a lot of flour. Flour is perishable too, right? You've got to keep that dry. It's true. Which again, keep things dry on the Titanic. I don't know. And we know from all our previous episodes how luxurious Titanic was. And you can imagine that

the decadent, like a Bavarian cream donut, just like- Floating Ferrero Rocher. No? Got me, yeah, no, yeah. Am I wrong? You're not wrong. But am I wrong? No, you're too right. Thank you.

That's the problem. You are too right. But am I wrong? No, you're too right. That's the problem. You are too right. So the first class dining room was known as the Ritz and it was extremely fancy. As you can imagine, the wood paneling in there was gorgeously done. The tables were set with the finest china. They always had fresh flowers on the tables. They also had like fresh fruits

and a potato room, which was super fun. Yeah, we love the potato room. Caviar, lobster, quail from Egypt. Damn. Yeah, pretty decadent. And please remember that even though our boy Charles was baking mainly for first class, there was still a different menu every day for second class. And third class got food, which was unique. Third class got the big troughs of like green paste that they serve to the man animals in Battlefield Earth. That's it. I looked at a third class menu and like, it doesn't change, right? It's the same. And for supper, like the first item on supper was gruel. G-R-U-A-L.

No. Yeah. And it's like, you put it on the menu. At least hide that you're serving gruel. Call it porridge. Yeah. Get you a need. Where's your optics, call it porch. You know what I mean? Get you need. Where's your optics, Titanic? Damn, I know. So Charles is baking up a storm.

He's doing the best job of commanding his 13 bakers under them. Rolls are going out. They're getting eaten croissants flying through the air. Just imagine a very busy like Muppets situation, you know, bread, flour, it's all beautiful and wonderful. And then April 15th, right? We know what happens. Yeah, no fun, no fun.

So Charles is actually in his cabin and he is treating himself to a drink. He's treating himself to a glass of whiskey after a long day at work. And you can imagine bakers' hours, he's up quite early to get stuff fresh and ready for breakfast. So he retires to his cabin, has a nice relaxing glass of whiskey and goes to bed. He is awoken by the little tap tap of a huge ginormous iceberg. Oh no, the iceberg's knocking. It's for you. It's for you, Captain Smith. Even the captain was like, wait, what's happening? I don't

know what's happening, right? He wasn't even on deck. So Charles doesn't know exactly what's happening, but he's been on enough ships that he's like, oh, fuck, what is this? Ships going down. Or something is serious. Something is happening, right? He goes to the kitchen. He goes to his pantry and the captain is still saying like, well, there's some damage to

the hull, but we should stay afloat for, you know, a few more hours. We'll call a distress signal, that kind of thing. Charles is like, bakers, let's assemble, unite. And all of the bread that we have baked and that's ready to go, we need to start loading that into lifeboats, because if people are going to be getting into these lifeboats, we don't know how long they'll be in there. They need provisions and sustenance. And this bread is just going to get soggy anyway, so

let's do that. Saltie, yeah. So apparently there was no command from Captain Smith. Charles just did this on his own. So they brought all the bread up from the kitchen and started loading it into lifeboats. And pretty soon Charles was no longer loading bread, but he was helping to load women and children whom were invited to board the lifeboats first. Yep. Episode 122.

Yes. Yes. And he gets to a point where, you know, things are kind of, there's a bit of a lull. Like people are getting into the lifeboats, but it's not hurried yet. And he's like, you know what? I think I'm gonna take a little me time because a little break I'm gonna go back to my cabin and I'm gonna have another glass of whiskey I mean fair enough if not now when exactly yeah take the fucking edge off brown liquor please exactly please I don't even like brown liquor but I would become a fan I don't even like brown liquor, but I would become a fan. Anything at that point. As he goes down to his cabin, he's staffed.

So he's not in first class. He's in kind of second class towards the middle of the boat. And all of these people are trying to come up onto the decks. So it's nearly impossible for him to get down to his room. He keeps going. He feels like he knows what's going on maybe a little bit more than other people. He's an experienced seaman, baker of the sea. And this reminds me so much of A Night to Remember because he features quite prominently in that film. Like he's a major character that we see reoccurring. I think he's maybe for comedy or I don't know just the way

the actor chose to do it. He's quite drunk in a night to remember. He's very stumbly and kind of blah, blah, blah, blah. And not to say that he wasn't drunk, but of his testimonies following the sinking, Charles was he was clear to say that he knew what was going on. He wasn't just drunk off his ass, blacked out. And what if he was? Who gives a shit? Who fucking cares? His ship is sinking.

He's about to die. Let him drink. Yeah, I know it. I know it. So once he finishes his drink, he goes back up to the top decks. And at this point, like there is no discernible

plan of what's happening. The first time he was up there, there was like, okay, we'll put 40 pounds of bread into lifeboats. We'll get some women and children on there. But at this point, it's just like all hell is broken loose. He's been assigned to a lifeboat, lifeboat number 10. And he goes there. And he again starts helping putting women and children on the boat. And then at a certain point, because things are so harried and he again starts helping putting women and children on the boat. And then at a certain point, because things are so harried and hectic, he actually forces a few of these women to get on the boat. He says, like, I just threw him on there. Yeah, well, Fairfax, it worked.

Yeah, I bet they're happy about that in the long run. Yeah, exactly. So at a certain point, he notices that like, you know what, we're trying to load this boat and these other lifeboats with women and children, but there's none on these decks. So he goes back down to the lower decks and starts bringing women and children up, which is like, oh my God, if all the crew had done that,

that would have been nice. They didn't have their two glasses of whiskey, so they weren't in flow state, you know, it's true Yeah, that's it. That's it. That's they needed lubrication. Yeah So he fills up lifeboat number 10 women and children. It's too filled up for him to get on he Sends it off and that was his seat on the lifeboat. Oh That is something I know I imagine he like takes off his baker's hat and it's just like, okay. The little rat inside wipes away a single tear.

I got you. And then, Taylor, what do you think our boy Charles does? One on one appointment with his old friend, Johnny Walker. Yes, exactly. He goes back down to his cabin and has another drink. Where would you? And this one even bigger than the last two. He's just... I'd be like, yo Guggenheim, you want in on this? Yeah, exactly. So after his third drink, he heads back up and all the lifeboats are gone. Oh, my heart hurts for that. And at that point, he's like, OK, all right, deck chairs, let's work on that. So he starts pulling all the deck chairs.

He chucks them into the ocean. So he's hucking deck chairs. He's been wading through water like his cabin is filled up to his ankles with water where he had his third drink and like he can see the fucking writing on the wall. He is he's getting it. A little bit blurry, maybe and like he can see the fucking writing on the wall. He is he's getting it a little bit blurry maybe, but he can see it. It's clear enough that he's foreseeing, hey, wooden deck chairs, they float. Let's see what happens if we do that. Sometimes you need a drunk guy to throw shit around.

So Charles heads back to his pantry and he gets himself a glass of water. He's like, you know what? I think let's hydrate. I'm gonna have a splitting headache if I don't. Brown liquor, Jesus, what have I done? He is in that pantry when he hears the sound of the boat splitting in half. Ooh.

And he said it was the sound as if iron was parting. That's what he described it as, as the iron parting. Hope not to hear that. I know you want your iron to like stay intact, never to part. So he's back up on the deck. And at this point, the Titanic is listing so far that it's taking on all this water. He is essentially like climbing up the deck as the stern of the boat goes further up into the air and he's on the very aft of the stern like hanging on to the railing on the opposite just like Rose.

Just like Rose. Just like Rose. Well, in 1997, James Cameron's Titanic, you see that character and you might even recognize him because he takes a swig of his flask. No, I wasn't thinking. I wasn't watching closely enough for all of this. You have to watch it again. Again and again. And you should watch it with us at the Bittersweet Film Club at coffee.com, ko-fi.com, slash bittersweetinfamy. Your monthly subscription makes you a member of the Bittersweet Film Club, which tells you to suggest a movie for us to watch.

But not Titanic, we already watched that one. Right. We're going to be joined by Dylan, the person, and Satchel, the cat. I'm excited for that. I don't know if we can afford Satchel but Dylan will be here. Oh okay. That'll be fun. So he is on the very edge of the ship as it sinks into the water and he is not pulled down. He is kind of of his wits enough flow state if you will that he knows he's got to swim away from the ship. Oh wow. He does that he He, and he clears the sinking, the suction, and he's without a life belt, without a life vest, until he finds one floating in the water. So remember this water is what, like 28 degrees Fahrenheit?

It is below freezing. It is a thousand knives stabbing into your body cold. And it's pitch black. Don't forget that. He is treading water, freezing cold water in the pitch black. And he does that for two hours. People are capable of some pretty intense shit.

And not only is it like, oh, you're in an ice bath, like, can you take it? You're like in the middle of the fucking ocean. And all of these people in the dark are screaming, terrified, slowly dying around you. Another drink, please. Very sober, yeah. So at a certain point, he can see in this, you know, in his in water polo, they call it egg beating, which I think is kind of funny because that's, that's cute. Yeah. It's a baker.

He spots a group of about 25 men who are standing on one of the collapsible boats that has overturned. Just dancing on it like it's an immunity challenge, like keeping their balance wobbling on top of it. It really, they're like nuts to butt, just trying to like keep, no, don't move that, don't move that. He comes to one side and they're like, oh hell no, brother, sorry, see you later. Like he swims around to the other side,

which is also just like a smart, you know, maybe ask somebody else. Because on the other side is another kitchen worker. Isaac Maynard is on the other side. And Isaac is like, here, let me drag you as much as I can up on this. There wasn't enough room for him to get completely out of the water, but now at least he was not having to tread water. So he's half submerged for another length of time, which you can imagine being wet outside

of the water in the freezing cold air is very disgusting freezing a little bit further They noticed that there's another lifeboat and it is taking passengers They pretty much call out into the night. We can take more people we can take more people and so Charles tells his friend Isaac. Let me go I'm gonna swim for it and try and get there. And he does just that. He swims probably, I don't know, 100 yards or so after like being in this freezing cold water, just insane. And he gets pulled into this lifeboat and he waits around for another two hours because by that time Carpathia has arrived, but it's taking passengers as it can. He tries to use the ladder but his feet have frozen and they're quite swollen so he has to go up

the rope ladder on his knees. I know. My heart bleeds truly I feel rotten for this guy. Yeah he gets on the Carpathia and what's waiting there for him, but a little nip of brandy. So. Thank Christ for small mercies. Exactly. And a cup of coffee, we should say. Oh yeah, I gotta sober up a bit.

Yeah. Gotta report on this soon, I'm sure. Considering that he was in the water for so long, he doesn't have that many injuries. His feet have to be tended to. Let's get this guy some slippers. That feels right. Yeah. Some nice Uggs maybe. That might be good. So he's actually on the mend as Carpathia

heads to New York. When they get there, he's taken to hospital and treated for exposure, but his turnaround is pretty quick. His recovery is quite quick. And he goes right back on board another ship. Yeah, well, I mean, that's how he made his money. Yeah, that's his trade. That's his wife and kids are. I'm a baker who floats. Yeah, that's what I do. Yeah.

He is a baker who floats. Yeah. That's what I do. Yep. He is a baker who floats. Yeah. And not only did he just go right back on to another ship, another day, another dollar, but four years later, he's on a ship, the SS Congress, and he's working as a baker there as well. Does the fucking ship sink, Josie? The ship is off the coast of Oregon and it catches fucking fire. Wow. It breaks apart. In the Pacific Ocean. Ships are kind of fucking scary, I think.

I slept on ships, but now I know. Now we know. Yes. Don't sleep on ships. He's on another ship, the SS Oregon, that strikes another vessel. And this is also happening a lot. For some reason, ships hitting each other. Just driving shit into one another. Yeah.

It's crazy. So that ship sinks as well. And there are not as many die in that event, only 17. But he is not one of them. He survived. 17 is like zero. Third ship sinking. What a guy.

Yeah. So he died much later in 1956 and he was buried in New Jersey. And on his death certificate, his occupation listed him as Baker on the Titanic. Wow. Claimed to fame. You might be thinking like, oh, okay, well, that alcohol is what saved him. Like, everyone just like, oh yeah, that's it, right? I'd rather be a little nice for all this. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Given my druthers, I think that it would maybe be of use in this situation. I get it. Maybe not if I had to like undo some knots or if like keys in a lock was in my future, maybe not fine motor skills. But other than that. Surviving. You don't need very good fine motor skills

to like lob a nine-year-old girl onto a lifeboat. You just need a good enough arm. That doesn't go away, so. True, drunk guys, don't shit. That's what you need. That's what you need. But you think, no, you think that this just happened to be a guy who had a couple of drinks

while going about the business of a shipwreck. Some of the theories are like, oh, the warm whiskey kept him warm in the freezing cold water, which it doesn't really work like that. Like you can't drink yourself a sweater to a point. That's funny. But you can't like survive exposure. In fact, having alcohol in your bloodstream becomes at that point, becomes detrimental

because your blood becomes thinner and it moves quicker and faster. And so you're more likely to die from hypothermia if you have a certain amount of alcohol in your system. Now, what he probably didn't have, and this is conjecture on my part, but maybe he just had enough to keep him that little warm. Nice. Yeah, keep it nice. And that is kind of some of the confirmed thoughts around it, is that he had enough alcohol not to incapacitate himself, but to make it so that he wouldn't panic. And you expend a lot of energy when you panic. So if he just kept it nice, then he

was doing a lot better energy-wise, because he could just be like, OK, now I'm going up on deck. Now the bread is there. Yeah. All right. And now I'm hanging on the edge of a huge ship. Gonna loft this Adirondack chair into the ocean. Yeah.

Let's see what happens. He was, as you say, flow state. I've had a lot of fun doing Titanic April, Josie, haven't you? It's been a pleasure to play with you, Taylor. I'm trying to be one of the musicians on the deck. Oh that was I thought you were being sexy and it was like what a way to put a direction. Musicians are naturally sexy. I genuinely have had a lot of fun feedback from the bittersweethearts has been very nice. I saw your friend Rose was saying nice things on Instagram. Yeah, my friend Rose. Thank you so much, Rose. That's so sweet. Well, I really appreciated it and I want to just say that if you feel so motivated,

if you really like these kind of monthly theme months around one thing, give us five stars, give us a good review. Join us on the Instagram page at bittersweetinfamy. You know, do whatever podcast service you listen to, give us good onamy. You know, do whatever podcast service you listen to. Give us good on that. You know what I mean? In whatever way is accessible to you. Gives a little love there. Please and thank you.

And thank you for listening. Thanks for playing with us. Thank you for playing with us. Playing with our hearts. Non-sexual. Yeah. Instruments. We're talking about instruments.

With that in mind, you ready for one last song to play with each other one last time? Are you ready for the last story of Titanic, April? It's a juicy one too. It's a few juicy ones. It's a few juicy ones. It's a few juicy ones. Josie in 1898. Oh my God, too early. Well, get up, ring, ring, baby, get up.

Story's beginning. I am not a morning person. Let me tell you that. An American author named Morgan Robertson publishes a novella called Futility, which isn't a good title because I don't know what that's about. Because we sometimes have this problem with our own episodes, so like, glass houses, right? So in this fictional story, Futility, a British ocean liner called the Titan hits an iceberg

and sinks, resulting in many fatalities, in part due to the lack of sufficient lifeboats. 14 years later, in real life, a British ocean liner called the Titanic sinks under very similar circumstances. Coinkydink? What do you think? Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm fuck. Especially the name thing. The name thing is kind of gnarly. I'm gonna be like the Harry Houdini rational guy here. I push back against the idea that the coincidences here can't be explained away by coincidence or something bigger culturally. In my defense, I didn't say that it was a coincidence. I said it was a quink-y dink. What's the distinction again for those of us who don't remember? Oh, how do you define coincidence? That are unrelated but seem to be related. Yes,

unrelated but seem to be related. Yes, a quinky dink is like the fun, cute, kawaii version of that. It's like, oh, weird. It's got a modifier on it. Got it. That's crazy. Yeah. Oh, weird. It's got a modifier on it. Got it. That's crazy. Yeah. Got it. There are scenes in futility that don't have analogues in the Titanic story. Notably, there's a polar bear fight scene that I don't think really cleanly matches up with any of the Titanic narratives that I've seen.

What a weird scene to include. This is like after the ship sinks, we've kind of got to like fight to survive and at that point it kind of doesn't really resemble the Titanic story. Once we're off the boat, not so much anymore. But broadly the novella is seen as having predicted the disaster, so much so that it gets re-released in 1912 after the wreck of the Titanic. Under the new title, The Wreck of the Titan. Much better title. Yeah, more descriptive. This isn't the only short story that's seen as being predictive of the

Titanic disaster in 1886, so even earlier than the 1898 one. A story with the wordy title, How the Male Steamer Went Down in Mid-Atlantic by a Survivor is published in the Paul Moll Gazette. The story depicts a chaotic and ultimately deadly attempt of survivors to escape a ship and lifeboats. The most chaotic moments of Cameron's Titanic, let's say, evacuation scenes. Okay. And it includes this note from the author, quote,

"'This is exactly what might take place "'and will take place if liners are sent to sea short of boats. That story's author W.T. Stead was among those who died in the sinking of the Titanic 16 years later. Mitchell talked a little bit about him back in episode 121. I'll tell you that Mitchell talks about him frequently. Yeah. Yeah.

He kind of got rolled up into his story in terms of the Titanic. Imagine being in Josie's house and she's like, man, he won't shut up about the Titanic. No, it's me who won't shut up about the Titanic. And he's just very kindly and genuinely researching other things alongside me. But W.T. Stead is one of the... That was his, yeah, yeah. He kind of like, what the fuck? Well, and he's an interesting character too, because he's kind of started a lot of this type of social justice journalism. He was instrumental in ending and reducing child labor. He was a woman's suffrage

supporter, but he also did some kind of gnarly stuff similar to our boy Randolph Hurst in terms of like generating war and like generating bad things. He was doing similar things as well. An interesting character to like composite with the way that journalism is working now. I think that was kind of interesting to make sure. I think that in general I've learned a lot about the history of journalism just by seeing how sources are composed as we've done our research, right? Yeah, that's true. You go back to those newspaper stories from the 1910s

where it's literally just like, whatever is gonna get people to read the paper, that's what we're writing. Yeah. So what did these seemingly precognitive stories say to me? This is my big theory. And it's, I'm sure not just my big theory. I'm sure many people have had this theory before me.

I believe that maritime safety was a top of mind issue at a time when ships were undertaking questionable practices. And these things were predictable because they were happening often. We're making the art because we already see the thing coming. Yeah. And let's make it like bigger and kind of more grandiose,

like make a point and tell a story. And then boom, the bigger grandiose thing actually happened. Yep. And it's not even that big. It happened to happen to a very big and grandiose ship. But the story is a ship has too few lifeboats, which seems like something that was happening at the time. And a ship hits an iceberg

because the shipping practices of the time hadn't had the reforms that they would have after the Titanic incident and become safer. So something like this was gonna happen. If it wasn't to the Titanic, it was gonna happen to somebody. Yeah, that's true. We weren't listening to our emergency signals all night and we didn't have binoculars in the crows, and like all of these things, right? That sort of anxiety and that sort of energy would have been on the mind of people who were concerned with the peculiarities of boat travel or were knowledgeable about

what the marine trends of the time were. Yeah. Which this first guy, Morgan Robertson, was especially supposed to be. He was just like a very knowledgeable person. So he's probably someone who's like saw like, hey, ships are probably going to start running into icebergs soon because that's not going so good.

You know? Yeah. I think our fascination with their seeming predictions speaks to how unstuck in time this story is. Ooh, okay. Titanic historian Stephen Beale says, to me, what's interesting isn't that it's a story that transcends time, but that it's a story that's been told and retold in time, that we keep making it meaningful to us.

It's timeless. It's timeless. But also I think there's a quality of the repetitiveness of this, from the predictive stories to Titanic 2 to the Nazi Titanic that suffers its own fate. There's a sort of like a recursive quality about this that compels I think. Yeah. And I think that interpretation really applies as we broach today's episode which is about the most major recent development in Titanic history and one that shares a lot of the themes

that keep coming up in these echoes of the Titanic sinking. Rich people ignoring warnings, playing fast and loose with nature, and paying the price. Oh yeah. What do you know about the 2023 Titan submersible disaster? I don't know a whole lot and I kind of kept my research away from it because I wanted to hear it from you. My impression at the time was probably kind of similar to some of like the space exploration stuff where they're sending like rich people up into space and like, oh cool, you know, touch the ceiling and then come back down kind of thing. They just did first women's only space mission and it was Katy Perry promoting her new album and Gale King and people

Jeff Bezos wife I think Mackenzie Scott. There was an actual astronaut on there too but nobody Katy Perry's an actual astronaut. Well now, now she is yeah. But it was that same idea of like because a lot of the backlash to that right is like okay great let's send rich people up into space like and now humanity's safe while everybody down here is like, I can't eat an egg, it's so expensive. And so the Titan submersible situation. It's let them eat cake vibes. It has let them eat cake vibes,

except it's just like the different direction. And also with like the ringing irony of like, Jesus Christ, you did it again. Like. Yeah. I'm struck by the shoddiness. How can you be so invested in the Titanic as a concept, but also be so blind to one of its central messages? To me that renders your entire approach to Titanic scholarship irrelevant because like

we did it again. Yeah. We did it again. We did it again, like a kilometer away from the first time we did it again. We did it again, like a kilometer away from the first time we did it. Yeah. Damn it. But people had been down to the wreck site. It had been discovered in 1985, right? Yes. By Bill Paxton. By Bill Paxton and James Cameron. Yes. But James Cameron did really go down there. Absolutely, he did. Absolutely, he did.

Before we get into the wreck of the Titan, the submersible, I need to tell you a bit about the wreck of another Titan, and that is the wreck of the RMS Titanic. Oh my gosh, I've heard of it. The brief history that I'm about to give you of the wreck of the Titanic and its discovery is not exhaustive by any means, but it'll get you up to speed and National Geographic documentaries will fill in the rest. Yeah. In 2025, we know that the wreck of the Titanic is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, about

13,000 feet, 4,000 meters underwater. It is approximately 400 nautical miles, 740 kilometers from Newfoundland, Canada. However, for a long time, we did not know where the wreck of the Titanic lay on the ocean floor. We had coordinates from the Titanic's distress signal, but those turned out to be the wrong coordinates, common Titanic L, which deeply frustrated the next 70 years of efforts to locate the wreck. I would imagine, yeah. Shortly after the disaster, the families of several wealthy Titanic victims,

the Guggenheims, Astors, and Wideners, fund an attempt to find the Titanic. How long after the sinking? Like right away. Okay, right, okay. Like we want to recover bodies type of thing. Yeah. But the technology in 1912 is not there at all.

However, with two world wars come advances in technology like submersibles and sonar, and as the tech improves, the hunt for Titanic intensifies. It should be noted that many of these early efforts are merely thought experiments premised around raising the Titanic. Oh. Because we believe at this point that it is still in one piece. Because there's debate from survivor testimonies about it cracking in half. A lot of people didn't see it or didn't register it or just the whole horror of the thing.

It didn't allow them to like digest what they were singing. It was dark. But yeah, not everybody thought that it had broken apart. People just thought it went up and then went down. I got a sense too that the prevailing belief was that it went down in one piece and the survivors who insisted that it did not felt very gaslit for a long time and then quite vindicated in 1985 when we eventually discover it and find that it did in fact break into two pieces.

Yeah, cause Eva Hart, who I talked about in our first episode, the sinking of the RMS Titanic. She was a little girl who survived the sinking. Yeah, a second class passenger. And she very clearly said, that thing broke in half. I saw it break in half, it broke in half in front of me. She did seem kind of like that defensive nature. Yeah.

Which, fuck yeah, you know? I would too. So as we're discussing experiments around raising the Titanic, Josie, imagine that the Titanic is on the floor and it is in fact in one piece. Okay. This is the set of knowledge that we have at the time. It's got a big gash in it probably from the iceberg it is in fact in one piece. Okay. This is the set of knowledge that we have at the time.

It's got a big gash in it probably from the iceberg, but it's in one piece. Yeah. How would you raise the Titanic? Let's assume you're using like a mid-century technology. So like anything up until, let's say anything up until 85 because that's when the Titanic gets discovered. How would you raise it? Okay.

I guess my first thought is like, you send down a long series of chains and you haul it up by a chain. That's an idea. How do you attach the chains? Oh, like claw machine style. Just like- How do you feel about magnets? I like magnets. Strong magnets. Strong magnets. I do- Magnets are mysterious and I love them for their mystery. So nobody has ever known how they

work and no one ever will. Facts. So there was in fact in 1996 for like a pay-per-view special. I don't know what kind of rope they used. I think they used maybe something that was a bit less rigid and a bit more plastic than the kind of thing you're describing. But they did try to like bring it up with ropes. And this was like a TV special. It was like a Geraldo's vault style TV special. Right. That immediately came to mind. Yeah.

They brought like celebrities and survivors out on a boat. It was a whole big thing. And they were just trying to bring up a piece of the hull and it was so heavy that it fell. Like one of the ropes broke. Oh yeah. So I think that this is a deceptively heavy piece of work. So that... Yeah. Good thinking, but I don't know if we would have had a strong enough thing to pull it

up then. Yeah. But I'm not sure. You'd pack it with balloons. This was a thought. A special, like, expansion technique when it, like, got to a certain depth or something like that? Yeah, but we don't know what it is, I think, how how we're gonna inflate them down there, but we're gonna yeah

Yeah, and then then it'll like all lift up like up like up. Yeah I Also saw ping pong balls. Oh if we fill the Titanic with ping pong balls Find it one find it find it one. Yeah. Yeah to ping pong balls. Okay. Find it. One, find it. Find it. One. Yeah. Yeah. Two ping pong balls.

More plastic in our oceans. Great. Love that. That one got shut down because they would just implode right away. Yeah. Apparently like glass balls would work for this. Glass is good under pressure, but the amount of glass needed would be like the relevant glass would cost like $238 million. So they keep running into these problems where like even if we did find it and we could lift it,

the way that we do it would either be like prohibitively expensive or we would need to build a bunch of specialized infrastructure to make it or it has like some physics component that doesn't quite make sense in the execution. Yeah. One of the impractical ways that was suggested to raise the Titanic was to pump it with enough liquid nitrogen to freeze it and effectively create an iceberg with the Titanic inside, which would then float to the surface. Wait, what? Yeah, like flash freeze it. Let's just freeze the sucker into a big iceberg. Ice is lighter than water. It'll float. Even if it's got a Titanic in it? I didn't say this was a good idea. And in fact, I'll come out and say it's a bad idea. And it was very expensive and very impractical and it was quickly dropped. Yes. Yes. I imagine all the animals that you would like freeze in there too. And then they would like thaw on the surface and then angler fish.

Oh, that's so sad. And this is very common, these raise the Titanic schemes. And again, these all operate under the belief that the wreck is in one big piece. In actual fact, if you want to raise the Titanic, you're going to need a bowl. Like it's in a lot of chunks. Yeah.

One big name in the hunt is a Texan oil tycoon named Jack Grim, known for his previous attempts to find Noah's Ark, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and the passage to the center of the earth at the North Pole. Serious guy. A serious man with serious endeavors and putting himself to the work admirably. Notably, one of his methods for locating the wreck is that he has a monkey named Titan Whom he has trained to divine the location of Titanic and pointed out on a map scientific as well. Yes serious and scientific

I see that now a twin Peaks kind of like Dale Cooper like there's a hint of mysticism to the whole process, right? Yeah, I bet he has a lot of things that come to him in dreams You know, yeah Grimm actually comes a lot closer than you would think based on the way that I just described him, but no dice. You mean the monkey? The monkey thing is the closest. He ended up getting rid of the monkey. I thought you were saying he shot the monkey.

I don't know what he did with the monkey. And I can't promise that he didn't shoot the monkey. I hope he didn't shoot the monkey. Don't shoot the Titan monkey, God. The crown of the lucky winner who gets to discover the site of the wreck of the Titanic goes to a Marine geologist named Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Robbie B.

Robbie B. Who on September 1st, 1985, finds the wreck site using an unmanned, remote controlled robot camera. Ballard is there doing Cold War work for the US Navy, examining the wreckage of two nuclear subs, the USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion, but he's haggled it so that he's allowed to search

for the Titanic on the side. Ah. Like he came into the Navy like, hey, I he's allowed to search for the Titanic on the side. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh uhhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uh hours. Passion projects, baby. You gotta have them. They keep you motivated. Yeah. They're just, I guess, sitting there at one something in the morning looking at the same boring feed after boring feed because we're just sweeping the floor and then we start to see things that look like not rocks and then we find the Titanic's boiler. One of these things that this guy recognized is that you actually want to look for a pattern of debris, smaller debris, because it won't be in one piece. It will have collapsed due to the pressure,

even if it did sink in one piece. Because now that's got all this pressure on it, so it'll be shit everywhere. And he just kind of found what he described as these kind of comet trails of debris that led back to the Titanic. Yeah. That was the strap, that was the tack.

Good mind. Did it on the side of his desk too, while looking at these other nuclear submarines. Yeah. That was the strat, that was the tack. Good mind. Did it on the side of his desk too while looking at these other nuclear submarines. Yeah. I'll spare you the details of the enormous conflict that emerged about who owns the Titanic wreckage. But to make a long story short, a US company, RMS Titanic Inc, owns the salvage rights, and the UK and the US government's share oversight of the wreckage site itself, which they need

to maintain in accordance with UNESCO rules since the wreckage site itself, which they need to maintain in accordance with UNESCO rules since the wreck was declared a World Heritage Site in 2012. Oh, for the 100th anniversary? Now that you mention it, I wouldn't imagine, yeah, that probably has a lot to do with it. Which is really interesting because, like, a heritage site suggests some amount of maintenance and how do you maintain something that's 4,000 fucking feet under the water and decomposing and subject to the elements. Well, I guess you try and keep scavengers from it, as in humans.

Like you let the worms and the, you know, lamp rays do their shit. But like anybody who's trying to like pull chunks of it apart, you have to prevent them from doing that. Yeah, I think that it's frowned upon to damage the ruins, but it's also a case that any artifact that was grabbable has been grabbed by now. Yeah. Shortly after the wreck's discovery, manned underwater expeditions commenced. In order to access the wreck, you need a submersible, which you would typically deploy from a larger

ship on the water's surface. The submersible maintains communications with this mothership during the dive and returns straight upon completion. The years after the discovery of the wreck are characterized by the exploration of the wreck, including a scientific exploration, debunking old myths about the sinking if sunk in two pieces, finding new species of sea cucumber. There's this thing that they have called rusticles that are these like rust type icicles that hang off the ship. Yeah, like if they're on the bow Yeah, like on the railing you see them a lot. Yeah, and

Apparently those have a specific type of bacteria inside them that has never been observed anywhere else Whoa, it has like the name of it. The Latin name of it is like something Titanic a you know what I mean? Oh Yeah, there's a lot of interesting, they found a bunch of like new species and subspecies living down there. In addition to science, however, there is also, as you said, scavenging, as explorers strip the wreck of its many artifacts, taking anything that isn't glued down, parentheses, with algae? Question mark? End parentheses. Yeah, period. So how do you feel about the taking of things from the Titanic?

A plate, a mirror, a locket? Where are they going? So again, the salvage rights belong to RMS Titanic Inc., which is basically this incorporation of American businessmen that people seem to have pretty mixed opinions on. Some people seem to think they're quite shady. I did see in a Business Insider article by Catherine Long called Dwarf Tossing Duck Dynasty and Al Capone's Vault inside the strange company that effectively controls access to the Titanic, that a federal judge blocked them from selling their collection of Titanic artifacts as anything other than a complete set to be displayed in a publicly visible exhibition.

So there is that. Me personally, I just feel like, no, leave it there, dog. Like, people died. It's a memorial site. Let that wreck be what it was. But I guess then on the other hand, I'm like, but the china, that's cool to see. I don't quite understand the impulse to like, I want this and I wanna take it for my own collection, like private collection thing. Like that feels strange to me. That's because you don't need to have things, Josie.

Some people need to have to possess. I don't know. I've gone to like the claw machine arcade and I'm like, I have to have that stuffy. That's fair. That is fair. So I know the impulse. I'm not immune, but I just feel as if.

It's a historical site. So I understand if like a museum wants to spend all that time and money, okay. But to like pull it up for your own personal like, I don't know. I mean, this is sort of the question of archaeology writ large, isn't it? It's not really specific to the Titanic. This is the question of the pillage of artifacts in any context. Yeah. I mean, there are cases though, I think with archaeology where it's like,

oh, let's build a gas station here. And we like dig, dig, dig. It's like, oh, shit, this is this thing. Like, well, in that case, I'm like, leave it. We don't need a fucking gas station. That's rad. But I guess in some cases, you have to move things in order to build other newer things on top of them. Like gas stations. But no one's building on... We need gas stations, Josie. I know. Well, what do you think? It's so case by case and almost bizarrely

artifact by artifact. Yeah. Like they got the bell that they would have rung to alert the captain of the iceberg. Okay. When I see something like that get salvaged, I'm like, that is a very important part of history.

Absolutely take it. Yeah. But then I see them, like, they bring up safes and they get them open. And this one has only like a couple of doubloons in it, but this one has like a bunch of bonds in it. Yeah. Like to me, there's something, I guess, like almost salacious, like robbing a grave. Yeah.

I feel that. And I should say that is actually Eva Hart, your girl Eva Hart, she shares this belief. She says, it was my father's grave and I would rather it were left untouched. Yeah. And I think that's a pretty big consideration that you have to take into account. Does it mean anything to you if I told you that despite the perception of the ship as a grave site, no human bodies have ever been discovered there." I have heard this, read this, seen this, because Caitlin Doughty, she did like a little YouTube video on the Titanic dead, and she talked about how James Cameron can confirm that. He's been down there. Never seen that person. James Cameron is...

Impeccable. Is such an interesting figure in this whole saga. It's so wild. Daddy Cam. He's such an interesting guy. He's such an interesting guy. Yeah. The reason that no human bodies have been discovered there is likely a mix of the flotation effect of life jackets,

underwater scavengers. Big time. And the dissolution of bones in very deep water due to what Robert Ballard calls the calcium carbonate compensation depth, which we will just take his word for. Okay. Sounds good, Robert.

Your bones go, uh-uh, too deep. Mashed potato bone. And then crabs get it. Makes sense. People died, Taylor. I know. Well, what do you want me to do? I didn't dissolve their bones, man. I don't have any control over that.

It's true. I can only control how I react to it. And I'm not controlling that well. I acknowledge that. That was an interesting thing that Caitlin Doughty was pointing out is that because those life vests keep you afloat, some of those bodies, those corpses were carried like 200, 300 miles from the wreck site. They're just on the currents. Bobbing along because they're floating. Yeah, which is terrifying. Says one explorer who's very familiar with the wreck,

I've seen zero human remains. We've seen clothing. We've seen pairs of shoes, which would strongly suggest there was a body there at one point. Yeah. But we've never seen any human remains. That explorer is film director, James Cameron.

I thought so. Oh my. Your boy Jim. Who has been to the wreck 33 times in submersibles of his own design. Jim, that's a lot. It's quite a few times. That's a lot, Jimmy. Would you ask a fish not to swim? And that's the Titanic wreck, but he's also done like the Challenger Deep, which is the

deepest part of the Mariana Trench, which is the deepest fucking part of the ocean. Yeah, yeah. Whoa. He's a big submersible guy, which is again, not an impulse that I necessarily relate to. We cramped. Hell no. Very cramped, very small, very hot. I would imagine it gets quite sweaty down there. Yeah. I don't need that. And when you're down there, if it goes wrong, depending where you are, like certainly at the time that James Cameron would have been exploring the Challenger Deep, there was no one to come and get him. Right. Yeah. He's in the only thing that can go this deep. It's an experimental craft. No, I wouldn't. I wouldn't do it. I mean, I'm happy to look

at the pictures and everything that comes from it, but oh yeah, great footage. Those could be unmanned. We don't have to put a tiny gym in there. No, but James Cameron wants to be in this. He's a sick fuck. He loves it. I know. It's his favorite. He can't wait to go back down. Get late. Yeah.

Yeah. Notably Jimbo and Bill Paxton were exploring the wreck when 9-11 happened. And you can see the footage of them like surfacing and finding out about 9-11 in his his documentary Ghosts of the Abyss. Whoa! Because he was good buddies with James Cameron from fucking Titanic and what better thing to do, what better gimmick for the next fucking documentary I'm

doing than to actually go down with Bill Paxton. The actor who plays the scientist, yeah. Yes, like his character in the 1997 movie. And then they come up and 9-11 happened. There's so many layers I can't, like it all, I'm like a mashed potato bone. There's just like too much pressure on my brain. If you can't tell, it's a bit of a Wild West situation

when it comes to who's allowed to access the wreck of the Titanic. Yeah, seems it. If you've got the money, the interest, and something that'll get you down there, go nuts. It only makes sense that eventually the idea of deep sea tourism for the very wealthy would enter the equation. Such expeditions have been carried out safely in certified and tested vehicles, and it should be noted that pre-Titan, the exploration of Titanic insubmersibles had a flawless track

record as far as death and injury. Oh, wow. And I think maybe just submersibles in general, like private submersibles of this type in general had a very, very clean, clean, clean record on this sort of thing, which is probably why there isn't so much regulation on it because they had effectively self-policed really well

up to this point, maybe. Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, it's not like the helicopter issue or like the tiny jet. What's the helicopter issue that they're very unsafe? Remember Episode 16? We were together when Kobe died. What am I thinking? Yeah, it wasn't even an episode, but an episode of our lives. Yeah, it was an effort. I was going through an episode there.

However, it is also true that while there are third party organizations that will certify your private submersible as being seaworthy and rigorously tested, you are not required to certify your vehicle in any way, even if you are taking private customers with you. Oh, okay. So it doesn't matter who you put in there. If it goes chug a chug on down then it can go

Yeah, we're in international waters. I think is part of it Yeah, and it was exactly that sort of case the case of an organization bringing paying passengers on for what is Effectively a luxury immersive adventure to the shipwreck of the Titanic on the seafloor That's exactly what was happening when in 2023, the non-certified experimental submersible Titan, captained by Ocean Gate CEO Stockton Rush, took four paying passengers down to observe the wreck. This was not the first such expedition

for either Rush or the Titan itself. It was, however, the last. It's so wild to think of it as like, yeah, this very luxury experience of going down because all of a sudden I'm like, are they wearing evening gowns? Like, what china did they use? You know, which I know is kind of different because what they're wearing is like, you know, zip up suits that look futuristic and like-

Like Katy Perry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they look like Katy Perry. It's that same kind of I get to play dress up. I don't say that to like infantilize these folks in whatever way, but you get to play explorer if that is not something that you do every day. These people had different levels of experience with this type of thing. In fact, one of them is actually like a really, really experienced Titanic

diver. But in general, the service is you give us six figures, we give you access to the Titanic. Yeah. And it is six figures a seat, negotiable six figures a seat, but I saw like 250K is the starting price. Whoa, that's pretty wild. Yeah, so it really is stuff for the very wealthy

to like indulge that sort of desire to see history up close, I guess. Yeah. In some ways, it's like at least the Titanic was like passage across an ocean. It was like, oh, I need to go see my sick grandson or like, oh, I have business in New York. Like I need to get over there. Coming back for my honeymoon, whatever it is.

This is just like total tourism through and through. If a seat became available to you, we have a bittersweet infamy media pass and we get one ticket. I don't get to go this time, unfortunately. We've decided, well, you love the water. So you're gonna go. This is true.

For free, not six figures, for free. Okay, for free. It fell into your lap. Would you do it? Well, not after the 2023 Titan submersible implosion, no. Fair. Fair. But within the hypothetical of your story, of your question,

I would be tempted. I think I would. It'd be like, oh, this is safe, and this is cool, and I could talk about it on the podcast. Yes. What a cool thing to do. What a cool thing to do. What a cool thing to see. You know, like when I write a bro into the Grand Canyon.

Hell, yeah. Let's get on here. Yeah, you know, like for some reason, those are equivalent in my. No, yeah, they're the same. Sure. Well, Richard Stockton Rush might agree with me. Sorry, Richard Stockton Rush,ton Rush might agree with you. Sorry, Richard Stockton Rush III might agree with you. Oh, don't forget, the third. He's got three slashes after that last name.

He was born in 1962 to a wealthy San Francisco family, the local art center that the symphony plays in is named after his grandmother. Just like a family of like people with money and philanthropists. Yeah. And so it is with our boy Stockton Rush. He's a descendant through his father of two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush. Oh wow. So they got together. Yeah. They banged. His two grandpas, yeah. Yeah, his grandpappy one and grandpappy dose. Yeah.

He has like a really classic like American guy face, I would say. Like this is a man who votes Republican. The chin, is it all the chin? He's very chiseled. I bet he was quarterback in high school. You know what I mean? Like if a bald eagle were a guy.

Not bald though, like very luxurious. He looks very handsome guy. RIP. I'm sorry, there's like a, the like beak look and the, I don't know. I like it. He looks like someone a golden girl would date and they would all be like frisky for him.

Oh, okay. That's his energy. That's nice, yeah. Hot 60 something guy. Yeah, yeah. Stockton as he. That's nice, yeah. Hot 60-something guy. Yeah, yeah. Stockton, as he's known, is seemingly afforded a childhood of luxury and adventure. He shows a big interest in space exploration, aviation, and aquatics.

By the age of 18, he's a trained pilot and scuba diver. In the 80s, he studies aerospace engineering at Princeton and business administration at UC Berkeley. So engineering background plus MBA background. Damn. Rush works in the aviation field, but he gradually becomes more and more enamored of diving and submersibles as a hobby.

In 2009, he and his business partner, Guillermo Sonline found Ocean Gate in Everett, Washington with the idea of using deep diving submersibles for commercial tourism. So kind of what we've been discussing. Yeah. You've got money, we've got a sub, let's make this happen. Yeah, yeah.

You wanna see what's down there, we wanna show you. This is a frontier that is so unexamined and deep ocean is like the new outer space. You can really sell it, you can sell it well. We know more about outer space than we do about deep ocean. Like, be the real adventurer and come down below. There's no like fucked up things with like, all the scary like tentacle and claw things that you would expect to exist in outer space actually exist in deep ocean. It's dreadful.

This is true. Yeah. Yeah. Ocean Gate runs three submersibles, Antipodes, Cyclops 1, and Titans. So little Greek theme there. Designed to go the deepest of the three, the Titan seats five people sitting crisscrossed applesauce in a cylindrical carbon fiber composite hull. A dick. That's what you're saying. Kinda.

Yeah. The carbon fiber hull is attached to a separate spherical titanium cap bonded together by titanium rings. So I prepared a visual aid here. So the head and the penis is that what you're saying? Yeah, you got it. Okay. I prepared a visual aid here. True facts, not once in preparing this did it occur to me that it looks like a dick.

Oh my god! Not when you pointed it out like, well duh, yeah. But I just didn't think about it because I was so busy making my little model of the Titan submersible. Your little dick. My little chode, which is a toilet paper tube with a golf ball in one end. I was so busy making my little model of the Titan submersible. Your little dick. My little chode, which is a toilet paper tube with a golf ball in one end. But yeah, so that's one of my visual aids is that sort of how the Titan looks.

Thank you. I like it. I feel visually aided. Thank you. Good. That was the intention. So carbon fiber hull, titanium cap bonded together by titanium rings. These are uncommon

materials for this purpose. Carbon fiber is much more typically found in aircrafts which makes sense given Rush's background in aerospace. It is a material that works well under tension as in being pulled by air. It does not work well under pressure which the Titanic deep ocean has a lot of six thousand pounds per square inch to be exact. So since this is like a fiber composite, you imagine that it's sort of woven a very tightly woven threads effectively, right?

Okay. Okay. Which makes sense that the pulling, cause it maybe even like have some slack in the pulling. Yeah. But under pressure, all of that slack just, they described it as the difference between pushing and pulling rope and something that I watched Okay, okay, and you didn't think of dick somehow miss that one, too Didn't even clock pushing out. You know when you have to shut off certain parts of your brain to get the assignment

Yeah, no masturbating Taylor just straight Titanic I'll come back later. I'll come back later. So many of Russia's fellow explorers criticize this choice of material, but Stockton takes pride in breaking the conventional rules of the industry, and he's especially scornful of what he sees as unnecessary regulations that stand in the way of innovation. That big Republican chin. You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you want to be safe, don't get out of bed, don't get in your car, don't

do anything. At some point, you're going to take some risk and it really is a risk reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules. If you want to cross the Atlantic, why be safe? Don't bring a lifeboat. Don't bring enough lifeboats for everybody. Yeah. What the fuck, dude? Are you,

like, read the fucking room? What are you doing? But I think this speaks to, there's a type of person who is this guy who doesn't really believe in their own mortality this way and thinks that, again, like, sort of through magical thinking, I didn't implode the last time I was down there, so I'm not going to implode this time. Yeah. Take chances to make mistakes get messy. And there is that sense of immortality that like the billionaire brain kind of has, right? Because it's like, I'll just upload my consciousness to the ether. It's fine. It will all be fine. One person who vehemently disagrees is Ocean Gates Director of Marine Operations, David Lockridge, who in 2018 prepares a 10 page report documenting his concerns about the

Flaws and Titan. Oh wow, just that singular, that biggest five person submersible, right? Not the other two. I haven't looked into the other two because they didn't very famously implode. Right, fair. You know what I mean? So it might be them two because like if this guy is running a shoddy shop on one submersible, he's going to be doing it in all of them, right?

To explain to you, I guess in more detail why this structure is not good. And this is where most of the science in this episode comes in, but I think it's quite digestible science or it's science that I found easy to understand. First of all, we've got this carbon fiber hull, which is the shaft of our deck. Okay, thank you. Use terms I can understand, Taylor. There you go. So the carbon fiber hull, in addition to this shape

kind of not being a very good one for withstanding pressure. Yeah, yeah. As we get lower, we've got pressure of like 6,000 pounds per square inch or whatever it was, right? Like it's a really a lot, a lot of pressure down there. And because the material is woven together, the carbon fiber, there's the possibility

that the saltwater penetrates the kind of the microscopic gaps in between those threads and crystallizes. And that starts a process called the delamination. Okay. And delamination is basically the separation of layers within a material, particularly composites or coating, things that are meant to be congealed together

as one thing, but because they are fundamentally made up of, cause it's a composite, it's made up of different things. Yeah. Those things can separate, right? Okay, and then when you're down there you want something apparently that's impenetrable steel steel is good No room. It's just one big thing where all the molecules locked together, right? Yeah, we've tested steel We like steel go with steel, right? I mean isn't that what the Titanic was made of too? And it was unsinkable, right?

that what the Titanic was made of too. And it was unsinkable. Right. Then we've got this titanium, which is appropriate end cap, which is attached to this carbon thing. You don't want to unlike materials, one that's like a carbon fiber and one that's like a titanium, which are really ones like manmade ones like titanium,

those expanded contract at different rates. If you have to attach them to one another, there's places where that could expand or contract at different rates or react differently to pressure or whatever it is. It's not stable. Yeah. Putting those two together in a really high pressure situation. No bueno. Yes. That's the science for this episode. That was cool. Having the visuals is very helpful, but that idea of the delamination too, is really interesting I think,

because I think like my little puppy dog brain would just be like, oh, it got squished. But the idea that like the material actually comes apart under pressure, even though pressure implies that things come together, it's counterintuitive to my puppy dog brain. And I, right. I like that. It's interesting. If we think too about what it is good for use in, it's aeronautics where it's not going to have that same like crushing pressure. Right. Yeah. In this long, long report, Lockridge mentions that O-rings are not sealing properly, flooring material is burning and there is evidence of delamination aka holes in the hull because of the separation.

He says in no uncertain terms, Titans should not be manned during any of the upcoming trials." And it is noted that like we did not do enough trials and we did not do them well kind of thing. We did like one trial once and that was all we did. Yeah, in like Bermuda with like a stingray and two feet of water. Yeah. Yes. Lockridge and Rush then have a meeting in front of others.

I don't know who, unspecified others. And basically Lockridge says is that like, based on his experience, none of this is gonna be able to work. Yeah, yeah. You've got a big fat dead. Don't even drop it in the water. None of this works.

Yeah. And Rush replies, I've got a nice granddaughter. I'm gonna be around. I understand this kind of risk and I'm going into it with eyes open. And I think this is one of the safest things I will ever do. I can come up with 50 reasons why we have to call it off

and we fail as a company. I'm not dying. No one is dying under my watch, period. That's such a strange start. I've got a nice granddaughter. It's like- He means like, I wanna be around dying under my watch. Period. That's a strange start. I've got a nice granddaughter. It's like he means like I want to be around to enjoy my granddaughter. I assume is what he's getting at there. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. But then to just it feels I mean obviously hindsight, right? But it just feels so blind to be like I want to be alive. So I'm going to will this

thing to work. Don't you worry. And I'm going take it further. No one else is gonna get hurt. You know, it's just like- Because I'm the main character. So no one around me- Because I've built the biggest ship in the world because Titanic is a grand ship and she'll never sink. Unsinkable. Unsinkable. What a character you're doing now. Thank you. Yeah, it was a little like sea shanty vibe.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, was that what that was? I don't know, but I had the yellow slicker on in my brain and the hat, the matching hat. The killer from I Knew What You Did Last Summer. The hook. Yeah, yeah. So after this meeting, Lockridge is fired. He takes his concerns to OSHA.

He also sues Ocean Gate, who counters you, Messy Messy. Oh, I hate to OSHA. He also sues Ocean Gate, who counters you. Messy, messy. Oh, I hate to see it. The report that Lockridge prepared leaks during an annual conference of private sub makers. The two weeks of the year that they're meeting, this is when this report leaks, of course. And it comes to the attention of a guy named William Conan, who is himself the president and CEO of a submersible company and very, very involved in a bunch of different aquatic safety and submersible type organizations from what I could tell. Okay.

He drafts a letter to Stockton Rush, warning him of the imminent danger if he continues to use this submersible. The letter is signed by three dozen industry members. I thought you were gonna say three, but it's three dozen? Three dozen. Stockton takes offense. We have heard the baseless cries

of you're going to kill someone way too often. Oh my God, listen. I take this as a serious personal insult. You're too close to the work. Have a day off. Like, don't take it personally, baby. It's safety. His argument is he's like a real like all regulation is bad.

And in general, I'm pro-regulation for a lot of things. Like anything that has to do with like life or death safety, I'm very pro-regulation. Food. I love regulation around my food preparation. That's fun. I love dairy best buy dates. Thank you Al Capone. Like, that's great.

Yeah. He compares Ocean Gate to other innovative experimental passenger organizations like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Blue Origin, who recently sent Katy Perry and Oprah's buddy up to space. In another dick-shaped vehicle, let it be noted. Also of note, Ocean Gate lists its partners and consultants as Boeing, NASA, and University of Washington, all of whom deny having worked with the group, as well as William

Conan, the guy who drafted the letter warning Rush that his subs weren't safe. Oh, whoa. I saw on the CBC Fifth Estate where they tell him like, do you know that this website has you listed as a consultant? He's like, oh no, we see the news get broken to him. Oh my God. But he consulted supposedly on this project. No, his response is very cute because he goes, oh, thank you. I guess I'm a consultant.

Thanks. Thank you. Other problems continue to crop up with the subs. So the way these subs work is that they're controlled by a gaming controller, which is my second visual aid. Oh my gosh. Thank you. So the one that they were using was an Xbox. This is a PS5 controller. I like the PS5 controller. It's got a good heft in your hand. say that I am open to the idea of controlling a submersible this way because it is easier, but it does contribute to the, I guess the impression that the setup is a little ratchet. Yeah. And there's also a situation where they were in the Titan and the Titan was spinning around

and they had to fix it by holding the controller sideways. Oh God. That was the fix to that. A lot of loud cracking noises from the hull, which they're like, Oh, this is a common trait of carbon fiber. But according to James Cameron, who did a lot of interviews about this after the fact, I think, cause he was kind of chapped that the Coast Guard didn't bring him in on the

investigation. He wanted to air him out of it. He's like, I'm the guy. What are you doing? He's like, I'm James Cameron. That guy. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. He's probably calling up like, I'm James Cameron. Do do do, do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do You don't want at any point to be hearing cracking noises from the hull. That's not normal. That means you have a serious structural problem. There's no scenario in which that's just the creek. You know, it's plastic. It's not- It's the house settling.

It's the submersible settling. That's Nana. Yeah. She's saying hi. Like, no. That's old lady Rose. She's waving hello, banging the heart of the ocean against the hull outside. You don't want those bangs, apparently, at all.

When the Titan goes down for the final time on June 18th, 2023, it's carrying Ocean Gate CEO Stockton Rush, who's 61, along with four paying passengers called mission specialists at a negotiable $250,000 ahead. Had the Titan gone down this far ever before? Yes, they have. Other passengers have come in and out without incident, but again, they report like, oh, we got stuck spinning around

and we had to turn the control sideways or we heard this clanging, banging, imploding, some have said noise. Hamish Harding is a 58 year old British businessman. He's the founder and chairman of Action Aviation, an international aircraft brokerage company based in Dubai. He's visited the South Pole three times, traveled to space with Blue Origin, like our girl, Katy Perry.

And relevantly, he's been to the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench, which is the lowest known spot of the ocean floor. So he has experience with this type of deep dive, if not this exact same thing. 77-year-old Frenchman Paul-Henri Nourjolais is described by the New York Times as titanic royalty, well known for having visited the wreck many times before, to the point where he has a friendly rivalry with James Cameron over who's visited the wreck more. Oh.

This is Narshali's 36th or 37th dive. Whoa. And he's been a very active and engaged scholar and researcher of the wreck since his first dive in 1987. So he's kind of like a titanic personality guy, which would make you think that he might have more wisdom than to get in such an untested Vehicle. Yeah, but perhaps again after you go down 36 times you think there's no way it'll happen this time, right? I will say the submersible community like the private exploratory

submersible community is very defensive as a whole about this whole incident because it sort of became the big pop cultural image of these submersibles to the point where I asked you Josie would you do this you said no you fucking implode or whatever they actually have a pretty safe record apparently yeah because there was such a big high-profile fuck-up done by someone acting recklessly and against the constant advice of everyone around him. And it left five people dead on like a global stage. Yeah.

I think that there's a lot of annoyance and defensiveness around the fact that this is what people think of when they think of private submersibles now. That makes sense. So this community would be like, we told you so. At least it's in writing that everyone told him so though. There's like a lot of documentation that says that people told him

that this was not a good idea. Three dozen signatures. That's a lot of signatures. Also on the submersible, Shahzada Dawood 48 is a Pakistani businessman and philanthropist from a very wealthy family of business people and philanthropists, not unlike Stockton Rush's own family. Okay.

He is to be accompanied by his wife Christine, but she gives up her seat for their 19 year old son, Suleiman Dawood. Oh, that's so sad. That's very sad. Suleiman is noted as being both excited and uneasy about the adventure, but he brushes away his fears in order to join his father for this opportunity, which takes place on Father's Day.

No! Yeah, it's a sad one. The Titan is brought to the wreck site by its mothership, the Polar Prince, a former Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker run out of St. John's, Newfoundland. On Sunday morning at 9.18am, the Titan descends below the surface. It maintains steady communication via pings until it sends a final text communication at 10.47am at an approximate depth of 30,341m, which is 10,961 feet. The text communication says dropped to weights, WTS. This implies perhaps that the vessel knew something

was wrong and released its emergency weights in an attempted ascent but we can only speculate 93 minutes after launch the polar prince loses tracking and communications with the Titan protocol in such situations as to wait some undefined amount of time before contacting the Coast Guard this is a pretty rare situation right there's not a lot of precedent to this. Yeah, not a lot of regulation around it. The team on the Polar Prince waits 12 hours until the scheduled time of resurfacing, because this was supposed to be a 12 hour trip.

And then when they don't surface, that's when they phone it into the Coast Guard. Okay, yeah. I may have done it a little earlier, considering we lost communication, but. Oh, backseat fucking Polar Princess over here. Polar Princess indeed, considering we lost communication. Oh, backseat fucking polar princess over here. Polar princess indeed, yes, yes indeed. So a multi-day media circus ensues from here, and I wonder what was your experience of this,

because this happened in 2023, and by then we were certainly doing the podcast, and certainly I had my ear out for like, when I heard this I knew I'm not going to do this right now, but I might do it in a couple years and here we are. Yeah, I think it was kind of hitting me maybe in the same way. But I think I also was just like, immediately struck with the hubris of it all. Of like, wait, you're going to look at the Titanic? Like, uh... A Titanic, a ship that was famously sunk because they ignored a bunch of warnings.

Right. And plowed ahead recklessly. Clear warnings, yeah. Much ado is made in the media about the submersible's supposed 96 hours of oxygen. Cause again, we don't know that it's imploded. We've just lost comms at this point. Yeah.

So we have like, are they down there slowly running out of air? There's a clock on this. Are we running out of time? Yeah. Stay tuned. It definitely has that aura. There's a lot made of mysterious banging noises that are supposedly being heard

at half hour intervals from the mid Atlantic. So maybe we've got like a little wrench, you know? Yeah. All right, we got the Xbox controller and we're banging against the hull. Right. Here to piss on that melodramatic parade is James Cameron. Oh, wow.

He notes that when he was told of the circumstances under which the Titan lost communications and tracking, two separate systems at the same time, he and others in the community quickly suspected that this could only be a catastrophic implosion of the Titan due to the substandard construction of the vessel that had been brought to Stockton Rush's attention again and again and again. Cameron is scornful of the media for giving victims' families false hope, and he holds a specific grudge over the implausible, mysterious banging noises story, saying it would be like quote hearing a sparrow fart over the cacophony of an airport.

Oh god. Jimmy John. Worst fears are confirmed when on June 22nd, 2023 after a long search conducted by multiple branches of the Canadian and American militaries the US Coast Guard confirms the shattered wreck of the Titan has been discovered on the ocean floor, 1600 feet northeast of the Titanic's bow. Whoa. Another Titan wrecked on the Shoals of history. Yeah. Says our boy, James Cameron, doing the heavy lifting for me. I would submit that there's a terrible irony here. Here, at the wreck of Titanic,

we now have another wreck that is unfortunately based on the same principle of not heating warnings. Yeah. Did they find any bodies? Stockton Rush, along with Hamish Harding, Paul-Henry Nurgilay, and Shazada and Sulaiman Dawood, will all have been, effectively, vaporized in the implosion. will all have been effectively vaporized in the implosion. Whoa. Says Rob McCallum, a noted deep sea explorer and one of the many who warned Stockton Rush about the Titan.

The whole volume of the submersible collapses in about two milliseconds and it takes about 25 milliseconds for the human brain to detect the threat. So it's not so much that you die, it's that you cease to exist. Yeah. It's almost the perfect end. I mean, we all gotta go.

And if you go like that, then that's pretty... Why not get vaporized under extreme pressure? You considered that one. Gosh. But that is way more comforting than like the wrench, you know, Xbox controller. Before you even hear the snap, you're gone. There is the implication that maybe because they released these weights that perhaps they

had heard some cracking or something were on their way up. But in terms of the actual moment of the implosion, it would have happened faster than they could even comprehend that they no longer existed. Or pain, you know, because that's the other thing, that is pain. Yeah. On July 6th, 2023, Ocean Gate suspends all operations. Despite the tragedy, adventure tourism is still in high demand. Regulations around certification have not changed. Perhaps some stories are doomed to be endlessly retold. Even Titanic changed regulations so that there were more lifeboats and stuff like that. They're not doing that with this? Who's they? That's it's international waters.

I guess so. And it's like rogue billionaires, millionaires who are doing it too. So it's not like you're a shipping company that's bringing people across waters, that there would be a lot of opportunity to regulate, but there are companies, but it's just that most of them are doing an okay job of what they're doing. Right? Like they're bringing down trained professionals.

They're taking proper safety precautions. Their transportation devices will have been designed over many years and tested and tested and tested and destroyed and destroyed and destroyed and tested and destroyed. And this guy had thought that like he wanted to be Elon, he wanted to be Steve Jobs. He wanted to be better than bad luck and bad craftsmanship, and he wasn't. In July 2024, an expedition to Titanic's wreck placed a small plaque on the seafloor in honor of the late Paul-Henri Nardjalaï, the French explorer, in his contributions to Titanic knowledge. Now that Nardjalaï has gone, his mantle of biggest Titanic superfan in the world is seated to the one and only

James Cameron, whom I will give the final word to sum up not just this episode, but Titanic April as a whole. Oh my gosh! Jimmy Cam! Here we go! Titanic is like a fractal. At first you think you see the pattern, and then when you get closer and closer, you realize that there are whole other patterns and whole other details that emerge.

It's simultaneously the most well-described and most well-understood disaster probably in history, and yet there are still mysteries. And on that note, we dock in Manhattan successfully. My gosh, there's the Statue of Liberty. There's the Statue of Liberty for the end of Titanic April. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com

or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our Ko-fi account. K-O-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinthemy. But no pressure, bittersweetinthemy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at bittersweetinthemy, or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you

think would dig it. Stay sweet. The sources that I used for this week's Mimphemous include an article from honeycombbread.com, Charles Loffin, published August 26, 2025, written by Bingjeman Vickers. I listened to episode 348 of My Favorite Murder. Episode title is Old Biscuit, which was released October 13th, 2022. And I looked at the Wikipedia article for Charles Jaff.

article for Charles Jaffa. I watched the 60 Minutes Australia episode Unfathomable, and I also watched the full version of their interview with James Cameron on their YouTube channel 60 Minutes Australia. I watched Fatal Flaws, the Ocean Gate story, it was a documentary by 7News Australia, and I watched Titanica, the 1992 Titanic IMAX documentary, you can watch that on YouTube at the channel Jcastro2000. And I watched How the Titanic was found by Neo on YouTube at the channel Jcastro2000, and I watched how the Titanic was found by Neo on YouTube. My reading included A Rubik's Cube, Thick Socks, and Giddy Anticipation, The Last Hours of the Titan by John Branch and Christina Goldbaum in the New York Times, July 2nd,

2023. Attempt to salvage part of the Titanic runs aground in the Los Angeles Times Archives August 31st, 1996. Stockton Rush, boss of Titan sub-firm, said No One Is Dying by Rebecca Morel for the BBC, September 23, 2024. Why Nobody Has Ever Found Human Remains Inside the Titanic, an IFL science by James Felton January 2, 2024. Who Owns the Titanic Wreck? by Mary Connolly and Kareem Kamara in The U.S. Sun, April 15, 2024.

Lastly, I read the Wikipedia articles for The Wreck of the Titanic and Rusticle. If you want more Titanic content, head over to our Ko-Fi account, ko-fi.com. Join the film club, become a subscriber like Terry, Jonathan, Lizzie D., Erica Jo, Soph, Dilla, and Satchel. You too will get access to 14 episodes of Very Sweet Film Club, including our upcoming James Cameron's Titanic 1997 episode. Very Sweet Infamy is a part of the 604 podcast network. This podcast was edited by Alex McCarthy and Lexi Johnson. Cover photo is by Luke Bentley. Our interstitial music as well as our melodica intro is by Mitchell Collins. The song you're currently listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele.

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