Part One: Stockton Rush: Inventor of the Deathsub

the man. Andrew. You are a writer in the in in in the entertainment industry and are on strike like all of the all of the god fearing writers out there, which means you have time to be on a podcast. So, uh, it's really working out good for me, this old strike.

of human urine to be silly. But given our topic today, it's downright responsible, Andrew, Because today, I mean I feel like normally we comment on like, so, what have you heard about you know, X person potentially obscure or whatever. We're all aware of the death sub right that that imploded on its way down to the Titanic.

I've chosen for the episodes to kind of rather than well focus specifically on the accident, to focus on stocked and Rush and like his background and kind of where he comes from and how this all got together, but we will kind of be talking about the stuff around it, including you know, it's interesting, there's this like a lot of so the kind of the two big arguments over this thing that have that have been filling the internet so far, or like should we laugh when a bunch

of billionaires die in an easily predictable accident and that's between you and your god people like I can't. And also it's one of those things where it's like if you think it's bad to laugh when like people you don't know die, that's a perfectly ethically consistent point. Also, if you think that it's fine, I don't really that's

that's that's what it's whatever. It's like if we're gonna flip out about people laughing at this, Like the Internet has been like full of shit like this from the very if you can remember the early days, the Darwin Awards were one of like the biggest things on the Internet, which was just laughing at people dying in stupid ways.

up that this's got so much more attention than that. Yes, it definitely is, but it's also like not particularly surprising. Like if you think back, because I started, I started covering like refugees moving from kind of northern Africa to through Europe back in twenty fifteen, I was on the refugee trail for a while and it was a huge story. People paid a lot of attention. There was a lot

of aid coming in. You know, when that little boy I believe his name's parents Island Curdie drowned a few years back, like that was there was a massive amount of attention, and then it, because it happens so often, kind of just became normalized. Which is the thing. I mean, it happens with mash It's not just a thing that happens.

It happens with fucking mass shootings, right Like it's this is a thing that happens because people can only sort of like be outraged or horrified about a thing they can't directly affect, you know, which is not to say that like more shouldn't be done, or that the fucking coastguards and some of these like Italy and whatnot are not doing nightmarish things, Yeah, stopping rescuers from coming in. But it's not surprising or really a mark that, like

people are much worse than they've ever been. That like this unique story of a bunch of rich people dying in a sub visiting the Titanic got so much attention.

dumb name. And the name like he has this dumb name because our special dead boy was named for two of his ancestors, Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush, both of whom signed the Declaration of Independence, which for rich white people. Was kind of like owning a foil charizard in nineteen ninety nine, Like it was real special, you know. So yeah,

and he's a twofer. He has a twofer. And speaking of owning Andrew, when you hear signed the Declaration of Independence, the first thing you should probably ask yourself is like, did this guy own people?

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

and whose judgment and prudence I can fully confide. So he's like, I promise these people I can free him, but I'm passing that buck down to my wife.

the British. No one knows quite. It doesn't seem like there's like conclusive evidence about what he did, but he got kind of led off, and there were rumors that maybe he'd like given up information and stuff. Yeah, we don't seem to have. Yeah, he's a snitch, right, He's a slave owning switch.

which was eventually named the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Interestingly, you know, we talk a lot on the show about how many abolitionists were still real racist, right, like you could be an abolitionist and super racist. Benjamin Rush was, interestingly enough, one of the guys who argued ardently that black people were as smart and capable as anyone else. He authored a seventeen eighty nine article about the first free black physician named James Durham, and he also wrote about an

enslaved black mathematician named Thomas Fuller. He was like kind of writing anti racism tracts back in the seventeen eighties, which is pretty cool. Here's here's where it stops being cool because he was publicly an anti racist, but privately he bought an enslaved black man named William Gruber and held him in bondage as his cook for more than a decade.

for profit to other families. Now he files manumission papers for William in seventeen eighty eight, but that doesn't actually free Gruber until seventeen ninety three, when he kind of lets him go with the equivalent of a letter of recommendation and a write up I found on the University of Pennsylvania Library's website seems to argue that Rush was probably probably kept it a secret that he'd owned Gruber because he's this public anti racist, so he would like

hide the fact that he was keeping a man enslaved in his home because he's like a public intellectual who argued with racists in like these tracts at essays and stuff that he was printing, and it wouldn't have looked good. And I'm going to read a quote from the University of Pennsylvania Library here. When Gruber died in seventeen ninety nine, Rush wrote a remembrance of him in his Commonplace book.

It appears in the Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. In it, he described Gruber as a Native African whom I bought and liberated after he had served me for ten years. The period is not likely accurate. He described Gruber's change from a drunkard who swore frequently to a sober, moral man and faithful and affectionate servant. He remembered especially a night in seventeen eighty seven when Rush gravely ill was expected to die and Williams stayed up with him all night.

So he wrote manumission papers for this guy, like the year after this dude helped like carry him through a deadly illness, but still didn't free him for half a decade. Like that's that's so weird. I guess it's not. You know, at least he did free him. I don't know where you want to put that, Like, I mean, I think it.

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

about that, all of you. But like I, behind the bastards is not where we'll make that moral deciding line or anyway. They're all bastards. It's fine, yeah, for sure. So that that is beyond a shadow of a doubt. So both the Stockton and Rush families continue to be very wealthy and powerful throughout the life of the new United States. Gradually the two families get intertwined through marriage. You know, it's a pretty incestuous breed rich people in

the Northeast. In eighteen ninety seven, their descendant, Ralph K. Davies was born. Dave's got a job working as an office boy for a company called Standard Oil. When he was fifteen. He rose through the ranks and became the youngest director in company history. In World War Two, he was FDR's petroleum administrator, which is maybe the least directly evil job a member of the oil and gas industry

ever held. It's like the one job where it's like, well, you know, it was World War Two, we probably needed somebody doing that.

Davies's daughter Ellen met Richard Stockton Rush Junior. A month later, the pair were engaged coverage of their wedding, accompanied by a huge photo in the San Francisco Examiners said they were settling down in Berkeley talk Rush, as he was known, also settled into the Davies family's line of work, serving as the chairman for Peregrine Oil and Gas Company in

Burlingham and the Natomis Company in San Francisco. His two thousand Princeton Alumni Weekly obituary noted that He even served as the president elect of the city's infamous Bohemian club, which is the Bohemian Grove Group, Right, like, that's who runs that. So wait, I don't even know what that is Bohemian Groves. That it's in the Redwoods, kind of near the Bay area, and it's where it's where like Henry Kissinger and all, like Dick Cheney all go to party once a yeares Alex Jones snuck in once.

Stockton founds is a hiss R we name. Yeah. He like within hours of this going missing, he was kind of trying to drum up conspiracy theories, posting stuff like, you know, we're working on this hard, but like the US government isn't helping us, you know, if they don't fix this and come to our a and I'm going to make sure the world knows the names of the

people who didn't do their jobs. And that's led to like I found a fucking like Donald Trump Junior has been posting shit about how like everything about this is sketchy. You know, why are they doing this? I'm seeing people talk about how like, oh, you know, how would billionaires have made a decision so dumb is to go down?

of the world. But like, uh, there's a theory that you that I came across started coming across I don't know, years ago, that like the Iceper, the Titanic was blown up by a bomb because a number of the rich guys on it, like John jacob Astor were against, uh, moving away from the gold standard and establishing the Federal Reserve. It's one of those kind of things, right, right, right, And so part of like what people are pointing out is that Stockton Rush's wife is like she had relatives

who are on the Titanic. They're actually in James Cameron's movie. They're the two old people who are like cuddling on that bed as it goes down. And so there's I suspect I've already seen some of this. I suspect we're going to see more like, oh, this is like a conspiracy. These guys we're gonna, you know, had some dirt on Biden or whatever and in what the Fed's doing with interest rates or some shit. It's silly, I will tell

you right now. The fact that Stockton had relatives in the Bohemian Club is definitely you're gonna wind up seeing this on some YouTube videos that the algorithm serves you at some point. Right, Just be ready for it, folks, It's a coming. So that's Stockton's family background. He is the scion of two very wealthy families who got wealthy through a mix of slavery and exploiting the Earth's resources

in the most poisonous way possible. Right, this guy, he grows up his family's worth probably hundreds of millions of dollars, at least tens of millions of dollars, and he grows up with that amount of money. In a twenty seventeen Bloomberg profile, he described his family wealth this way. Rush earned his money the old fashioned way. He says, I was born into it and then grew it. I don't know, that's not really the old faction I guess it is it is.

time you hear this. It's interesting, I kind of when I was started looking into him, I was surprised to see that despite how high profile his clientele is and the fact that like he'd been in a number of prominent news articles prior to this. When I started working on this, at least Stockton had no Wikipedia page. There was no like single Stockton Rush entry on Wikipedia. Oh wild, and I wasn't able to find an exact reference to

his birth date. One article that I read notes that he was eighteen when he got his pilot's license in nineteen eighty, which would mean he was born in sixty two thereabouts. Be beat motherfuckers, Hey, Robert here from the future. Since we recorded this, a number of official obituaries have come out for Old Stockton, and we now have an actual birth date for him. The New York Times gives it as March thirty first, nineteen sixty two, in the

place as San Francisco. I'm leaving in the conversation we had around it before we knew that, because it gives good context as to how actually, like relatively unknown this guy was prior to the disaster, which I find interesting considering how connected he is to so many like rich and super famous people that like very little about this

dude before he became very suddenly famous. One of the things that I use sometimes for research is an AI powered search engine called find Phi n D, which is basically like it's nice because you can kind of ask it direct questions and it'll scrape the internet trying to answer it. And so I asked it when was he? After I couldn't find a birth date. I was like, for shits and giggles, hey, when was this guy born? And Find was also like, there doesn't appear to be

a clear exact birth date for it. There's not a thing. Yeah, there also doesn't appear to be a clear exact answer as to where he was born. Some articles suggest he was born in the UK, other say California. Given how Rich's family is, that it's possible, like it's not weird for like Rich people don't care.

more than to be an astronaut. His parents assumed he'd grow out of that, as most kids do, but since they were super wealthy oligarchs, they were able to humor him by introducing him to a real astronaut, Pete Conrad, the commander of Apollo twelve and the First Man's Skylabih just like, well, he wants to be an astronaut, let's go find a nag go find an astronaut dotting it really bring him in bias an Apollo twelve man, like he's a Gi Joe.

that guy's hand and he like walked us around. It was like part of a thing like a bunch of other like families and stuff where they're It was like one of the best single moments of my childhood. And for Stockton, the equivalent of that is like, bring the skylamb man over to the house, have him talk to the boy, right, I mean, he's.

have started work as a professional pilot when he was nineteen. Quote. Rush has been investing in startup companies most of his adult life, while also working at aviation. He was a commercial jet transport pilot at nineteen and later a flight test engineer for McDonald Douglas. Now that's not the most

detailed version of his early life that I found. In a Smithsonian magazine profile from twenty nineteen, he gives a little more detail and some of its contradictory because in that he says that at age eighteen, he became one of the youngest commercial pilots in the world. From what I could done, what I think happened is he got his license at eighteen. He started working a year or two later. But like once he started to get more famous, he started lying and saying that like, oh no, I

was the youngest commercial pilot ever. You know, just a little bit of that fluff cycle, right, Yeah.

and out of Saudi Arabia. He's working for the Saudis he as a teenage boy.

that Smithsonian article continues. The astronaut dream was dashed when Rush learned that his eyesight wasn't good enough for him to become a military pilot in the nineteen eighty Still, the astronaut fast track so he kind of has the background of that kid from Little Miss Sunshine. Yeah, that's the that's the continuation of that dude's life. Instead, he moved to Seattle to work for McDonald douglas as a flight test engineer for F fifteen fighter jets, then went

on to business school. Building on inherited money, he invested in a string of esoteric tech companies, wireless remote control devices, sonar systems. Still, he dreamed of going to space, perhaps as a passenger on one of the private rockets being developed in the early two thousands by the likes of Richard Branson. In fact, Rush traveled to the Mohave Desert in two thousand and four to watch the launch of

Spaceship Ie, the first commercial craft sent into space. When Branson stood on its wing and declared that a new era space tourism had arrived, Rush says he abruptly lost interest. I had this epiphany that this was not at all what I wanted to do. I didn't want to go up in space as a tourist. I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise. I wanted to explore.

been terrible at investing. We have no evidence actually that he was good at it that I've seen.

Now he describes as like, well, I wanted to explore. I wanted to be Captain Kirk. I don't think that's actually accurate either. I think he wanted to be Richard Branson selling tickets to rich, old white dudes who would worship him as a badass billionaire adventurer. Right yeah, like that's that's what this guy actually wanted. Now, the startup costs for this guy's rich. His family's rich. But like there's rich, and then there's being able to start your

own space company rich. And this guy is not that rich. You know, his family doesn't have that kind of money.

over the world. And he specifically he gets into because he moves up to Seattle as an adult and he does a lot of cold water diving off the coast of Seattle. Now, as he notes, the diving off of the Puget Sound is gorgeous, but it's like cold water diving is like a whole different beast from like regular open water or regular diving, right, like where you're in I don't know, like fucking I learned to dive in Okinawa,

where the water is kind of a perfect comfortable temperature. Right, it's one of the best places in the world for diving. The Puget sound as cold as hell. So if you're going to dive there, you've got like special suits, you're carrying extra tanks. It's like more of a pain in the ass. And that's kind of how he describes it quote, I loved what I saw, but I thought there's got

to be a better way. And being in a sub and being nice and cozy and having a hot chocolate with you beats the heck out of freezing and going through a two hour decompression hanging in deep water. Now that's funny for a couple of reasons, Like I don't know, Subs are fine, subs are cool, Like I think what James Cameron has done with his submersibles is like neat, But it is funny that this guy's like I wanted

to be an explorer, but also I want my hot cocoa. Yeah, I don't know, man, Like read about what astronauts go through. It's not a comfortable process.

They'll be arguing about whose shits fly around. It's very funny. God, Yeah, you wouldn't want to You wouldn't want to be drinking coco in that environment, I'll tell you that much. So since he was a very rich kid, he had the power to just kind of go out and spend money to make this expensive whim happen. But alas Stockton was stymied because there aren't a lot of private submarines. It's actually pretty uncommon for like just a dude to own a sub which is a shame because I did grow

up reading the Illuminatus trilogy. I would like to, you know, it'd be cool to have a golden submarine that you run a global conspiracy from, but it's apparently a real pain in the ass to upkeep them.

sub I was thinking, this is stupid. I should have just bought a robot and explored with that. But the moment I went underwater, I was like, oh, you can't describe this. When you go in a sub things sound different, they look different. It's like you've gone to a different planet. Rush was hooked. His entrepreneurial instincts were peaked. I had come across this business anomaly. I couldn't explain if three quarters of the planet is water, how come you can't

access it? Now? Yeah, that's a fascinating thing to think. Where like he's underwater, alone in a submarine, looking at like the majesty of reef systems and underwater life that very few people get to see, and his immediate thought is like, why isn't this owned? Why haven't we enclosed this and turned this into like corporate property.

you get the feeling more than anything. He sees this as his opportunity to become a self made billionaire and put himself on an even footing with guys like Branson and Musk. But the private submarine world, you know, it's never been huge. It's never been a big business to be a submarine owner, and it had pretty much collapsed by the early aughts. In his interview with the Smithsonian, Stockton Rush claims that there were two reasons for this. One of the big markets for private subs had been

carrying what are called saturation divers to work underneath. So you've got oil rigs right in the ocean. They go down very deep and they need repair work done on them intense depths, and these are the kind of depths where you don't just like throw on an oxygen tank and go diving. Right. Number one, it's too deep. So when you're diving, you can go down pretty quickly, but going up you have to be extremely careful about how quickly you go up right otherwise you're gonna fucking die.

So when you're going to intense depths like this, and you have to work, so you have to be able to spend a decent amount of time down there to do stuff. What they would do is they would put divers, and these divers don't have oxygen tanks. They have like special formulations of different kind of like chemicals that allow them to breathe in the specific like it's I don't know, we're not going to go into like how diving works.

There's different stuff like nitrox. I'm not sure exactly what these guys were on, but they're wearing special suits, they've got special you know, mixtures in their tanks, and a submarine takes them down and takes them back up so that they can get on the sub and be in decompression without kind of running through all that way. They

don't have to carry as much as many tanks and stuff. Now, this is was for a while kind of the only way to do repair work on this stuff, but it was extremely dangerous, Like this was one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. These guys died all the time, not because like the subs weren't safe, but because diving at that depth isn't like people just die for like no reason while diving. You know, like sometimes it's it's just like a you know, your heart stops or whatever.

You get the wrong, you know, mix a shit in your blood. It's like it's very dangerous to dive, especially this kind of shit. So once oil and gas companies, once drones and stuff started being good enough, they moved away from having divers do this as much as possible and started having robots do it, which is like, I'm not gonna give the oil and gas company a lot of credit, but I'm sure it was both more cost efficient and like, yeah, people, it's like a lot safer.

So the other reason he claims was that or the other like business for private submarines was tourist subs, which could be skippered by anyone with a coastguard captain's license and were regular by the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of nineteen ninety three, which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection requirements and prohibited dives below one hundred and fifty feet. The law was well meaning, Rush says, but he believes

it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation. So he's like, it sucks that they stopped having divers fixed oil rigs because they were all dive dying, and it sucks that they stopped. They wouldn't they won't let us take people below one hundred and fifty feet in subs because it keeps killing them.

War era. It's a really good book. But like, basically, we used to have these fights between our submarines where they would try to force each other to surface, and it was insanely it's like chicken with nuclear submarines. It

was insanely dangerous shit. But like talking to him and talking to like other people who were in that industry, anyone who has done this kind of like four there have been four submarine rescues that have been successful in the history of submarines, and none of them were very deep compared to where this thing was. There was never any chance of saving these people, I don't think. But anyway, whatever, that's not that's not what we've got to talk about.

So we got to talk about. Yeah, one in a million. So Rush calls these these needless passenger safety prioritizations understandable butt a logical, which is very, very funny. But what we are what is interesting to me is that like the sub market falls apart. The real reason is that, number one, it's insanely dangerous the jobs that it was being used for, and we found better uses than submarines,

better ways to fill those needs. And number two, once we started replacing, like the subs that were being used to transport divers and shit, the only real industry for private subs was private trips for rich people to see shit underwater. And the thing that people most wanted to see was the Titanic. And we're going to talk about that, but first, you know what's also Titanic The savings that

you're gonna get if you purchase these products. And we're back, so we're talking about tourist trips to see the Titanic. So spoiler alert for those of you who haven't seen the movie, The Titanic went down on April fourteenth, nineteen twelve,

with a shitload of people on it. Now, despite the fact that this is the most famous nautical disaster in history, when it happened, and for like decades after it happened, very basic details of what had actually gone down were seriously in doubt, which is weird because eyewitnesses saw the ship break in half the way that it does in the James Cameron movie, right, But when that happened, like scientists at the time, an awful lot of the kind of people who were building boats and were experts on

this didn't think a ship could go down that way. I think the belief was that like it would basically get overwhelmed and like just kind of all sink at once. But they didn't think it could break that way. And because a lot of the eyewitnesses were like women, there was this like a lot of these people got like

mocked and stuff by the like. Anyway, it was a whole It was a whole deal, which is to say that, like when people started going after the Titanic, there was a real reason to want to find it because, among other things, you might actually like give some closure to some of these people who had spent their lives being

called crazy. I don't know whatever, there was a good scientific reason to want to find this thing, and the shit the cruise ship's resting place remained a mystery until a very cool dude named Bob Ballard got a secret contract from the US Navy in nineteen eighty five. Ballard Ballard is an oceanographer, and like Stockton, he'd always loved the sea. Unlike Rush, he turned this love into a lligent appreciation for the science of oceanography. And he gets

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

finds the Titanic. Because Bob Ballard is very good at what he does. You know this is he's also the guy who finds the fucking Bismarck. And because he's the guy who finds the big dead boat, he could have claimed salvage rights to the wreck, which is like potitionally quite a bit of money and salvaging the Titanic. But because he's like a basically decent guy, Ballard was like, I don't want to mine the graveyard of several thousand

people for profit. That seems that seems ghoulish. Yeah, he actually was like, I think that's grave robbing, so I don't really want to do that. But other people had no compunctions against renting deep sea vehicles and grabbing shit near the wreck to sell back on surface. And we're actually going to talk about those people because one of them winds up on Stockton. Russia's death sub kind of

the biggest of them. But over the next year, some fifty five hundred artifacts from the titan Over the next eighteen years, some fifty five hundred artifacts from the Titanic are sold or put in the Titanic Museum. Bob later wrote it had turned into an ugly carnival and a front to the fate of the Titanic. And all those

who had lost their lives in her final hours. Now, this grave robbing is done by mere subs which are leased by the from the Russian government during a period in which like this is kind of the late eighties early nineties, like right after the Soviet Union fall, so like the Russians, Yeah, they're kind of needing money, you know. Yeah. So my analogous.

around the globe. And suddenly there's this kind of burgeoning fan And there had always been since the Titanic went down, people have been obsessed with this, but obviously the movie takes that to another fucking level. There's all these people who kind of make the ship and its story the center of there. It becomes a fandom, you know.

the British born adventurer who led the trips. McCallum told Rush that the only reason the trips had stopped was that the Russians quit renting out the mears, which have since been mothballed. There was never an end in sight to our market, McCallum says, we just didn't have the machines. So now he's like, oh, well, there's a market, and like, nobody's serving this shit as a capitalist, you know nature capitalism abhors a vacuum. This is this is how I'm

gonna make my fucking fortune. So he feels like he stumbled upon a great idea and the way he puts it in that interview with Bloomberg, which lists some of his earlier ideas for how to monetize submercivals, and a paragraph that is extremely fucking noteworthy. This keys you into kind of the most important stuff about what he was

really planning to do here. Up to that point, Rush had been thinking about unexplored rex hydrothermal vents and bizarro sea creatures, not to mention the many ways a capable sub could be leased out to an oil and gas company to service under sea wells and oil plats, or do were research institution to do surveys of sea cucumbers, or to the CIA, NSA, d i A to do whatever it is that spooks do on the floor of

the ocean. So that that's this guy's ethical basis. He's like, yeah, you know, raping the world for the oil and gas industry, discovering sea creatures, spying on people for the CIA, all equally valid. It's so funny, like he is. This man has the moral center of like a fucking donut. It's so funny. We did not lose a paragon of virtue here. I am truly grateful that Bloomberg profile exists because it makes very clear the fact that this guy never cared

about exploration or expanding the frontiers of human knowledge. He was an adrenaline junkie who liked planes and subs and wanted to become a billionaire doing something that he thought was cool. He'd have been happy helping Exon frack the Marianna's trench if that had worked out for him, But it just so happens that there was a bigger mar for the initially at least in catering to Titanic weirdos. So he started pouring money into building a new deep

sea submersible, the Cyclops, and then the Cyclops too. You know, he takes these guys down, he tests them out, he starts getting seed capital from fins and family. He's putting a shitload of his own money into this, to the tune of maybe tens of millions of dollars, and at first he can't really get any big investors involved. For pretty good reasons, Stockton cannot get to the Titanic, right, and a lot of people are like, well, he probably

is never going to get to the Titanic. At present, I think there are four other vehicles on Earth capable of reaching that thing with people in them, and they're all owned by various governments. The Chinese Jhaolong submersible is capable of going down the furthest For a while. Famously, James Cameron had the deep Sea Challenger, which had proved that a rich maniac could have a submersible constructed for

this kind of feet. But the Deep Sea Challenger, it's not the sort of thing, and I don't think of these are that you can fit a bunch of customers in, right, ye, Like the deep the way it works, You've got like this kind of superstructure that's this sort of weird almost cylindrical shape right around it. But the actual thing that a dude is in and that like the cameras and stuff are, as far as I can tell, is like a sphere, because a sphere is the is good for pressure. Yeah.

And it's also like by the time that that a Stockton's working on this, the Deep Sea Challenger is not operational anymore. There was like it took some damage just like because it's this is tough on a vehicle, and then there's like a car accident while it's being transported and they're like, well it's kind of been compromised, you know, we have to kind of retire it, which is what responsible people do when their deep sea vessel has been damaged.

Like you know, now, it's interesting. When he's talking to Bloomberg, Stockton presents both the Geolong and the Deep Sea Challenger as kind of like this is what he saw as the proof that his dream was achievable. Quote. People used to ask me, how do you think you can do

this if nobody else can. I like to point out that the two deepest diving subs on the planet are the Chinese Joolong and James Cameron sub the DSV Deep Sea Challenger, which in twenty twelve carried the Titanic Director to Challenger Deep, the ocean's deepest point, and is now retired. They were both built by amateurs who had never built subs before. The sub is not the challenge. The challenge is the business model and logistics. Now, that is an insane thing to say, Andrew, and if.

that's what he means by like amateur. But he's the professor at the School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil Engineering of Shanghai Jiaotong University. That's not an amateur. He's

a professor of naval architecture. He seems like an expert, and like there's there's a whole team of experts who are like people who build things under this four underwater shit, right, yes, so you're not, yeah, just just in a like you know, you can't walk down the street in La without hitting a professor of naval architecture, right, that's like, that's like running in a guy with a fucking podcast. It's so it's such a funny way to be like they're amateurs.

It's also like a Chinese government ministry are the people like handling the like the actual construction, and like it's it's a serious project by serious people. That's why it works, right And likewise he's being like, well, James Cameron's just this director and he got to make this thing. It's you know, an amateur. Well no, Cameron. Cameron says that like he contributed, he was one of the designers. He

helped do some of the engineering. I don't know exactly what that means, but he did not just design a ship and have it built. He is working with a company, an Australian R and D company called Acheron Project, and the construction is headed primarily by the co designer, a guy named Ron Allam, who is a professional engineer. If you want to know how serious an engineer, Ron Allam is. When they're working on this thing that Cameron takes down

to the Challenger Deep. There's like this kind of foam that they are using is part of like the pressure system that keeps it safe, and it's based on like the initial thing they tried is there was this kind of like nautical foam for pressure pressure vessels that were meant to go down less depth, you know, I think just a couple of thousand meters as opposed to how

far the Challenger Deep is. And they test out this foam that's already in use, and they find out that it can't handle the pressure, and so ron Allam invins an entirely new kind of foam for this thing, right new phone, Yeah, so yeah, Yeah. In two thousand and nine, Stockton Rush founds ocean Gate Ink with the promise to deliver Mann's submersible solutions to the private market. And that is where we're going to end our story for today, because we have now gotten up to the point where

the death sub is about to be made. So yeah, how we feel in today, Andrew, how we feel in about this whole tale?

people's money over and over and over again until you, you know, hit the right lottery ticket and then say it's your money.

going to happen. Like that's the Those are the kind of things that the tech bros who are a little bit less dumb than Stockton do where they'll talk about like doing bold and crazy shit, But if there's actually any risk in it, they don't because they they don't want to die, you know. Yeah, we're getting hurt or embarrassed, you know.

he was as ex gunned. He had money. Yeah, so maybe he just like never had any kind of grounding as a person. I don't know, though, I think it's.

I'm not doing any work.