Doomed to Fail - Ep 26: Brushstrokes of Tragedy: The Byford Dolphin, Kursk Submarine, and Vincent Van Gogh

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

This week Farz tells two tales of the ultimate red flaggy relationship – humans & hubris. Hint - it’s been in the news! Farz covers two stories of man’s lust for dominance of the deep sea that end in disaster. First, the Byford Dolphin Accident, which contains 0 dolphins, and many gruesome deaths. Then, the Kursk submarine incident, where Russia’s inability to get along with anyone, caused things to go from bad to worse. Then, you’d think this would lighten the mood - but it really doesn’t - Taylor takes us on a journey through the colorful, manic, and ultimately tragic life of Vincent Van Gogh. Who was the most famous painter of all time? Chances are you have something Vincent painted in your house right now. We all know that he wasn’t successful in life and that he cut off his ear. But why?? We’ll explore. https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpodVincent’s paintings, Vincent & Jo Van Gogh, & Byford via the public domainKursk via Wikipedia & Popular Mechanics Some Sources:Van Gogh: The LifeWhatever version of Gardners Art Through the Ages that came out when Taylor was in college https://www.vangoghbrabant.com/ Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortthall James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. So, Taylor? Yeah. This is our last week of anonymity? Wow. I just, I just went out and went to Walmart, you know, just to. Be unrecognized in public for once, fine, for the last time. I went and triggered a stranger's hand of the grocery store because they weren't ever going to have this chance again because we're going to be so famous. Perfect.

Perfect. We'll go ahead and kick things off. I'll make the intro. Welcome to Doom to Fail, the podcast where Taylor and I explore two relationships, one historic and one usually true prime, although our promise tends to change all the time. There are full of red flags. I'm Fars, joined here by Taylor. Hi, Taylor. Hi, Fars.

I'm so excited to be here. I know it's Sunday and it's late in the weekend. We usually record earlier, but you had your parents in town and I had to work yesterday. And just this week, I've been more tired than I've ever been in my whole entire life. So I feel like a human today. So I'm glad that we're doing this today. This time, this moment, like, this is exactly why I should be recording. I'm in the exact right headspace.

Because like yesterday I felt so rushed. The family was here. I had to take care of things. And earlier this morning, they were here. And now they've been gone for like an hour and a half or so. Nice. And I can just like ease my way into like normal life again, you know? So this is the exact right time.

Yeah. One, my husband took the kids to the park. Because I hate the park. I hate the park. I fucking hate it. It's boring as shit. So he takes the kids to the park because the kids love it. So obviously because of their children.

But yeah. So it's nice. I've been home for a little bit. Just kind of. I was, I've been home for. like an hour by myself and I haven't been listening to anything. I've just kind of been like trying to like get my mind around what I'm talking about this week. And I'm super excited to talk about it and to tell you.

But I've been like in a thing. So as usual, everybody knows Taylor and I never share a word of discussing beforehand. So I have no idea what Taylor's going to discuss. But I don't know why I get the feeling that there might be like a through line. There's always a through line for Merr's literally always. There is. There is. Always.

My stories are very unique, though, but we'll get to that in a second. I think today I go first. Is that right? Yes. So why don't you tell us where your signature cocktail is, where your signature drink, where your story? Okay. I also want to just, I'm going to do that in a second, I promise.

But I also wanted to say part of the reason that I feel like I'm in this, like, crazy mind space of the moment is because, like, this whole week I've been reading this book on what I'm going to talk about later. and I listened to it because, like, everyone, I have, like, a shit ton of stuff to do, but it was, like, 48 hours. So I was, like, in this book. And I was, like, you know, bringing the kids to swim lessons and trying to get in my steps. I was, like, walking around the pool, listening to this book and, like, taking notes in my notes app and, like, trying to, like, really be in it. So, and then I was reminded that I read this, like, dumb ass posts on, like, Instagram or LinkedIn, or some dude was, like, you know, exercise is much to do this.

And he was, like, and read one book a week. but audio books don't count. And I just wanted to say, book that guy. Because A, that's the, that's the advice and clueless that Cher says. She says, let's read one non-school book a week. Do you remember that part? And she goes, my first book is fit or fat. You'll remember if you know. And then also, that's like super dumb, but also it's like really ableist. Like people, some people can't focus on words. People, whatever. So anyway, that's, I've been like, I think listening to this book actually put me like a lot further into the story. So that's why I've been kind of losing my mind. mind. So I just wanted to share that with you. And then also, because we're here before you get

started, I had another friend of ours that we know mutually trying to mansplain, whatever, this to me. And they were like, oh, so for every episode, do you just like read a Wikipedia page? And I was like, no, I'm reading like a whole books. And I'm like learning a ton. And I just feel like in the past six months, I've learned so much. And I hope that you have too and that other people have. Yeah. I have discovered that, you know, there's a lot of stories that we've done before where i will look at the wikipedia page and i'll read other content around it i'm like the facts just you're left up up in there in terms like what's true and what's not because you know i covered what was the guy last week the guy who killed um rsatchi and harper's bizarre i mean i

actually grown a new fascination and appreciation with magazines and the amount of like actual research that goes into publishing certain articles like harper's resort did a that is the source of truth for all this stuff there's another one i did the atlantic was a source of truth for like and and you look at the wikipedia articles for example and they're just like taking these like broad swats and copy pacing over from like actual publications that are doing really legit research work which is really really interesting so and i think it sounds silly but like then i'm like oh well they got this from this article. You're like, oh, now that I've read more than one source on this thing, I'm like getting things. So anyway, it's super fun. So this week, I am drinking cognac. Do you know

what coniac is? I've had coni. Is Hennessy coniac? Yes. I've had Hennessy. Okay. Yeah, because I was going to, it's like, it's a brandy and brandy is distilled wine, which I didn't know or understand. I feel like I haven't had brandy, but I'm sure I have. But yeah, Cognac's you might know are like Hennesse, Hennessy and Corvassier. Okay. Anyway, so that's why I'm drinking. That is not a taste profile that I particularly enjoy. Because it's like sweet, right? Like sweeter than usual.

Anyway, in real life, I'm drinking good likes. It's like a liqueur, liquor, you know, one of those things. Anyway. So, anyway. I, on the other hand, have just discovered that our, my local grocery store, HGV for anybody that's in Texas, has a passion. fruit sparkling water. I'm going to be drinking that because it has nothing to do with my story, but I just enjoy it. So let me go ahead and drink my little passion fruit, fizzly, fizy water. And then I'll go ahead and kick us off. And once again, normally I cover True Prime.

This week is a little bit different. Actually, it's a lot different. It's totally different. It's like exactly 180 degrees different. So it has nothing to do with True Crime. What's what? Oh my God. What are you telling me? Taylor, consistently, I think that we want to keep this show mostly Evergreen. so we try not to cover super topical things that are in the news. And the reason why mine is different is because I'm going to do something. Because what's been in the news this past week has actually sparked my interesting curiosity and things. And I get a lot of research on stuff. So much of the rest of the country, I was following the Titanic's immersive story very, very closely.

And mostly because I'm, one, fascinated by the ocean. Two, I always had a thing for the Titanic. Ever since I was a little kid, I've always had a thing for the Titanic. When I went to Ireland, like I went to the Titanic, I deliberately detoured to go to the Titanic Museum because I'm just like that into it. And I find the story very, very, probably has nothing to do with Jack and Rose or James Cameron. This is like predates all that stuff. Good for you. And the third one is that both the ocean and the Titanic, the story and where the ship currently lies, terrify me to no end.

So scary. But as a lover of all things horror, I'm naturally drawn to things that terrify me. and this terrifies me. Okay. So in the spirit of the ever-evolving premise here, I'm going to discuss a red-flagy relationship that almost all of us have at some point in our lives, and that is a relationship with hubris.

Okay. So, whoa, I know. I'm getting super heady with it here. So hubris, the word, is derived from the ancient Greek word for pride, insolence, outrage, and it is defined as a characteristic of one who has excessive pride or self-confidence. Usually the red flaggy parts about this are minimal in our day-to-day

lives. Maybe you have hubris that you're the best-looking person or that you're the smartest or that you made the right decisions, whatever. Usually it's just, it ends in being embarrassed or fired or losing a relationship, but it doesn't really matter. When it starts mattering is when it impacts your life in the life of those around you. And most of the time, that happens, when it happens in a consequential manner, like it did this last week with the Titan submersible and with the Titanic itself, that happens in an engineering capacity where there is an immense amount of hubris towards the engineering prowess of humanity and then it leads to horrible consequential things that end up impacting people's lives. The reason I brought the

whole Titanic Titan submersible thing was because I heard something that James Cameron said this week about how ironic it was that the Titan is on the sea floor next to the Titanic because neither leaders of those two vessels, he did all the warnings and instead relied on their own hubris to move forward, resulting in the death of others. So I'm actually doing two stories today. What is happening? Yeah, they'll be relatively quick, though I promise. But they're going to have to do with how humanities, hubris, and engineering resulted in horrible, horrible tragedies. Awesome. And these are going to be a little bit rare. These are not going to be like super obvious ones. Well, one of them might, but the other one I definitely don't think you'll know about.

cool that sounds awesome i am exactly the right age and the right sexual orientation for the movie titanic to have destroyed my life i totally believe yeah first they that was our vision of like this is romance it destroyed my life yeah no unbelievable unbelievable the amount of times i saw the movie in the theater i like how many times i like would like record on the radio you know how remember they play the slain down song with like words in it like the movie there you go my god it ruined my life i can't wait let's the two stories i'm gonna cover i'm gonna cover the more obscure one first that one also taylor just so you know a part of me was like is taylor gonna get mad at me for doing this because i'm not doing true crime and so i don't know if you're mad at me or not but i'm

already super mad at you i know i can see you squinting your eyebrows so the first one is an incident that is known as the bifor dolphin accident have you heard of this one no cool okay great that i got you wait wait wait stop read with us when we watch that okay we have that horror movie club with with our friends and we watch scary movies and there's that movie with george c scott where he trains a dolphin to kill the president of united states i didn't see that one i skipped that one oh my god it's so bad and i love george he's got so much but um it's the whole thing so george scott is amazing oh this has nothing to do with dolphins oh yes it's just called the bite for a dolphin incident

But thank you. I'm going to start with an old mainstay of oceanic disasters, which are oil rigs. In the case of the bifur dolphin, that is the name of a natural gas rig, but it's essentially the same concept as an oil rig. Humans have been very unique, or are generally very unique in our capability of going super above and beyond the loss of nature to get what we want. And oil rigs are a great example of this. Researching this really reminded me, like, how incredibly easy our lives are. Like, people do the most insane labor and work so that we have gasoline in our cars, that we have plastic, so we have, like, it's insane what people are willing to put their lives to doing to let us have the basic modern conveniences we have, and this is a good example

of that. So in the case of the rig Bifert Dolphin, this was positioned in the North Sea in November of 1983. The rig required work to be done at or near the sea floor, and it required, divers to do that given that the depths that we're talking about here are an incredible huge massive we learn all about that this week this type of diving that the people had to do on the biker dolphin is called saturation diving have you ever heard of this before okay it is a super i i snorkeled once and i was scared yeah guys go watch youtube videos of saturation divers and oh my god

take the turn the lights off and like just it is worse than any horror movie you'll ever watch because it's it okay tell me more saturation diving is like a highly highly highly highly technical still version of diving so out of all commercial divers in the united states there's only about 330 or so that are saturation divers right now so it is these people get paid a lot of money and they take a lot of risk to do what they're doing as we learn with a time disaster the lower a person or an object goes in the water column, the higher the outside pressures are that are acting on that body. That's true for all parts of the body, including oxygen and nitrogen in our bloods and our lungs. The deeper you go, typically considered somewhere around 130 feet, the more of those things get

compressed, and the longer you have to wait before coming to the surface. Right, or you get the bends. Or you get the bends. So if you go straight from, let's hypothetically say 500 feet below sea level, directly to the top, you get the bends you get decompression sickness which results you're in the nitrogen in your body expanding rapidly from all the negative pressure around you which results in damage to your blood vessels blocks the nausea confusion you lose motor you die like you almost certainly die as a result of this yeah to prevent to prevent this deep sea divers have to stop at certain

intervals to go back to the surface safely the exact interval varies depending on the person the gas combination, they're breathing, how long have they been down there, the temperature of the water, and a host of other, like, this is not hard science. Like, there's a lot of factors that go into this. What I've read is that typically it takes between two and three minutes per 10 to 15 feet of depth to go back to the surface. So it has to be like slow. It's slow. So for example, for a 500 foot dive, that would mean, if it's like a short, like you go straight down 500 feet, you do something you touch the ground and then you go back up, it takes about two hours to go back up. aren't touching the ground and going back up. They're spending eight to 10 hours on the

seafloor working, right? Obviously, companies want to mitigate how much time is lost every day by people going down to the bottom, where can they going back up? Because if you actually decompress every single day, it would be a nightmare for the divers. It would be a nightmare for the companies, the profit margins would be like all of it's bad, like none of it's good. So instead of doing that and decompressing every single day and wasting days of work, what they do instead is they stay in a pressurized tube called a diving bell that maintains the outside pressure of the depths they're working at. So if you can imagine it, there's this like object, like this spherical thing that gets dropped below the ship over the workstation on the C4. It maintains the pressure of the

seafloor. You swim out of it, go to the place where you're working, swim back into it, and then the pressure maintains, you go back up, you dock with the ship, and then you're good. And then you just stay there. Basically, you stay pressurized. hate it so when they're done diving or when they're done working they go back in the diving belt that gets wrench up to the surface to the dock or whatever it is and there is what is called a pressurized living system or a diving chamber that sits on the ship or the oil rig and that's where people the divers leave the dive belt to go into to live sleep work you know do whatever and get back in the dining bill the next morning and go back down it's all pressurized so they're in like a

spread a pressurized place but like above the water yeah yeah they're on the deck they're on the ship deck but they're in a chamber on the ship deck that is pressurized as though they're a thousand feet below the surface holy shit yeah it's crazy and the way it works is that typically if you're a saturation diver you can work about four weeks give or take in these conditions so you stay fully pressurized for four weeks and then gradually once you're done with the job they start increasing the pressure slowly slowly and that is basically reflective of them swimming further up in the water column until they're in atmospheric pressure of one makes sense yes but how do you do you do you feel normal yeah yeah your body gets adapted to it because you're breathing a special combination

right like you're not actually like it's the oxygen at that level is so compressed that they have to mix with other stuff for you to be able to breathe normally but yeah it is you do feel normal Wow. On the Bifur Dolphin, there were four saturation divers. I'm going to use their first name because two of them are Scandinavian, and that is a lot of consonants in a row that I'm not going to even try and pronounce. Their names are Edwin, Roy, Bjorn, and T-N-N-A-R-B-N-A-N-N-T-N-N-A-N-R-N-N-T-N-N-N-R-N-N-T-N-N-R-N-E-R-N-E-R-N-E-R-E-E-R-S. I said Charles, and I was like, I don't know. Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. So the diving chamber on the bifered dolphin had two parts.

So there was basically one section that was a kitchen and then another section that was like a living area and a bedroom area. So on this day in November in 1983, two of the divers, Roy and Edwin, they were resting in the dive chamber. They were sleeping, essentially. Underground or on the boat. On the boat. Okay. Yeah. On that day, so they do in shifts, right?

So Bjorn, two go down, they do the work. They go back in the diving belt, go back, hook up the chamber. and then they're up there, and then the other two come back in, and they go back down. That's the way it works. Bjorn and Trolls came up via the diving belt. Their day was done. They came up via the diving bell. At this point, all four men had been compressed to an atmosphere of nine.

So their atmospheric pressure is nine times the pressure that me and you experienced at sea level, essentially. Outside the diving chamber are two dive tenders whose job it is to safely dock the diving chamber to the diving bell. So make sure that two pieces are connected, make sure they're pressurized, and usually the way they connect them is through this thing called the trunk. So there's a passageway, the diving bell goes up, it fits onto this spherical thing. It's called the trunk. That spherical thing connects the diving chamber. Then the dive tender, make sure the two, all three are pressurizes the same amount that they can pass through from one to the other. Okay.

All they're trying to do is equal pressure. It takes a lot of, I feel like everyone needs to be real on in this job. Real on. You really don't want someone drinking on this on the job here. Yeah, yeah. So Bjorn and trolls are in the diving chamber. They get hooked up to the trunk. The trunk gets hooked up to the diving bell.

And they make their way from the diving bell into the trunk to get into the diving chamber. The two dive tenders had successfully pressurized all three areas. And they make their way through this. In the middle of them going through this, so what is opening the diving chamber with a tour of sleep? other guy is closing the diving bell because once that's closed then they're inside they can pull it

away and then come back later on and reconnect it in the middle of this a dive tender released the clamp holding the diving bell to the trunk i'm so nervous because i just i feel like someone's going to explode and i like like i feel like i want to throw up yeah that's exactly what's going to happen you really you really stepped on the story sorry i'm just like very nervous i'm like oh my god I feel like it's because you feel normal, right? But then like one weird thing happens and you realize that like you're not normal, you're super pressure eyes.

Oh my God. I can't feel my arms. When this clamp was released, the negative pressure as nine atmospheres of pressure rushed out of the chamber into the opening basically turned one of the guys into just confetti. Because the temperature, the pressure is trying to equalize. The only way it can equalize by going out.

Right. the guys was right next to in trying to close the diving bell hatch and got squish right through it with the force of nine pressure nine pressure to bad atmosphere wait how well oh my god i'll explain this because actually in case i'm wondering if i read just wikpity articles uh go i will be referencing their exact autopsy report from 1983 here in the oh god three of the divers were super lucky because their blood boiled immediately like they were they were so all them died before you know it's like the tyin submersible situation they said that if it was an explosion of decompression by the time they would

have understood what happened it would have been over right same here like the amount of pressure we're talking about was enough to where they didn't know what was going on nobody experienced any pain or anything like that their blood boiled immediately one of the interesting things in the autopsy report i found was they found like a ton of fat in these guys veins and their arteries and around their organs and it was like what on earth happened like because nobody's experiences this has never happened in history before nobody knew what was going on they concluded that the rapid nature in which their blood boiled broke down in denature the composite material of blood in ways that chemically i don't totally understand but it converted them into adipus tissue into fat it basically

converted what was left their blood into just pure fat it's like i have no idea how it works chemically. That was the inclusion of the autopsy report. Oh my God. The one that got to the worst was a diver who was beginning to close the diving bell door. That was Trolls. He had his entire body shoved through a tiny opening in the door, which bifurcated him completely in half. His organs, except for his trachean, small intestines and his spine, well, that's not your organ, but they found his spine. Everything exploded, basically, immediately. So you're right, he did explode. Wow. Those pieces plus his spine were spit about 30 feet out in the other direction. I found the autopsy photos. So in the in the autopsy of um that they generated for these guys,

there's pictures of them. They, so three of them are just like weird looking like they just like they had like weird bruised all over their body because apparently it just immediately flash fried them from the inside. But they look mostly normal. This guy trolls. He was confetti. they in the autopsy report um it states that he was delivered in four sacks to the to the corner oh my god there was a picture of his face there was no bone nothing like it was just like you just all you can make it was like he had like a he had the kind of beer that i have and you can see that and like kind of where his mouth was and that was basically it it looked like it looked like leather face were they inside inside they were inside suits no no okay so the three guys that had their blood

flat uh boiled immediately they were not wearing suits because the oftentimes pictures were taken when they were there and they were just in their underwear i don't know if trulls was in in in space so what i remember reading about saturation diving is that the typical protocol is you take all your gear off in the diving belt before you crawl in his suit oh my god the ultimate cause of error was the ultimate cause the issue was human error on the part of the dive tender who disconnected to the dining bell before Charles and Bjorn were in the chamber. So one of the dive tenter that did that actually died too, because the diving bell hit him with such force and pressure, just like panicked him completely. The other one suffered tremendous injuries, but somehow

remained alive. The families of the divers ended up suing the government of Norway who had approved this system. There was a lot going on here that I'm not going into because it will take 17 more hours there was no outside ability to read the pressures from one from the trunk to the chamber like there was right he should have like more yeah we don't know why he disconnected it like we don't know if he was just confused he didn't know whatever but basically there's family suit saying that the government in norway approved this process they approved these materials these chambers to be used that was in the wrong and apparently they only finally won judgment in 2008 which is 26 years after the accident actually occurred and that's been probably the single worst

accident when it comes to pressurization and diving bells and diving chambers has ever happened well i just want to warn everybody that when you google this you're going to get a picture of ronald torsendigar when he's on mars in uh what's that movie oh oh yeah yeah um oh god it's not running man it's um i just had it i don't know what i mean i know what i mean i know what you mean yeah and that's definitely not what happens what happens is so immediately and you know what taylor like i was because like when i was because that's what fascinated me about the whole titanic thing was like total recall total recall because the pressure like the um the physics of what happens to like to the human body in these situations you just

you can't believe it right like right and it's not like that far away if you went like if i walked 500 feet you know i'd be like oh i just are like whatever like you walk i could walk that far and nothing would happen to me but when you go down that far you know it just becomes so like crazy and then i always think about always i mean whatever the titanic is crazy but i you know like all the other stuff like there were like dishes and clothes and books and people and it's like everything it's like at one point getting soaked in this freezing water and then also the pressure the pressure is just like changing everything. It's crazy. I mean, also like if it was safe, I would love to go down there. Oh my God. How cool is that? So like I get the appeal. I don't think it could ever be like

so safe where I could where I would do it. I'd go with James Cameron, whatever he's doing. I'd do no one else. Yeah, even that was here the hell of me. But so that's the thing is like that's why like there isn't an issue with the Titanic and there's not an issue with the people or the things that are down there is because the pressure is equalized. Right. That's the issue. the issue with the submersible was that inside had a vastly different pressure that outside but the Titanic all the water and all the pressure's been equalized like there's no right right because it's been there for so long well it broke up when it went down so the the Titanic itself the inside was equalizing as the outside was equalizing so that's why I never went through a crush experience but oh right because it was like because it was like open yeah it was open it was open your problem is only when you're trying to keep the pressure from out of the outside from coming in. But at the Titanic's case, that was a foregone conclusion. Right. And that, yeah, I mean, obviously, along with the rest of the world, watched a bunch of videos of, like, steel drums being, like, vacuumed clothes this week. So. Yeah. Yeah. The second story is going to be a lot more familiar. But I also found it really, really interesting. And I actually paid this one specifically because of your fascination with Russia. Do you know what the K-1-4-1 is?

No. Do you know what the Kursk is? No. So the Kursk was a Russian nuclear-powered cruise missile class submarine from the early 2000s. I remember. Oh, God. There you go. It was called the K-141.

That is a classification. Like back then, or during World War II, the U was used for a classification for German Nazi boats. The K is for Russian boats, P is for American boats, so on and so forth. So every country has their own classification, essentially. and the cursed tragedy happened in the year 2000 and that's an important part of what ends up playing out here because to put things into perspective on why things happened the way they happen at 2000 is about nine years after the collapse of the Soviet Union so Russia was coming out of their USSR state and they were financially crippled their militarily kind of embarrassed

because that's what crippled them. They're not doing too good. The exercise in communism didn't play out as expected. The world's looking at them a certain way. And so they found themselves kind of this weird, friendless state, you know, from the year 1991 on to when the first disaster ended up happening. In 1998, the entire world suffered a huge global economic recession, which resulted in dramatic increases in prices for Russia's main export at the time, which was energy.

So around late 1998 to early 1990s. 1999, while the rest of the world was suffering from this recession, Russia began to actually feel a bit of research. They started filling some pride in themselves, like, oh, we're doing good now. Like, you know, this can be what we need to kind of turn this ship around. And that's an important factor in understanding why things happened with a curse of way that ended up happening in August of 2000. So Russia wanted to show that, hey, we're still here, we still got it. So they put on the largest display of military exercise in decades in the country. history. So they wanted to put together in this August of 2000, this massive display of all of

their naval warship power. And part of that was the K-141. Curst was considered the flagship submarine in the fleet. It had a reputation that, again, is another through line here, fits with the Titanic perfectly because it was considered unsinkable. Nothing is. It was considered unsinkable. Why would you even say that out loud? I know, I know, seriously. you're asking for to fucking drown the reason that this was considered unsinkable had to do with its double hall design which essentially meant that if one you could breach one part of it and then still not sink the ship and or the submarine until you breach the second hall again there's no such thing as unsinkable literally everything which is literally what the titanic said was like oh we have

all these different chambers so if you like breach one chamber it won't go in the next one or the next one and then it got sliced across the side and it was over this goes back to my theory that marketing people never talk to product people they literally never you're totally right oh my god never tech and submarine construction on this morning in august of 2000 the curse was authorized to fire off a dummy torpedo as part of this war game and kind of kick things off something goes wrong at this point we don't know what's going on yet because i'm describing the events and as they're happening all we know at that time is that norwegian seismic detectors detected a seismic activity measuring 1.5

on the Richter scale. Two minutes and 14 seconds later, they recorded a 4.2 on the Richter scale at the exact same spot on the C4 this time. I'm going to describe what we learned two years later about what ended up happening. And the reason I'm going to kind of blow past this because that's not the important part here. Basically, what ended up happening was a torpedo they fired uses hydrogen peroxide fuel source. And with this type of fuel, when it interacts with the catalyst such as copper, which it also coppers what torpedo tubes are made of. The fuel denatures and expands in volume by 5,000 times. This particular torpedo was not well maintained. It was actually 10 years old, which put it well past its service life that it should

have been used anyways. It also had cracks in the fuel cell. So you have a torpedo that's made of copper. You have a fuel cell that has a combustible material that reacts to. negatively when mixed with copper and that has cracks in it. So that's the situation. When the crew fired this torpedo off, they introduced the accelerant to light the fuel source, which expanded the peroxide mixture by 5,000 times, exploding the torpedo and setting a 4,800 degree Fahrenheit fire, which immediately incinerated the entire torpedo room.

Wow. That was Richter 1.5. That's what was recorded. The second blast detected was the initial blast setting off. five more warheads, which explains why I was like four times stronger, basically. Oh, like by accident? By accident. And the blast basically destroyed the command center.

It blew a hole in the hall in one of its compartments. The ship basically just like filled with water and sank to the bottom of the ocean floor. It took a while for the government to realize what had happened in launch a response. But the response... I'm sorry, I interrupt you. But didn't we think it was like missing for a little bit? We... So, we didn't think it was missing.

Okay. We didn't think it was missing. They thought it was missing. I'll explain that here in a second, too, actually. That's a really good point. So they launched a response, but the response itself wasn't that great. They actually had a submarine rescue vessel, but it was a converted lumber ship called the Mikhail Rudnitsky. And it had a diving belt, a crane, specialized gear, all that good stuff that it needed, but it didn't have the thing that obviously wouldn't have being a lumber ship, which is automatic positioning. Basically, the way it works is that a lot of these ships that have these search and rescue missions and stuff like that, they have to stay stationary over what they're trying to do that's on the ocean floor right and the way to do that is through automatic stabilizing so when waves hit you the ship is correcting itself it's like cruise control for the ocean you don't have to be like port bow stern blow 20 12 all that's that shit like the ship has little projectile or points on the bottom that are kind of doing it for you and actually what's interesting is that the arctic rose or whatever that that um the some the the submersible one was, that also didn't have auto-correcting.

And that was also an issue initially, because that was the first ship that was on the scene. So anyways, consistent pattern there. 12 hours after the curse sank, this ship, the Mikhail Rudnitsky, left port to go help the sailors trapped in the curse. By this point, the families were going concerned, but they'd been told the sub was unsinkable.

So very similar to the time, submersible. They hoped that this was a loss of communication and nothing more than that. The day the curse went down, Even before Moscow knew what had happened, so this is before, so back then, Putin was president, well, she will be forever and always. The day it went down, the US knew was an accident.

They knew where it was, they knew it hit the ground. And on that day, this is literally before Putin knows what happened. The US, the UK, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Norway, all six countries reached out saying, we know what's going on, We can help. We have all the shit. We have the material. We can tell about Russia refused. Yeah. They mounted their own rescue, which I will say it was admirable how many things they tried. It really, really was. They did the best with what they had. But given the nature of Russia coming out of the USSR stage, it was just like amateur hour, basically. So they had one submersible that found the curse can try to dock with it, but it couldn't form a vacuum seal with the escape hatch.

And they ran low on batteries. And so, and they had no more batteries. like that was the only they had to take this thing back up plug it in for god knows how long before we could try to go back down again it's just like stuff like that's the ship the mikhail whatever rudnitsky didn't have the auto positioning so the sea waves and all that would just constantly move it off position which was yeah they tried to lower a diving bell but couldn't actually position it over the subs latch because of the non-positioning piece of it they tried putting a remote submersal back down there to open it, but it couldn't open the latch. The batteries on that one submersible recharge enough so they could relaunch it. They freaking ran the thing into a boom on the ship and destroyed it. And so that had to go back down and had to start getting worked on for repairs. So it took five days after sinking before Putin finally said, yes, I'll accept help, not for America. I won't help take help from America. I will take UK and Norwegian help, though. So that's what

happen. So the UK and Norway put together a task force, a plan to do this. They used a Norwegian ship with a traditional marshal. It was a joint operation. And it took a couple of days of a sudden that. So by time they actually got the curse, the course has been down for seven days. That rescue team decided to cut holes in the hull of the ship and compartments they knew were already flooded. They did this and were told that only Russians could go in. The Russians go in. They collect all the classified material. They collect some bodies and come back out. One thing I mentioned here that I really love was learning, like, how big of a piece of shit Putin is and how he consistently is a piece of shit. So apparently during this entire time, he was out having an amazing time vacationing.

And this ended up turning into a huge PR disaster for him. Eventually, he came back and was like, I'll meet with the families of the sailors who just, like, tore him a new one. The media had reported that foreign assistance had been offered as early as the day after the ship, the curse had gone down. And Putin had been like, he was film doing this. He told them, no, no, no, they only offered help like two days ago. I accepted it two days ago. And the media was a false. And the family, you know, was a lie too.

At one point, this lady whose son was down there started screaming at Putin. And somebody from the government, like, injected her with something. I was going to say, did they all get killed? Are they okay? Because I feel like once you yell at Putin in the face, you jump off a building. I mean, that was it. Like, this woman was, like, swimming at him saying, we're not going to let you get out of here, a lot of you piece of shit.

It was like she was going on a lot on him. And then someone just grabbed her back and just like inject her with something. And she just went limp and they dragged out of there. 23 men on the curse gathered in one of the compartments is a compartment nine that was slowly filling with water but was somehow somewhat survivable and it also had an escape hatch. The problem was when the ship went down, the nuclear reactors were set to automatically shut off. When those shut off, the air purification systems that scrub CO2 from the atmosphere are also shut off. So their oxygen supply was growing limited. in theory they could have opened the hatch and made a break for it but they were in the arctic sea

so yeah yeah death from the cold so a they could have drowned before they got the top they didn't have to worry they didn't super have to worry about the bends because they were pressurized to the atmosphere of sea level because they were at sea level when they went down right problem was the compartment was seeping with water and so their bodies were absorbing nitrogen and their bodies were absorbing more pressure being down there. So there was a risk of getting the bends. But more importantly, they're going to die out of being frozen at death before they got to the top anyways.

So that was the biggest issue. And their assumption was, look, we're in the middle of like a massive military exercise. Of course somebody's coming down here. So that was the idea. The contentious part about what happened with the curse had to do with whether saving those 23 people was possible if Russia hadn't tried to save face and accept help early on. the answer is we don't know and it kind of doesn't matter because if there was a 50-50 chance they could then they should have accepted the help and should have not try to save face the way they tried to say face

notes that were recovered from the sailors were timed and dated to about six hours and 17 minutes when the ship went down but there's some assumptions that at least up to three to four days those men were still alive in there there's reports that there was banging hurt on the hall yeah it's like a come thing that didn't that that couldn't have happened because because again the ship was double hauled so like there was right all you I feel like this week I've been hearing that about like remember about happened in Pearl Harbor where like people were banging on the hole for like two weeks when they couldn't save them yeah which which could have been because those ships are iron ironclad they're not double

hold so like that could have been a possibility but in this case it's one of it possible because there were been like this sheet of of air between between that and the outside So that part is not true. We don't know how long the men were alive. We'll never know how long the men were alive. It is It is possible that they could have been alive and saved if they'd accepted help from outside sources So in the end the families of the curse sailors received a total payout of $35,000 from the government 12 or so of the high-ranking leaders the Navy were fired and Putin went on to become You know the guy we all know and love today. So that is my little tale of two horrific ways of dying using pressure water oceans and all that such a horrible

ways to die there you go it's unbelievable uh although i would rather die like the bifur dolphin guys and die like the sailors in that compartment a hundred percent because it's also probably dark right oh yeah yeah it's pitch black you're starving and slowly losing all of your oxygen mostly oxygen you're going to die of not having any oxygen and all you smell is kerosene and this scream here the screams of your sailors next to you so oh my god that's terrible and also and also i i covered a russian story so look at me i'm like taylor i i i instagramed about russia yesterday because there's so much russian stuff happening in the world always and i just i love talking about russia happy to continue to talk about it i'm having a an emotional crisis watching

the last couple episodes of this season of the great because it's so good and i'm so upset so like it's just a whole thing i love it never saw that one oh my god it's so good it's so good There you go. Are you covering Russia today? I'm not, but I have to pee. Can you hold on? I can hold on. I think you. Taylor, I can hear you. I'm muted. I think you could have heard me peeing, but I just like to mute it just in case.

Just in case. I pee in this totally different room, but just in case. I thought there was a bucket next year computer. Oh, God. Like you remember when you were like, oh, I'd like a chamber pot. I was like, absolutely. Okay. I'm ready. Hold on. No, I'm not talking about Russia. today first, but I am talking about something that does have a little bit of a true crime bit in it in the end. So that was unexpected. So I'm excited to tell you about that. I was thinking talking about we talk about relationships. Like was a dramatic thing that happened in a

in a relationship. And then I was thinking like, do you remember how I have this extremely expensive degree in our history that I'm still paying for? And why are you? Yeah. So I'm like, what are some things in our history that seem super dramatic? And what is it? a story that we think we all know. So I thought, who was the person that caused Vincent Van Gogh to cut off his ear? Oh my God. That is so cool. Yeah. Hell yeah. And it's not at all what I thought. This is a fernetic, colorful, tragic story. It begs the question, like, do artists have to be starving? Do you have to be mentally ill? Does something have to be wrong for you to create, like, great art? So this is a wild ride of Vincent Van Gogh's life. Yes. It's going to be a cousin. It'll be something gross. It's a cousin, isn't it?

no it's not even a woman and it's not sexual weird so i'll tell you more also i know that were i a dutch speaker i would say van gof and not van go but i can't do it i'm not doing that i'm not doing that i can't i don't it's like when people will say cacha molly when they're trying to say well it's like i i get that you speak a language i can't speak and i'm really proud of you but like you don't have to big up me you call guacamole i mean i think you know who i'm thinking about right taylor no tell me later yeah i'll tell you later i imagine But I do, I do think that once Dan Carlin does a, if he does anything on Van Gogh, I'll say Van Gogh, because I'll say whatever Dan Carlin says. But until then, I'm going to say Van Gogh, because that's what I came up with.

So I'm going to tell you about the many failed relationships of Vincent Van Gogh, starting with his parents, his brother Theo, God, a sex worker named Cien, his cousin Kay, the art world in general, an artist named Paul Gogan, and ultimately himself. So. Is he's your. All fail. failed. I also, we are both older than Vincent Van Gogh will ever be. He died when he was 37. Wow. And we have things that he so desperately wanted and never had. We have good friendships. We have loving families. We have homes. We have, I have children. Someday you might have children. Who knows? But like Vincent Van Gogh so desperately wanted this family and he will never have them.

But in a hundred years, no one will remember us. You know? What about this podcast? Uh-huh. So, yeah, no, I just, it's, it's interesting, and I think the tragedy that we all know is, like, he wasn't famous in his lifetime, sure, you know, and he was, you know, this tortured artist, and he totally was, but he had this wild need to be accepted and loved and to express himself. And, like, that was what ultimately, like, led to his death. In March, 1987, Van Gogh's painting, A vase with 15 sunflowers was sold for an adjusted $94.21 million. And that tripled the last painting ever sold before that. So it was like a new era of art.

So like Van Gogh, obviously is like, everyone knows him. You can see his art. You know exactly what he does. You can think about it. You like picture it immediately. Yeah. I went to the Van Gogh. There's in Austin.

They set up a Van Gogh. It's called Van Gogh. It's experience. Vango experience is what it's called. I did it in Las Vegas. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool.

Yeah. I mean, he's everywhere. And Wikipedia's list of the top 89 most expensive paintings, I don't know why I was like 89 on that list ever sold. Ever sold. So 11 of like the top, you know, most expensive paintings ever sold are his. He only sold one in his last year of his life. So he only saw one that he sold that he sold. There's a, did you ever watch Doctor Who? I've seen a few episodes. I'm not like a huge Doctor Who. I know what a TARDIS is. So perfect. So there's one and I've only seen this clip, but it's a beautiful. clip where they get Van Gogh and they take him to exhibit in like 2010 and they ask the the Dacin to tell them like, you know, what is it about Van Gogh? And he goes off and he taught says, he's one of the greatest artists that ever lived. And Van Gogh starts crying and it's just like

beautiful and like very lovely. But in his life, he never knew. So again, like, you know, I spent this week on a topic that people spend their whole lives doing. So I'm definitely going to like miss things. And there's definitely more of this story. But it's such a good story. So the thing that I read was the book Van Gogh, The Life, by Stephen Nacophay and Gregory White Smith. So that's the book that I read. And then I also have some like art history books from when I was in college that I looked at as well. And then also just to mention, this is post-impressionism if you were like, where are we with this? Well, one more thing that I don't, maybe I'll say for the end, but I just want to add now

because it's fun is there is a missing Van Gogh. It is called Poppy Fowers. It was stolen from the Muhammad Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo twice. It was stolen in the 80s and it was stolen again in 2010 and no one knows where it is. That's pretty cool. Pretty cool. I'm pretty fun. So let's talk about him himself.

Vincent Van Gogh was born on March 30th, 1853 in Groot-Zernert, Netherlands. So there's a lot of words that I'm not going to be able to pronounce because they're Dutch and French coming at you. Just FYI. You just remind me that I actually went to his actual museum when I went to Amsterdam. Cool. Yeah, it was really cool. He does a lot of, like, lithographs. There was like a lot of, like, no, okay, okay.

It stuck my mind of like, I didn't know that guy. I thought he's a painter only and I guess, you know. He did thousands of works. There's so much Van Gogh stuff. It's crazy. Yeah. His parents, Theodorus Van Gogh and his mother, Anna. His dad was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church.

So they were Protestant in a very Catholic area. It was a very fan. family first family. His mom was very strict, wanted the family to be together and be happy. This is also like a weird time in the Netherlands. They are, think about nature a lot, think about the garden, they think about flowers. They have this idea that people have all the time, that there is this glorious past that we have to go back to, that we have to remember. And they're remembering times when the Netherlands was really successful. And they're enchanted by that. enchanted by the past. And we talked a little bit about that in like the tool up

being an episode, you know, when people were like first becoming to start, becoming to be middle class and starting to like get money and people like had a lot. It was very prosperous time for them. But also it was because of slavery that they were so successful. So they know that by this time. You know, they're like, so easy when other people do all the work for you for free. Yeah, exactly. So they, you know, have this memory of a time where things are great, but they also don't want to remember the fact that they were great because they enslaved people. Right. Vincent himself was the oldest surviving brother of six children.

A brother was born the year before him, exactly a year before him, whose name was also Vincent Van Gogh. But then the brother died still born and then Vincent was born a year later, which is like maybe weird for us than it was for them, but still kind of weird. I don't love it. Yeah. And his mother. It's like his parents were still mourning the death. It's like started over. To name this one, Vince, that's a little weird.

Yeah, I don't love it. Different times. Yeah. So his parents kept having kids, his mom actually had her last kid at 47, which I think is interesting. So his family read a lot. They love reading Dickens. They love reading fairy tale books, things like that. They read a book.

This isn't really important, but one of the authors that they liked was a man named Edward Woolworth Lytton, who have known. never heard of, but he was the first person to ever write, it was a dark and stormy night. Oh, nice. Which is kind of fun, you know? I guess someone had to write that for the first time, and I don't know, I don't know anything else about him, but it's fun that he was the first person to write that. Another big thing in the Van Gogh family is they'd make each other gifts, so they loved

Christmas. Imagine, like, you know, a Dutch Christmas. There's, you know, a lot of, like, candles and ribbons and flowers, and they would make each other presents, so they would crochet things and collage things and always just, you know, like a really loving the dad's three mantras were duty decency and solidity so fate has ups and downs choose the middle like just like do the middle path which does not it's not at all what his children did but that's what he was like trying to force upon them solid solid what does it mean and what i wrote is yeah fate has ups and downs but you choose the middle like you stand strong in the middle so like

when a good thing happens don't forget that bad things happen wait that's what solidity means well to them yes so when a bad thing happens don't forget that something good will happen eventually like this too shall pass stuff but also when something good is happening don't forget that something that can happen any moment such an idea i type salinity and i was like the dissolved salt of content the body really salty water is our third family virtue i don't know why it just is but that made it hard obviously for the kids to be themselves because my parents are like Like failure is always around the corner, you're going to have a weird, a weird life. Right.

Because him and his mom did not get along very well. He did a lot of art. He would send things to her. She would throw it away. She was like, this jerk kid of mine, you know. His dad was very religious. And so that definitely had an impact on Vincent's life. Eventually, they sent him to a boarding school because he was a lot to deal with.

He was very like, he would read a ton. and do all this art and do all these things, but he never really fit in anywhere. And so his parents were like, you're kind of making this family crazy. So, you know, everybody else is like following the rules, going to school, living like a relatively like normal life for, for preacher's children. And Vincent, like, can't do that. He's kind of all over the place. So they send him away.

He goes to several different boarding schools. He still doesn't fit in. So they're trying to figure out, what do we do with this, like our oldest son who's kind of, we're going to have to, like, support him forever because he can't figure out his shit out. essentially i would encourage that and be like the ones that don't fit are the ones that do cool shit so yeah he's about to do cool shit for sure the vango family actually is very was very successful in two ways they're successful in gold and successful in art so it's not crazy that vincent would be an artist there's art as an art family his dad is is a preacher because

his dad was so it was like several several generations of like going right back to your exact dad, whatever, like that line was preachers, but, but everybody else was like in the art world. His uncles are art dealers. So there are people who are like telling everybody what to like an art during this time in big cities, like in Paris, in London, like all over Europe. His dad also, to note, did have a fun time in university before he got married and then he decided to become more pious. So at least, at least he had like a little bit of personality in there. But right now also there's this crazy thing happening where there's a new book called The life of Jesus that came out and it for the first time in these guys's life they're they're seeing

Jesus as potentially a real person and not like as the son of God. So it's kind of throwing a wrench into things. So it's kind of a crazy time to to be involved in religion. But Vincent decides that they're like he needs to get out of the house. He won't go to school. He keeps walking home from school. So his he had an uncle named Vincent Van Gogh. And this uncle was called scent. so scent is his uncle's nickname for Vincent and he's an art dealer so he made money in an art store he was a very fun guy

I'm confused, hold on his uncle was named Vincent Van Gogh yeah he was named for his uncle the Vincent and the family okay but the uncle's of Vincent Van Gogh but his nickname is Sent so we're just going to call him Sent call him Cent okay cool yeah

yeah and so Sent is one of the first people who started to see like you were saying with the lithographs like art that's like reproducible and people want to see to get prints. So he would sell prints. They sold Prince in the Hague and he became very rich. And Uncle Sent was not able to have children with his wife.

So his wife and him just like worked together and they brought Vincent on as sort of like, you know, a family, maybe a son figure who can work with him. And Vincent was 16 when he went to work in St. He went to work in the Hague. He's the worst at work. So do you ever like go into like a niche store and there's like a nerd there that you just like don't want to talk to? that would usually be me at like GameStop. I was going to say, like, at GameStop. Like, yes.

So imagine he's like the nerdiest dude at the GameStop. And people are like trying to just go in and like buy art and like do these things. And he's kind of freaking out about everything. He's like, you should buy this because it's this and this is this. And he's like, this applies to this poem, applies to this book, applies to this thing. And he just has so much going on in his head. Then when you talk to him, you're like overwhelmed. And people are like, no, thank you.

So the kind of like back. out of the store slowly and like don't want to buy anything so they sent him to the back of the store because they're like you can't talk to you're too weird but you're way too weird sorry sorry bro he moves around he's 16 by 19 he's in very very much in the scene of going to brothels all the time he spends a lot of time with sex workers sometimes just to talk sometimes like other things but like something weird happens during this time where they're just like you got to cut that out like you can't do it anymore like it wasn't like who's they the broth of the sex workers saw him to cut it out no the hit uncle sent and like the people at the store because of something

that happened in the brothels i don't know exactly what it was but like everybody knew that he had like maybe like freaked out on someone you know what i mean like he did something and everybody was like uncomfortable aren't him so like you got to go so sent him to london to another store like an autistic kid yes he definitely absolutely there's so much mental illness that like we would think about differently and i'll tell you actually what they know he had later but yeah like something's up his brother he had a younger brother named theo theo is five years younger than him theo was sent to a similar job in brussels and he did great theo's great he's personable everybody likes him he is always the one that will

financially support vincent for his whole life so vincent's whole life he will ask theo for money and theo will send him money um while theo is selling other people's art and he's like he's doing fine Theodore was fine. Vincent gets sent to London to work in the same company but in a stockroom and he was bummed. He didn't want to be in London. London was like really dirty and gross and like so many more people than he was used to seeing. And like he didn't know if he loved it and he felt very like isolated and alone. Another thing happens during this time, which I think is crazy is he because he wasn't doing

very well, he was about to get drafted into the military. And the military was going to send. him to Sumatra to like fight in like a war there that they were having and he got out of it his parents paid 600 guilders which is a year's salary to send a bricklayer in his place that is that is privilege yeah and instead i was kind of like hey i sent him his money but also like yeah he wasn't going to send him to samatra to do that so he sent some poor bricklayer in his place but vincent will always be a financial burden to his family like always and he's always trying to find a another, like that family feeling he had when he was younger before people started to try to

like get rid of him in certain ways. So why he's in London, he meets a family like a woman and a widow and her daughter. He's like, this is my new family. We're super happy. I like love it here. He invites his sister. His sister was like, it's weird. Like you're being weird. Like, why are you so obsessed with these people? And there's so many relationships he'll have were like the only last a month. But the first two weeks are like, this is the best thing that ever happened to me. This is it. This is my, this is my thing. And then the last two weeks are awful. And then he leaves and never talks about it again. And it happens over and over. Like it's just obviously like he just has like a disconnect from whatever. We don't. It's all

good. You're discussing. But yeah, no, exactly. He has a disconnect. Like in his head, he's like seeing things differently than everybody else is seeing. You know, he's like absorbing all this literature, all these stories, all this art. And it's just like he cannot express it in a way that isn't crazy. You know, people like, he's like, people are like, you got to calm down. Like you, we can't, we can't do this. He decided that he was super lonely.

He didn't know what to do. So he turned to God. He was like, my dad is, is a pastor, preacher, or whatever. I want to do, I want to do the same. So during this time, also he was in Paris when the impressionists were making their move. So like the ones that you know, like Monet is doing his thing. and he missed it he doesn't write about it because again like most of the people I talk about we know about him through his letters and he missed it because he was going into this like religious

fervor being like I can be the best preacher out there you know and then he also missed it because Monet wasn't famous in when he was no he wasn't a way that it was like they were trying to be disruptive so you would have heard him you know like maybe that people weren't like he's amazing and like they're putting water lilies in their house but they were like he's being disruptive so you would have known yeah so he also just like i put like Putin because you know i guess speaking of Putin he had this romanticized idea of the past which Putin does as well so Putin looks at Catherine the Great and says like there was this time in Russian history where we were the best and that isn't true because things were horrible things were happening all over the country but he wants to like be a part

of that past. And so Vincent always saw, like, I want to be a part of, like, the French revolution. Like, I'm, I was born too late. So he is very lonely. He gets fired from his job in London. He goes home for Christmas. Christmas is, again, a huge deal. People complained about him. They wanted to act like nothing had happened. They just, like, kind of wanted him to go away. So also, I guess also back to Russia. Of course, I mentioned Russia like nine times and that's just like Rasputin, Vincent went for a walk for a really long time. There you go. So he went for a walk for months.

He would walk for days along the countryside. He was like walking around kind of preaching, not doing much art, but like, you know, really like reading the Bible and becoming very, very religious. He finally got a small job at a church in London. So he's walking around England. He gets a job in London. He speaks English. So he speaks English, Dutch, French. But his English is very heavily accented.

And he's super excited. So people are just like, whatever. is this as he's like preaching in the thing he's very passionate um he's very strange no one thinks he's going to be a preacher which is also really hurtful you know because family's like yeah you're doing something that like a lot of us have done but we don't think you're going to you're going to be successful it's also it makes him so much less cool to me I didn't know he was trying to be a preacher like he like lost so many cool points by trying to be a preacher like he gets him back he's back so he now he's like walking around he's smoking he smokes

He smokes a big, like a big pipe all the time. And he studies and studies and studies, but like he doesn't study the right way, you know? It's like he does that thing that he always feels like he needs a teacher, but he never finds a teacher that he will listen to. So he just like studies his own way, which is sometimes, which doesn't give him the outcome that he wants, you know? So that's like someone being like, I would read the Bible 15 times and that's how I'm going to become the most religious person of all time, you know? And you're like, okay, but you also have to like talk to people and like do other things, you know? have a joke in the in the chamber and i'm not going to no do it go ahead no i'm not going to do it eventually do it let's just say there's other things the catholic church is done you know what i'm not

doing it let's not catholic he's protestant but he just he's an artist he's an artist's heart an artist soul but he's like how do i express this he's trying to express it through religion he throws himself into it 100% and it doesn't work. So meanwhile, Theo, his brother, even though he's successful in the art world, that's a successful store and, like, is doing well, he falls in love with some not as reputable ladies and he gets someone pregnant and his parents are like, absolutely not. So he has to get a prostitute pregnant, basically, what you're going to say? I think, I don't know if she was specifically a sex worker, but like someone who was poor. But he's definitely sleeping with a ton of sex workers.

That's going to be Theo's lot in life. So he was getting super depressed and that's what's happening coming in the background. Like Theo is successful in work. Like he gets offered a job for like a shit ton of money, like more money than anyone had ever seen. And he, you know, he's very successful. He goes to the opera. He dresses really nice because another thing that Van Gogh was really into was like dressing really nice and going for walks and Sundays. And everybody's seen them and being like, oh, they look nice.

They have their shit together. you know so theo looks like he has a shit together when he does not have a shit together now vincent's 25 he's hoping to become a preacher he becomes a pastor to a poor mining village in belgium called the bournage and he's one of the people who you know reads the bible and interprets it as like if you suffer you're lucky you're lucky because you're suffering and so that was good because it was a mining town and on april 17th 1879 there was a huge fucking experience explosion and a ton of people died. It was the fucking mining town. He tried to like comfort people and they were just like absolutely not. You know, like. Because he's a weird though. Yeah. Like everyone we noticed exploded. Like we can't, we can't with you. So he was there. He was there a month. And he kept trying to like be like, I'm also going to suffer. He would, he would like not eat for days. You know, he'd walk for days. He wouldn't take care of his body because he was like, I have to suffer to like be

religious. So now he's like, he's trying way too fucking hard. You know? And so he gives up. He's like, I'm not a preacher. He becomes an atheist. It's over. Okay. Who knows? Yeah. Whatever he really believed, he just wanted to like do something with passions. He was like, I can put my passion into this. And that didn't work. It was like too much. So now he likes art. I mean, he moves to Brussels. And he starts taking art classes. He spends money on nice clothes. He, you know, tries to start a print collection, tries to make money from selling his collection. But again, like even if he is in art, art classes. He doesn't last very long. And even if he, you know, dress is really nice. People are

like, we can tell that you're weird, you know. And like later, there's all tons of stories of people who like, you know, they're asked 20, 30 years later, do you remember him? And they're like, yeah, we remember him. He was really fucking weird. You know? Yeah. Yeah. It was a weird guy. Whatever. And he became obsessed with several, um, artists. And he would like, be like, I want to study under you. I need to like be a part. Learn, teach me everything. And that would last like a month, just like everything. it would be like super high high super low low over and then he would like never talk to something again he became obsessed with his cousin k and he asked her to marry him and she said no like absolutely

not she said it was kind of on to something when i thought it was a cousin that did this to him yeah but this i mean this i don't even know he was like oh i really want to he asked her to marry him and she said never no never which is very dramatic it's not what you want to hear and so he was was like, I really want to see her. Like, you know, he tried to go and talk to his uncles and be like, I need to see her. And they were like, no, like, just absolutely not. So he had to like kind of like deal with that. Like he was still trying to find this like family.

He feels like he is a late bloomer, obviously. He meets more artists, an artist named Mov. He meets for a while. But he never has enough money. He always gets in fights with people. He just like can't keep it together. The big thing that Theo keeps telling Vincent is you need to make saleable art. You be able to sell.

your shit like in the book they say saleable art like 15 million times like this is the thing that you need to do but he just can't do it he knows art dealers he knows artists he knows what people are buying and he just like cannot do it he approaches art like he approached being a preacher like he's impossible to get along with because it's just like so into it and so in his head and produces this stuff that comes out like garbled and people don't get it yeah you know so one thing that he loved doing is he loved drawing people and he insisted on drawing people from a model like from having a person there he couldn't really draw from his imagination that was not something that he did he stood in front of things and drew them so he would spend all of his

money on models a lot of time they were sex workers a lot of time they were really poor people that he would give like a couple coins to and then they would like you know pose for him but people still thought that was really weird you know they'd be like oh you're going to go like stand in this guy's house and just like pretend to eat for an hour three hours and that he's going to paint you. People thought that was really strange. Kind of that strange. Yeah. So he tried to master some things. He struggled to paint perspectives. He bought this like frame to help him do perspectives. He wasn't like perfect at really anything because it was just so like kind of kind of overwhelming in general. He met a sex worker

named Cien and she was pregnant when he met her and he, you know, fell in love with her, thought they'd have a family together and he like loved her very passionately even though she was gross so we know he we have drawings of her we know about her life sand was gross she has she was just s i e n she was just riddled with STDs and she was pregnant and she like you know was missing her teeth was like a witch yeah she's not doing great and of course he gets gonorrhea so it's actually like really bad and they're both in the hospital at the same time while Stan is having her baby and Vincent is being treated for gonorrhea which I don't know the details but I did learn in the book they tried to like get rid of it by inserting bigger and bigger catheters

into him until it like flushed out. Sounds fucking terrible and his dad came to visit him during this time and was like dude you have to stop talking to this woman like you have to get out of this and Vincent was like no I love her I'm going to go back to her as soon as I get out of here whatever he can see continues to be supported by Theo, his family, like, kind of threatens to take over and, like, put him under conservative. Conservativeship and be like, you know, you have to, you can't take care of yourself. But he insists that he's okay. And this whole time he's kind of been drawing. And now he wants to paint. So he's starting to get into painting. And he's starting to get more money from his, from his brother. And he's still with with Sien. He thinks of himself as like Robinson Crusoe, like by himself. on this island of passion that like no one understands and he's always like I'm about to get make something that you can sell I'm like this close to making something that everybody will want to buy everybody just be patient with me the consequences will be dire if you're not

he'd rather die than quit like all those things he still really thinks he can do this and in the in the book that I read this is where they say he starts waving the red flag of mental instability because he's like even more losing it than before i'm gonna i'm gonna go on a limb here i will say this might be a bit of a shock i am not like a very artsy person i don't care about art that much i don't know what look i just know what looks good to me i don't really i will say like i'm looking at his paintings in the thick brush stroke line work stuff that he does like it is objectively really really cool and awesome and also his family's right he is unstable he should have been locked up he should have had a conservative like when a pregnant prostitute comes knocking on your door and

you're like i want to be your baby it's a somebody get this guy help like yeah it's like if any of our brothers do that you'd be like no no no no it's like we used to make christmas cards at home and like make mama cake for her and now you got like this woman pregnant and you have gonorrhea and And you don't know, like, she said, what are you talking? What are you doing? It's not like, it's not an indictment on her or whatever. It's like, we all come from different walks of life. But there's like, sometimes it's okay if there's no overlap. Yes, totally.

And you, yeah, you would, you would also tell your brother to cut this out. Yeah. If asked. Exactly. So, I mean, this is such a long story. There's so many things. But eventually he's living in Trenton with his brother. He leaves Cien.

Ced's story ends later. but she eventually throws herself into a river and dies by suicide. So her life continues to be awful and gross until it's over. And so he's lived with his brother for a little bit. His brother has a mistress and he wants them to all live together. He's like, we can live together. Like he really needs, he wants his family unit back. He remembers when he was younger.

But Theo won't live with him at this point. His mom falls and he moves back to Belgium to the Netherlands to take care of her. and he got a patron got a painting teacher he ended up meeting a woman named margot and she was 43 and he was younger so he must have been like 35 or 34 at this point but she's like super in love with him so she falls in love with vincent and she is a woman who's a daughter of a neighbor and the neighbor died and his three daughters live in the house alone like what have happened to Lizzie Borden and her sister. They lived in the house alone. And her sisters are such bitches. They're like, you're too old to get married. You can't marry him. And like, yes,

he's crazy and all the things. But like, give me a break. Like, you just like told her she can't get married. She can't be happy. So poor Margo. Isn't that she's too old. The problem is that he's an unhinged maniac who has VD from prostitutes. Like, what are I the only one missing this? No, you're totally right. That's definitely a lie that history is told. They've been like, you're too old. They've been like, dude that goes dirty yeah that's the problem you're right you're right but his sisters like her sisters were like are you pregnant like what the hell and she's like no i just love him and they're like no absolutely not so she meets him in a field in like the middle of the night and she's like

i love you so much i don't know what to do and then she faints because she had taken strychnine to try to try to kill herself he made her throw up took her to the doctor and just felt terrible after that but he eventually did leave and did not obviously did not get married but she's maybe the only person who really did love him like unconditionally maybe that one woman's it's all sad so he has all these relationships he has this like beautiful imagination it's 1885 he's still at home but he's sad he's taking care of his his mother after her injury she fell and theo is still in paris and he's like he tells Vincent he makes him think

of old people who think their youth was better he's like you're acting like we have this idyllic childhood you have to go back to eventually he's still with his parents and his dad dies

so his dad's last day he goes out and repairs the fences does a long walk in the snow home and then later after he should have been home a maid hears a sound on the door

opens up the door and the dad has leaned against the door he's had a massive stroke and he's dead so he made it all the way home like in the snow by himself but then died the end which reminds me of my great grandpa who went to the doctor one day and the doctor said you're doing great you're absolutely perfect he went home and chopped some wood and then had a heart attack and died like tough one second both us so now his sister anna is such a bitch and she's like you kill dad it's your fault that he's dead because you're hearing you're stressing him the fuck out and so he's feels terrible he's with his parents and he's

He doesn't know what to do. He is acting weird. His brother is like, you have to sell some stuff. What do we do? He's so close. And so he makes this lithograph, like you were saying. So he learns how to, like, do this new form of art where you can, like, quickly reproduce stuff, these lithographs.

And he does one called the potato eaters. Oh, yeah. I'm looking at that right now. Yeah. So it's like a family eating. And he was obsessed with, like, the peasantry and, like, poor people and their lives. And people saw it. And they were like, what is this?

it's weird like where are their organs it's dark this is not like I'm going to look at this and feel jolly in there I'm not going to put this in my living room basically totally and it ends up in someone's living room later in the story but at this point people are like this is weird like we don't know what it is so nothing sells he's he's pretending that like everything is okay but nothing is going well he moves to antwerp and he also now this is where he can track syphilis So it's just like, again, tons of STDs. So the medicine for syphilis was mercury, which has his own problems. So it would make you crazy, obviously.

Like, you know, like the mad hatter. You know that? Yeah. Because like hatters would be mad because of the mercury. Did you remember that? So, like, that. And then it made you lose your hair. It made you spit a lot because, like, the mercury would, I don't know, whatever.

So he would, like, his hair was falling out. His teeth were falling out. He had sores in his mouth. Like, he was just like, not good and he was trying to spend all of his money on like getting models we could start painting them and he was like learning how to paint taking classes and just was like never working out for whatever reason things start looking up and he moves to Paris to be with Theo and he gets wooden dentures he starts eating he starts dressing nice spends a few months at school but it doesn't

work like he goes to school where there's like the teacher is like okay today we're going to paint pairs like a still life and everybody else is like do to do I'm going to do I'm going to hit normal and Vincent is like covered in paint there's paint dripping down his arms he's like slapping paint on the thing he's like talking to himself all these things and people just like don't get it they can't handle it and they're like he can't do it so he doesn't stay in school very long and then Theo meets a woman who's going to be really important later named johanna gesnia and he is like he met her in holland he's like I love her he goes to ask her to marry him she's like I don't know you like what are you're talking about so

she like turns them down and theo goes back to paris very very heartbroken so her name's johanna we're going to call her yo if they're spelled joe but pronounced yo which is super cute um so yeah yo because johanna you know they're called her yo so theo is starting to get sick as well because theo was also riddled with STDs so i'm not so okay sorry i'm just i'm not reacting anymore I get it. Everybody has syphilis, everybody has gonorrhea. It's fucking awful. So he, I don't even know what those things do to you, but I imagine it's awful.

But it's like you know the source. Why do you keep going back to the source? That's what caves my head in. Anyways. But like emotionally, he keeps going back to the source of the things that hurt him, you know? So it's like just. It's true. I don't know.

Yeah, you're right. The whole thing. So Theo, certainly. to get tired of Vincent to living together, which has been Vincent's dreams to live with his brother. But it's just, it's not working out. Vincent's obsessed with like this, this madame, madame at this cafe, called the cafe tambourine. He's fucking that up. He's fucking up every relationship that he's in. And Theo is actually now in charge of buying all the impressionists and selling it. So like, he's one of the reasons that impressionism is even such a big deal is

because he was in charge of buying it for the store and selling it. So it's like after they were like the avant-garde thing and now they're like the main stream. Vincent is still not selling. Theo sells none of his work. He was doing some cool things. Some things that I didn't know that he was doing, like he became obsessed with Japanese art. So there's some like Japanese-inspired things that Vincent Van Gogh did. He would draw, like he would copy Japanese paintings and then draw borders and just put like gibberish Japanese symbols around it because he like didn't speak Japanese or Japanese is, but he would like try to like learn from.

that. So a lot of like these deep colors come from that art. In February 1888, he leaves Paris. He leaves living with his brother, which was his dream because he does that for Theo's health, because Theo is like getting sick from syphilis, like super sick and can't handle having Vincent around. It's just too much. So he leaves and he goes to his town in France called Arl. A-R-L-E-S-R-L-E-S-R-L. This is where a ton of stuff happens. So Arl is a place where Vincent paints his most known works of art. He goes to this town. It's like a beautiful old town. It is, it has Roman ruins.

It has like Renaissance ruins. It has like so much history. It was something where like, you know, the Romans went through it to get to the rest of Europe. It's just like a beautiful, beautiful place. And he rents this house. It is yellow and it is called the yellow house. And that is where he does a lot of his work that you may have heard of. One thing he says during this time is he says, I use color to express myself forcefully.

So he's like really painting a lot. Oil paints are new at this time too. So it's like a whole thing. thing. He spends a lot of time and late nights in a cafe. He says it's in a room. He calls it a free love hotel. Obviously, we know what that cafe is. But it's like a lovely thought to be like, oh, like we're out late at night with like artists and people that kind of don't care. This is his opportunity to start over, you know? So he's like, who can I have come here with me and like actually do art with me? So he asks another painter named Paul Gogan to come live with him.

And it sounds familiar. So look it up. So Gaghan had spent a lot of time traveling the world. He just been in South America. And he paints a lot of like native people. So there's a whole thing about like the cultural appropriation of Gaghan painting his native people and all of that. But he paints like a lot of things. His colors are very deep.

But they're also very like matte or Vincent's are very like shiny. Yeah. But Gogan is older. He's 40. So he's like older than everybody else. He's married. But his wife, he doesn't give shit. live somewhere else and people fucking love him like he's starting he's really um charming and

people just like like being around him where they do not like being around vincent and also vincent is starting to get starting to get older and he can no longer have sex because of the STDs so that's like a big thing absolutely absolutely ridiculous but like but you know what you know what i think like every human in their life has like a counter and that counter takes down how many sex workers you can hook up with and he just hit his limit like at 15 i mean it sounds like it was a lot more than 15 but no no no at 15 years old i mean like he went way over yeah no he i mean yes he that was bad he shouldn't he is it's it ruined his body for Theo is giving Gogan money also and Vincent money to be like a patron.

So now he's like, we'll live together. It's going to be wonderful. It's going to be like this beautiful place and they move into into the yellow house. Gogan is like, I'm going to counter your arguments. I'm actually looking at gogans or how was misappropriation? This is like lovely, lovely like this like I don't know. You are not depicted in like a bad way at all. 100%.

I don't know. That's like one of the last things. I read and I don't know anything about it. I can talk about Gugan later, but I don't know. I just wanted to bring that up because it's like in the news. But also like if you look up like a photo of Gagin, he doesn't scream super sexy to me. People loved him. I don't know why.

Like he gets a ton of stories, you know, maybe they're exaggerations. Who cares? People like love me around Gogan. So they'll be like, oh, I'll post for you Gagin. And then they'll go to go to the house and be like, oh, fuck. Vincent lives here too, you know? And then like, he'll paint a picture of someone and Vincent will paint pictures of same person at the same time, but that person's hand will be in front of their face because they

don't want Vincent to look at them. Oh, wow. Because they just like don't like him, you know. Another thing for, for, I wrote this must have been in the book, or he has hypnotic sensuality. I don't know why, but his stuff is like really, really selling. But they also are like, they're battling in their personalities. Gogan is very slow, very like specific with his painting. Vincent obviously is not. Vincent spends all their money on like random things. is like we need to have a budget like we need to have me to clean like you can't live like this in vins that just like can't do it but at the same time and gogan's starting to get praise and theo is selling his stuff which fucking sucks because it's like oh you sell his stuff but

not mine yeah you know and he's like super upset about it but he's like pretending this isn't happening he's trying to to rent more rooms than the yellow house like build his commune it's just him and gogan gogan's trying to leave he's like I got to get out of here so he's like writing letters to people being like I have to get out of the space like I just came to live this guy, but he's crazy. I got to go. On December 23rd, 1888, Gogan goes for a walk. And Vincent is like, he's leaving. Like, I don't know what to do. He's leaving me. And he, they're in that time, there'd been like a murderer, which I don't look up, but there was like a murderer in France that everybody was like worried about. And there was a paper and the paper said the murderer has fled.

So it was like this murderer is out in the, out in the world. So this newspaper clipping, Vincent follows Gogan as he goes through this walk, hands him. him this newspaper clipping that says the murderer has fled and then he runs back home and gogan's just like okay and gogan goes off like onto his night that's when vincent goes to a bar he's drinking absent he's fucked up he's overwhelmed with anything of everything he's being rejected again and again theo has actually gotten yo to marry him so theo is about to get married he sees gogan's room is empty he's like he's gone i'm all alone and that's when he cuts off his ear wow that's what did it yeah wow yeah so he is like i have to do something grand to like hurt myself you know

dude he's like an abuser he's an abusive relationship he's like a gas letter it's like you made me do this you made me do it's like one of those things so i'm going to show you but knowing this is this is the visual part of this podcast so he takes his ear i'm moving my headphone he pulls it out by the earlobe and takes a straight thing a straight razor and cuts it up like this so we cut the whole thing off the whole thing off then he's bleeding profusely and he wraps it up he wraps his head and he wraps up the ear in like paper or whatever and he goes out to try to find gogan and he's like where can i find him and he goes to a brothel where he knows gogan is but they won't let him in They're like, you're bleeding.

You're crazy. You can't come in. Goggan's like, dude, this is what I'm talking about. Exactly. Like, do you see what this is doing? 100%. So he hands his ear to like the receptionist at the brothel and says, remember me and goes back home. So when they say, like, the thing that I had heard was that he like gave his ear to a sex worker, but he didn't.

He gave his ear to a sex worker at the brothel who's trying to find Gogan to be like, look what you mean. we do don't you love me dude i don't blame everyone for thinking this guy's a fucking weirdo like this is like yeah but again his brain's riddled with fucking syphilis like in mercury point it's just like so i didn't okay so far i i assume there's autism ADHD involved there's probably going to be like a little bit of something else mixed in there as well as part of the cocktail but even worse than that his vd is eating holes in his brain and then what's and that's being filled in with mercury point anything and immediately it's just like all that it's all not it's all that 100% now he has to go

to a mental institution like to an asylum like he has to and they theo comes to visit him he only sees a day um he takes all of his paintings back to paris and kind of leaves him in this institution where vincent like yells this pj he's his pajamas yelling the whole time you know like people will wake up and he's in bed with him. He's just like doing weird stuff. He'd be like, dude, you can't be in bed with me. Dude, this has to be like a comedy movie. Vincent, I mean, I know it's sad.

It's sad because it's mental illness. He shouldn't be laughing at people that are suffering. I get, I get it. But it's also like, it's such a crazy, he's such a crazy historical figure. And like Vincent Van Gogh was in my bed screaming at me with his ear bleeding all over my chest. you'd be like this crazy fucking artist was like am I bet again with the hell you know ludicrous

so he he's in the hospital he leaves for a little bit and goes back to the yellow house in Aral but the people 30 of his neighbors signed a petition to have him go back they're like we don't want him here put him back so he goes back because he was like walking around drunk

you know just like doing weird stuff he couldn't budget he couldn't do anything he's in or out of the hospital Theo gets married to yo and they're blissfully happy as far as everyone knows Vincent is on his way to go back to Paris

to live near Theo and Yo but then he's like in like a moment of clarity he's like no I gotta go back to the institution so he goes back to the institution because he's like I can't

I don't want to hurt you and I don't want to hurt your new life that you have so he goes back Theo takes all of his art including sunflowers like when Vincent went to finally pack the yellow house

it had been it had been flooded Everything was kind of moldy. So a lot of his work you had to throw away. But a lot of it was like some of the stuff that we know today, like the Sunfours and the really famous things, the potato eaters were in there as well. So he sends that all back to Paris with Theo. And then also just to note, on June 25th, 1944,

an Allied campaign to destroy the bridges over the Rhone River bombed the area and the yellow house was destroyed. So are you going to get to the most famous painting? Yes. Okay. I'm coming up to it. Sorry. It's happening really soon.

Now Vincent is in a beautiful. asylum in the mountains of France. And this is when they discover that this is what he has. He has epilepsy. He has latent epilepsy, which means he doesn't have physical seizures, but they happen in his brain. It causes him to have anger and mood swings and to work furiously and have exaggerated activity. It's like an epileptic fury that's like only mental and doesn't really come out in like the physical shaking that you think of like a seizure but it's happening in his brain that's a lot of what's happening to him the things he's seeing are like all the things his brain like this fire that like other people don't see that's why he's so like besides other things

I'm sure of ADHD all the the gonorrhea the syphilis the mercury poisoning but he also has epilepsy which makes sense because there's actually a lot of epilepsy in his family he has an uncle who's epileptic and it totally syncs with what he does because like if you're having this late in epileptic seizure that's in your mind you become totally manic you forget what you're doing and then later you have like serious serious remorse and that's what happens him all the time so this in this asylum in france is where he does paint a starry night that you're talking about yeah i also want to point out that late stage syphilis also causes seizures and epilepsy so as we as we try to like paint brush over these are not congenital

little defects the man was born with he fucked his way into epilepsies what happened it's also in his family so i don't know it could be it could be both sure sure yes we are not doctors we're not doctors go get tested be be careful everyone i was thinking about story night vincent as i've said didn't paint from memory or from his imagination he painted from looking at things that's why he was like obsessed of having models except obsessed of having people actually there when he drew them but a starry night he would stand in his room in his with barred windows looking out at the night all night long looking at the stars and then in the morning they would let him go down into a studio to paint by day and that's how he painted a starry night which is like the

only thing he ever painted from memory and from his imagination so he the town that's in a starry night is sort of like there was a town that he could have seen from his room it's not that town but it's like similar and they made it a lot smaller more quaint and then on the left there's obviously like the big cypress trees and he could have seen those from his bedroom window as well so that was like the view we should have done more from memory because that one's like that's obviously the best one I think well I think also that's so interesting because it's like people were telling him you have to go to school and like learn these like concepts of art and he was like yes but he would try it and he couldn't do it so he was like forcing himself to tone it down for everybody else you know but when he

was like i'm just going to go ahead and do it then he makes a starry night wow yeah which i've seen it's in the um in the in the moma in new york city so i saw that yeah lovely um which is where i got is it big is real cute yes it's that huge but it's not like small bigger than mona lisa yes it's bigger than the mona lisa yeah so this is the first time he's ever done that it's like you know maybe potentially this like firework of electrical impulses in his brain who knows all these things. But he's painting Starry Night. He's three with artistic things. But also he's like eating his paint and drinking kerosene from the lamps. So it's not great. So they're going to be like, you can't paint anymore. You're not going to have, you can't have sharp objects because you're

starting to go crazy. People started to see a sunflower paintings and kind of like them now. There's an article about him in the paper. And people started to be like, oh, isn't it interesting that this artist is institutionalized? You know, like, I don't know. It's kind of cool. So they started to like do that, which is, like, super unfair that the people who pay attention to him once he'd already been, like, hospitalized for his problems. So, then Theo and Yo have a baby. How many in their baby? Vincent Van Gogh. Oh, that's cute. There's another run. So the baby Vincent hasn't met Yo yet, but he, like, they write letters. She's very nice to him. When she meets him for the first time, she's like, he looks great. He looks healthy. Like, he's not what I expected.

Like, he looks fine. Actually, Theo looks worse, you know, because of his syphilis, but whatever. Yo, did not get syphilis. So lucky duck on that one. There's like piles and piles of art around them. He's sending it to Theo like frantically. He gets out of the institution and he goes to a town that I absolutely cannot pronounce. It's a very sir oise. Why is he sending? Is it because his art was finally being recognized and valuable and he's trying to monetize? No, I mean, that's what he always wanted, but he's just like producing a lot at this point. So he let him out of an institution for whatever reason and he goes to the small town and he's painting a lot. He's looking at gardens. He's asking Theo and Yo to come back and live with him. He's like,

we could be a family. We got to live here. We'd have this garden. They do come and they bring the baby. And he like shows the baby the yard. He's like, look, how lovely it could be like. He's like, I'm feeling better. Like he's all accounts. He thinks he's feeling better. And so on July 27th, 1890, Vincent went to paint the field just like he always did he wore his little hat he brought his easel he brought his paints he walked up to the field hours later he came home after walking like a mile like literally up a hill up a cliff to get back home he is walking home his people in town see him his jacket is buttoned and he's limping his landlord looks at him and says like vincent what happened and he says i wounded myself and opens up his jacket and he has a bullet hole in his ribs

people then forever were like he died by suicide he shot himself he died like 29 hours later it was like super painful like super oh he didn't shoot himself in the head or like the heart it was like in his ribs like a really weird spot and there's all of these things that are like well he had talked about suicide before um he was very like he was eating the paint he was drinking the kerosene but when he talked about suicide he would talk about it as like drowning. or like he never mentioned guns there weren't really guns around at this time they were very very rare the official story was that he shot himself and he died a few days later and he actually said like i wounded myself and theo came to be with him and he said theo let me die this is where i want to die like this is fine so he never like so they just assumed that he had that he had killed himself and that that was that was the end of vinci vango but there's also in this like i said He was with a sex worker. He was with a sex worker.

No. No? Wow. Here's what I think it was. This is on the book and then like an article in Vanity Fair where the authors from the book talk about this. But it sounds like there were these fucking punk-ass kids in town who would make fun of him all the time.

And they would be like, they'd like put sugar, put salt in his coffee. And they like found him masturbating in the woods and made fun of him. Because like obviously he was also masturbating Zendorum. And they're not wrong, Taylor. No, but they were mean to him. They were mean to him. They found someone they could bully, and they bullied him. And the leader of this gang of bullies was named Renee Suckerton, and he was 16 years old, but he fucking loved the old west of the United States. So he had this fake cowboy costume that he would wear to be like Buffalo Bill, Cody, Wild Bill.

And he would wear this fake costume around, and he would borrow a gun that the innkeeper had and pretend to be a cowboy. so it sounds like the kids accidentally shot him playing cowboy and vincent didn't want them to get in trouble so said that he had hurt himself did they find a gun on benson no they never found the gun they found like a gun much later and never found his um paint or any of the things he brought with him so it sounds like the kids took it and threw it away there was no suicide note there was no painting stuff like yes he was depressed and And yes, he was all these things, but he hadn't, like, said anything was going to happen, which also, like, that happens to. You know, people who seem very, very happy die by suicide and you don't know.

But that is, like, a thing that is suspicious. So the authors of the book who, what that I read, they, in the, I don't know, 2000 somethings, they had a forensic person, look at it. Look at the autopsy reports. Look at Vincent. Look at everything. and the person who did it was named Dr. Vincent de Mayo and he was actually the forensic analyst who worked on the George Zimmerman case. So he's like a real like forensic guy in the news. And his conclusion is, quote, is my opinion that in all medical probability, the wound

incurred by Van Gogh was not self-inflicted. In other words, he did not shoot himself. Okay. I can't do that work guys work for it. It could have been an accident. But that's like a whole thing. He was super sick. Van Gogh was not going to live to be 100 you know like he was going to die soon anyway but he was always like i will accept death when it comes but i'm not going to like necessarily seek it out and then when it happened he was probably like this checks out my only thing is like if you're trying to ascribe logic to it the guy fucking slid his ear off and gave you to the receptionist of a brothel he's not yeah he wasn't going to live much longer what you know because if you're argument is like what normal person would

try and kill themselves by shooting them in the rib well you're not dealing with a normal person totally right it's totally right yeah but we just like we'll never know there's always rumors around town the rumor town was that some boys killed him by accident but they didn't say anything they wanted to get in trouble that that that boy ended up growing up and becoming kind of a like a famous not famous but like a politician in the area so they just like didn't talk about it anymore so like it could have happened it could have been him we'll never really know but it's not like black and white you know theo his brother is obviously devastated that vincent has passed and he you know is like I want to make make him famous he feels very guilty he's obsessed with

it but he can't do it because of the syphilis of course so Theo actually dies six months later he gets sent away to an asylum as well because his like mind is crazy with the syphilis whatever it does it's like not great and he ends up dying like really young Vincent was 37 when he died Theo was 33. So he died pretty, pretty young. And he ended up being like a padded cell. That's how crazy the syphilis made him. And then, I mean, the Van Gogh family, like, you know, without going into all the things, like, another brother, he died by suicide.

Another sister was actually sent away for 40 years. She lived in an institution. So, like, the kids were not great. Yeah. In general. But Vincent was the one who, like, did it by, like, you know, to have this actually actual output. from his like his mental instability so yo remarried and she made sure that theo and vincent were buried together and that could have been sort of like the end of his his legacy but then you know

the question is why do we know about him like why would we ever know he never sold anything in his life you know he sold like one painting in his like last year of life people ridiculed him he was always like on the outskirts of everything like there's no reason for us to know about him but the reason we do is because of yo because she inherited everything so in so she moved back to the netherlands and made a um like a boarding house so she would have like people stay at her house it was her and vincent van go to the kid the baby and she had the potato eaters in her living room she has starry night in her dining room she had this crazy yeah these like she had they were 800 million dollars worth of paintings between two paintings? No, it's more. Like one of the, there's a kid, like a great, great

grandson of Theo was talking about in one of the articles I read, like going through closets of Vincent's work. And he's like, it's tens of billions of dollars that we were going through, like in the closet, you know? And the Van Gogh family actually doesn't own any original Van Gogh works anymore. They've all like donated it and sold it and given it so like the world can have it is like their thing. But Yo had all this art. And she had all. of the letters that Vincent wrote Theo. She had all the letters, all the paper that Vincent kept. So she read it all. She was so smart. She would translate books from Dutch to English. She was like a teacher. She like knew time about linguistics. So she was like people need to see this and they will understand it if they understand how tormented Vincent was in his mind. So she invented in was the first person to really say like the tortured artist. Like she was a person to like make a thing like you have to look at his work in context. of his life. So she did that. And, you know, one thing is, like, in the article that I read, like, she would go to an important gallery with her baby. She's holding her baby. She's a woman.

No one takes women seriously. And she would be like, you have to look at this. You have to read these letters. You have to look at this art. It is something. And so she would rent galleries. She became the person who championed this across Europe. She actually spent a couple years in America having people look at his work as well. In 1905, the largest Van Gogh exhibit that ever happened in in the Netherlands. It had 484 of his works on display. And she rented the galleries, printed the posters, invited the people, bought bow ties for the staff. Her son, Vincent, wrote out the invitations. Like, they made it happen. Wow. And then the question is, like, why did Yo do that? She only was married to Theo for like less than two years. But her journals and

her life, she were a journal when she was younger saying that I wanted to do something with my life is important. Then it stopped. She said, I'm moving to Paris. And then two years later, she picked up her journals again. And the rest of her life was like, those two years in Paris were the best years of my life. And she was trying to like recreate and share that like huge artistic journey with the world. And so that was like her motivation was like, this is the thing that I want everybody to know. We know about him because of her, because of all the work that she did. Otherwise, that we would never have known. And one thing that he wrote in a letter to Theo, which is a quote from another artist,

but it's something that he felt very deeply, is he said, no results of my work would be more agreeable to me than that ordinary working men should hang such prints in their rooms or workplace, which is exactly what happened. Yeah. And I cut this out of my art book. I just framed the night cafe to hang up in my house. No, that's awesome. Yeah, I'm looking at it is, so apparently the, the estimated value of Story Night is $100 million. It's crazy. Crazy. It's one painting. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And arts, you know, arts like whatever, who knows, like what makes something stick and something doesn't, but his stuff is very special. He's, it's very special. Yeah, again, I don't, I'm not like an art guy, but like, I look at it and I'm like, man, it like evokes something.

You know, it's an infangible, but for common people like you and me, you know. I will say this. I will say that nobody in the world will ever convince me that Pablo Picasso was an artist or good at painting or good at his imagination or good at, like, it is, it is like an acid trip on paper, like is all it is. like it is not good i have a couple thoughts um Picasso was actually like a really good like technical painter that he could he could paint things that were very like realistic like ifango could not but he moved past that and was like i could do this forever but i don't want you to like the next thing which was like Picasso's like something we know for use that NYU degree tell me what giving it like a realistic public pasta painting

oh but look up as blue period Picasso, blue period. Thank you, NYU. Thank you. That was $100,000. But this is when he was doing, like, starting to get weird, but like. Like it's good, but it's not like,

you know, you look at a DaVinci painting and you're like, whoa. Right. You know what I mean? But that's a different, but that had been done and it's different. I need more time to think about this, but yes. How about?

Or like Van Gogh. stuff wasn't detailed, but it's just like, wow, like, the brush strokes, like, weird. Like, how did you, how did you, you know, now I'm, I'm so foolish because this entire time I thought it was just like a genius mind filled with curiosity and endeavored for truth and style and painting when really it was just a VD world brain full of holes filled with mercury poisoning. Like, that's what it takes to do, I think a good Van Gogh, but I don't know. Picasso, yeah, probably one of those guys who, the sheer force of personality made him super, super fascinating in life. And people just like, were like, oh, then you must be a genius. I'm sure, Picasso, I don't want to be a dick, but like, do you watch what we do in the shadows? No.

It's so good, but there's one where they have, Gwernica is one of Picasso's most famous paintings and it's like black and white and it's after like the, the, um, like a bombing of the town of Guernica in Spain and it's like a horror thing, but it's weird. It's weird. If you don't like it, you wouldn't like it. But anyway, one of the vampires, she says that she's in it and she calls him Pablo Picassal. It's really, get to that. You're the first person to ever recommend what we do in the shadows to me. It's amazing. Like forever ago.

It's so good. Well, because even before the TV show, that's like three seasons now, there's the movie from like 10, 15 years ago, it's so good. The movie is the one that you recommended. Oh, my God. I mean, I love it. I love it. Yeah, it's crazy.

I feel like the thing that rocked me is I was like, oh, he cut his ear off for a woman and he absolutely did not. It wasn't a better reason. A woman would have made more sense. No, but the, but the answer is every relationship that Vincent Van Gogh had was red flagly and doomed. He couldn't do it. He just, like, could not do it. and like that that um that beautiful two minutes from from dr who but you're just like would he it'd be lovely to be able to tell him yeah you know like it'd be nice to be like you know people

know who you are i think that he'd like that yeah that was a good one that was a really good one i am going to start a lot this this will be a long episode yeah we're pushing just shy of two hours yeah whatever we had a lot to say we got three stories and i i do like how you know when we consider our topics you cover like this giant of creativity and insanity mixed with beauty and the movement it's like you're like that guy in american mind who like films the sack in the wind you know and then no one's ever thought i was deep and i'm like this guy's guts got fucking shot out like a cannon 30 feet oh my god it's so gross

I made some beautiful things on mid journey of Van Gogh doing a diving bell that I'll share with you oh my god oh my god well I have some listener mail oh yeah let's hear it which is not listener mail because zero people have emailed us but it's friends who texted me

that counts I have a couple I have three stories so Beth from North Carolina called She called to tell us that when Pat Robertson died, Robert Pattinson was trending on Twitter because people were worried that he had died. Oh, it's so good.

It never fails. And I would be more much sadder if that had happened. I know. Even though I think I've ever seen a Robert Pattinson movie, but still. And then George from New York, my friend George, reminded me about talking, speaking of the Habsburgs, the last crown prince. of Austria actually died in 2011 at the age of 98 and he was the one that was in a wheelchair. Do you remember that 30 Rock where Jenna almost marries the Habsburg?

No. They do like a really great thing. I think it's the guy, I can't remember his name. My God, the guy I played with TB Herman and he's like in a wheelchair and like, but a prince. So it's like, it's really funny. It's like definitely watch that. And then my last one is Blair from Austin. I've heard of her.

She said that when you had mentioned, has anyone ever mixed? whiskey and wine in a cocktail. She said that she used to work at a restaurant in Las Vegas, and they would make sangria, but it was just a bottle of wine and a bottle of brandy and a ton of sugar, and people would get shit-faced. God. So, I mean, man, I guess if you're trying to get shit-faced, that's one way to do it. Exactly.

So that was Blair's suggestion for, you know, mixing whiskey and wine, just put together, add some fruit and some sugar. I'm sure that sangria is probably, I mean, no one would notice after the first half a glass. That's true. This is delicious. Yeah. You'd be like eating the fruit with a fork.

Oh, God. It's all I'm just going to taste. Like, it might as well be nothing at that point. Exactly. Like mouth is numb and you can't remember we parked. Thank you, listeners. Thank you, everyone. Writing in.

Yeah. For texting me personally and, you know, I love it. I'm so, I really, I truly do love it. My friends are like, we love it. Thank you. And soon with our advertising that's coming out, everybody will love it as well. We're going to be world famous and yeah, that'll be our cross to bearer, hopefully. Yeah, strangers find us on the internet.

We're at Doom to Fail Pod, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, put everything up on YouTube so you can watch it there. That's what you do. But we're on all of the podcast platforms. Please like and subscribe. Tell your friends, this is our 26th episode. So we have tons of episodes to go back on, talk about Russia a lot. not the true crime as of history please listen thank you thank you all um and i think i think i'll go ahead and cut it off there okay