S3 Ep320: OceanGate: A Preventable Tragedy (Part 1)

It was marketed as a voyage for the boldest among us - a ticket to the bottom of the world, where only a handful of humans had ever dared to go. But what began as a high-tech adventure turned into an unthinkable tragedy, and at the center of it all was one man: Stockton Rush. He called it innovation. Critics called it recklessness. And five people would pay the ultimate price. In this series, we’re diving deep into the story behind the Titan submersible disaster. From the birth of OceanGate and Stockton Rush’s obsession with rewriting the rules of deep-sea exploration, to ignored warnings, missing safety certifications, and a catastrophic implosion that sent shockwaves across the globe. Who was Stockton Rush- visionary pioneer or dangerous idealist? What happened in the final hours of the Titan’s descent? And how did a vessel built for discovery become a tomb in the dark silence of the Atlantic? This is not just a story about engineering failure; it’s a story about ego, ambition, and the fatal cost of a man with a god complex who gambled with human lives in the name of legacy. We're coming to CrimeCon Denver! Use our code CRIMEWEEKLY for 10% off your tickets!https://www.crimecon.com/CC25Try our coffee!! - www. CriminalCoffeeCo.comBecome a Patreon member -- > ｿ https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeeklyShop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> ｿ https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shopYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcastWebsite: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.comInstagram: @CrimeWeeklyPodTwitter: @CrimeWeeklyPodFacebook: @CrimeWeeklyPodADS:1. https://www. OneSkin.co - Use code CRIMEWEEKLY for 15% off! Help support our show and let them know we sent you!2. https://www. TryFum.com - Use code CRIMEWEEKLY to get a FREE gift with your Journey Pack!3. https://www. EatIQBAR.com - Text WEEKLY to 64000 for 20% off ALL IQBAR products, plus FREE shipping!4. https://www. HelloFresh.com/CrimeWeekly10FM - Use code CRIMEWEEKLY10FM for 10 FREE meals with a free item FOR LIFE!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  It was marketed as a voyage for the boldest among us. A ticket to the bottom of the world, where only a handful of humans had ever dared to go. But what began as a high-tech adventure turned into an unthinkable tragedy. And at the center of it all was one man, Stockton Rush. He called it innovation. Critics called it recklessness, and five people would pay the ultimate price. In this series, we're diving deep into the story behind the Titan submersible disaster. From the birth of Ocean Gate and Stockton Rush's obsession with rewriting the rules of deep-sea exploration, to ignored warnings, missing safety certifications, and a catastrophic implosion that sent shockwaves across the globe.

• 0:56Stephanie Harlowe?

  Who was Stockton Rush? Visionary pioneer or dangerous idealist? What happened in the final hours of the Titan's descent? And how did a vessel built for discovery become a tomb in the dark silence of the Atlantic? This is not just a story about engineering failure. It's a story about ego, ambition, and the fatal cost of a man with a god complex who gambled with human lives in the name of legacy.

• 1:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Crime Weekly. I'm Stephanie Harlow.

• 1:37Derrick Levasseur?

  And I'm Derrick Levasseur.

• 1:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  So we are, as you heard from the teaser, talking about the Titan submersible disaster. This was huge. This was a huge thing. I remember when the news reports started coming in, and it was all over. It was all, anyone was talking about, and they had a countdown for how many hours of oxygen the people in the submersible had left. And it was so stressful for me. And I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, these five people have family members, they have friends, they have loved ones who are out there watching the same news reports that I'm watching, seeing this oxygen timer just tick down. And then, you know, things started coming out about Stockton Rush, about the other passengers, about their part in it, about Ocean Gate, Stockton Rush's company, and...

• 2:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  It really started to unravel and it showed how easily this whole tragedy could have been avoided. And then I became very interested in it. I did a video on it on YouTube. I think I may have done one or two. And then the documentary came out on Netflix a few weeks ago. And I remember, I think it was June 11th or June 12th that it dropped. And I was on it as soon as it came out. And I watched it. And I was like, whoa, this is so much worse than we thought. This is just mistake and mistake and intentional mistake after mistake. And all the people involved, who I think were just too afraid to push back against this man, Stockton Rush, because of his leadership style, because of the way

• 3:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  he would react, because of the fact that he had a goal, a personal goal of being this titan of industry, you know, like an Elon Musk or a Jeff Bezos. And he wanted to be a trailblazer. And he wanted to be the one who did something that nobody else did. And that became so much more important than the safety of humans. And it wasn't just the four other people that he brought down in the Titan, because he brought many people down in the Titan. He brought many people down in his previous submersibles. And there was always issues and he always shrugged them off. And this, this could have happened, you know, before it actually did happen. It could have happened multiple times. It's lucky that it didn't. But these four people in Stockton Rush on the submersible, they

• 3:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  really, it would have been terrifying to be in their situation. It would have been absolutely terrifying. I mean, the ocean is terrifying on its own. And to be down there and know, hey, things are going wrong, you know, scary.

• 4:09Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, I mean, we're gonna get into it because there's, from what I'm seeing, a lot of people who believe they didn't even know that something was wrong until it was too late. But we'll talk about that. But I also think the other reason that the story was so captivating was because of what it was surrounding, which was Little Known Boat. Called the Titanic.

• 4:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Derrick Levasseur?

  And that's something, that's a story that's fascinated me and, and, and millions of other people since the movie came out and our boy Leo and.

• 4:35Stephanie Harlowe?

  I have so many books about the Titanic, it's crazy.

• 4:37Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's a crazy story because that's another, another example of wanting to be first, of wanting to be the best and, and not putting the proper safety measures in place to prevent tragedy because as we know with the Titanic, there were engineering designs done that were done for certain reasons, maybe aesthetics.

• 4:57Stephanie Harlowe?

  Aesthetics, I think speed.

• 4:59Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. And, and it came at the cost of the integrity of the boat. So you, it's the irony of having this situation happen right next to it when they're going down there to look at a boat that sunk because of its problems to do the same thing. It's just, it's, it's mind boggling, but.

• 5:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  It, it kind of brings it full circle.

• 5:18Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, it really does.

• 5:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. And there's more, there's more about the Titanic and its connection to Stockton Rush, which I found out in, in my research. So.

• 5:28Derrick Levasseur?

  No, I'm looking forward to covering it. It's, I had said a couple of weeks ago, like, oh, it's going to be a little bit more light. No, it's not light. Five people lost their lives. But considering what we just covered for seven parts with Darlie and her two children, we too, you know, people ask how we, how we do this all the time, every single week. This is how we do it. The, all these cases are tragic, but this one's a little lighter as far as the specifics of what went down. Um, and sometimes for us, we need that as well. So it's enjoyable to talk about the, the science and the technology behind it and the backstories. We're not making light of the, the deaths here, including Stockton Rush. But yeah, I'm looking forward to this case. What do you think?

• 6:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  I had a good time researching it because I got to learn about, you know, different metals and their properties and how they're used and why they might, why they might be used in aerospace, but not great to use for underwater vessels. So I, I got to learn a lot and that really does for me buffer the sadness of things when I feel like I'm learning and, and kind of getting a better handle on things and understanding what happened. And are you, were you about to ask me how many parts do I think this is going to be?

• 6:30Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  How dare you?

• 6:32Derrick Levasseur?

  I know you hate that. That's why I was doing it.

• 6:34Stephanie Harlowe?

  How dare you. Um, three, I would say.

• 6:36Derrick Levasseur?

  You hate being constrained. You hate being.

• 6:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  I don't like to, I don't like to say something and not give, and not be able to keep my word is what it is.

• 6:42Derrick Levasseur?

  No, but I mean, listen, we've gone, we went more with Darlie. It's like you do what you have to do to feel like you've covered it all. And so if it's gotta be four, great. If it's only two, that's fine too. But no, looking forward to it. The only thing I'll say before we start. Thank you to everybody who commented Crime Con on our Apple Podcast and some people were having issues with Spotify. You can just leave a comment on there. I'm looking through them. I'm gonna randomly scroll. We're just gonna pick someone. We're gonna do it till next week. We'll announce the winner. And then I had a lot of people hit me up saying, well, how do we just get tickets in general if we want them? Don't go buy the tickets through the site. Use our code. You could, you go through the site, but make sure you use our code. Because if you use our code CRIMEWEEKLY, you'll get 10% off the ticket. So if you don't win, or you don't wanna wait, just go to the Crime Con website. You can buy your tickets.

• 7:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  Crime Con Denver, yeah.

• 7:25Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, Crime Con Denver and use the CRIMEWEEKLY code. You'll save 10% if you don't wanna. But I would say wait for the, uh, wait for this little giveaway to happen because we're gonna do this one.

• 7:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  We'll announce next week.

• 7:34Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, we're, we're gonna probably do another one, but if you're impatient and you know, you just wanna buy them, you can go do that.

• 7:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  All right. So let's dive into it. And as always, to understand what happened at the end, we have to go back to the beginning. So Stockton Rush was born on March 31st, 1962 in San Francisco, California, into a world of privilege, pedigree, and power. He wasn't just a child of wealth. He was actually a descendant of American royalty. Two of his father's ancestors, Dr. Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton, signed the Declaration of Independence, anchoring the Rush family name deep into the foundation of the United States. Now on Stockton's mother's side, the legacy continued.

• 8:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  Ellen Davies Rush traced her lineage to Ralph and Louise Davies, a family known for their immense wealth and influence in the West Coast shipping and oil industries. Ralph Davies, who was born in 1897, was working for Standard Oil by the time he was 15, and he would eventually become the youngest person in the company's history to earn the rank of Director. During World War II, Davies joined the Department of the Interior at the behest of FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he served as petroleum administrator throughout the war. After the war, Davies served as chairman of shipping company American President Lines and lived with his family in Woodside. His wife Louise was a patron of the art scene in San Francisco and would later donate $4 million for the construction of the city's new music hall that would bear her name.

• 9:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, in 1957, Ralph and Louise's daughter, Ellen, would meet Richard Stockton Rush Jr. and within a month, they were engaged. Rush, who's Stockton Rush's father, he served as chairman for the Peregrine Oil Company and notably also served as president-elect of the infamous Bohemian Club. Now, if you're into the conspiracy theory realm of things, you know the Bohemian Club. I'm going to give you a quick rundown. The Bohemian Club is one of the most exclusive and secretive private men's clubs in the United States. Founded in 1872 in San Francisco, its membership includes some of the most powerful men in the world, US presidents, Fortune 500 CEOs, titans of tech, oil barons, media moguls,

• 9:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  you name it, former, like I said, tons of presidents, politicians, everything. And every summer, these men gather at the Bohemian Grove, which is a remote and heavily guarded redwood forest in Northern California, and they engage in some weird stuff. They got some off-the-record meetings, lavish ceremonies that include like burning effigies and kind of running around half naked, just strange theatric rituals, far from the eyes and ears of the public. And who's that guy? I always forget his name. He was like big into conspiracy theories. I think his last name is Jones. He gets all like really hyped up and wild.

• 10:27Derrick Levasseur?

  Alex Jones or Alex?

• 10:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  Alex Jones. There you go.

• 10:29Derrick Levasseur?

  He was the one, the idiot who said that Sandy Hook wasn't real?

• 10:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, well, he's got tons of conspiracy theories.

• 10:34Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, he got sued for like hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 10:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  He actually took like a camera crew and kind of like broke into Bohemian Grove and was able to get the only footage that we know of. And that's when we saw these men like dancing around like this big owl effigy and like burning it and chanting things. And it's just weird. It's weird to see grown men who hold really high positions of power and influence turn into, I guess, some pagan.

• 11:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  Ancient pagan worshippers is just a weird thing.

• 11:05Derrick Levasseur?

  You don't do that on your free time?

• 11:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  I mean, I'm not like-

• 11:07Derrick Levasseur?

  How do you know I'm not doing that?

• 11:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  Are either of us in like a position to influence like power or laws?

• 11:14Derrick Levasseur?

  I mean, I'm just doing it in my backyard by myself.

• 11:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  Exactly. That's absolutely fine. I encourage it. Go feral. But uh, yeah, it's just weird. It's a really weird thing. I have a book about it too, but anyways. The club's motto is weaving spiders come not here. In other words, leave business at the door, but no one really believes that because for decades Bohemian Grove has been rumored to be a place where political deals are brokered, wars are discussed, global strategies are quietly shaped over cigars and scotch. Like, stuff's happening there. It's like a um-

• 11:44Derrick Levasseur?

  It's the Boys Club.

• 11:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  It's like a BNI group on a massive scale where like presidents would be there and people who are also in, you know, positions of power might have some benefits from a president making a certain decision about, I don't know, where to go to war. Maybe there's oil there, stuff like that. You know, they're like, yeah, maybe you should go to war there. And if you do, you know, let's do this and let's do that. So it's really weird. It's creepy. And Stockton Rush's father served as a vice president-elect of the Bohemian Club. So the fact that Stockton Rush's father wasn't just a member, but was rising to the highest ranks of the Bohemian Club, it places the Rush family at the very heart of American elite power. They weren't just wealthy, they were connected,

• 12:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  insulated, and influential at levels most people will never see. This isn't just a story about an ambitious man and a doomed submersible. It's about legacy, entitlement, and a dynasty that always believed it was destined to do something extraordinary, no matter the cost. Now, from the beginning, Stockton Rush wasn't just expected to succeed. He was expected to leave a mark on history, and he would, just not in the way anyone imagined. We're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back to talk about how Stockton kind of got to the place where he even wanted to start a company called Ocean Gates.

• 13:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  All right, we're back. So by the age of 19, Stockton Rush had already made headlines as the youngest jet transport rated pilot in the world. He was still a teenager when he started flying DC8s in Saudi Arabia during the Hajj pilgrimage, taking semesters off from Princeton University to log hours in the sky. He actually kept his own private plane at the Princeton Airport and pursued his aerospace engineering degree with the same intensity that he brought to the cockpit. So for his senior theses, he designed a high-speed ultralight aircraft. He wasn't just a book smart, he was fearless. A friend recalled a last-minute flight through rain and turbulence to witness the launch of

• 13:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  the Columbia Space Shuttle in 1981, piloted by none other than Rush himself. This friend from Princeton was like, "Yeah, we just decided, like, oh, we're gonna go watch this space shuttle." We jumped in his plane, and then the wind was bad and it was raining, but he was completely cool as a cucumber. Never rattled, right?

• 14:05Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, those people have to be like that, pilots and...

• 14:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  He was like 19, though, dude.

• 14:08Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, but it's something you're born with. You know, and it's just they do things that most of us would be like, "Yeah, no shot." But they'll, even this whole Titan submersible, we're not talking about the details yet, but just the balls to go down there. Personally, I wouldn't do it. And I consider myself someone who will take some risks.

• 14:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  And wants to make a mark on the world, yeah.

• 14:31Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, want to make a mark, but I'm not gonna go that far down in the water. I'm claustrophobic to begin with, but I'm not, I wouldn't do that. And so it takes a special type of person. I think about these pilots that hop in these little cockpits and fly planes at, you know, 800 miles per hour, and they do it like they're driving a car. Yeah, they're just built different. It's just the way it is.

• 14:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  They sure are. I also think with the Titanic and with the Titan, a lot of it has to do with money, right? We're gonna talk about that, but...

• 14:58Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, it's a business, for sure.

• 14:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  It's a business. It's a business that...

• 15:02Derrick Levasseur?

  It don't make dollars, it don't make sense.

• 15:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  It could be very lucrative. It could be very financially lucrative. So Stockton Rush was known to be calm, poised, and unnervingly confident, and these traits would follow him all the way to the ocean floor. Now initially Rush had dreamed of becoming an astronaut, but he didn't have the best vision. His vision wasn't sharp enough to pass the necessary tests. But instead of giving up, he pivoted. So he ended up meeting Pete Conrad, who was an Apollo 12 commander and a personal friend of Stockton's father. So Stockton's father introduced Stockton to Pete Conrad. And Conrad was like, hey, you know, you don't have to go to space to make a mark, you know, but I highly suggest that you look into engineering.

• 15:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  Because if you're gonna do anything in any kind of craft, you're gonna wanna know that craft inside and out. And so Pete Conrad encouraged Stockton to pursue engineering. And this was a move that would blend Stockton's hunger for exploration with his deep technical curiosity. He wasn't content to simply be along for the ride. He wanted to be put in control, to chart his own course. As he once said, he didn't wanna be a passenger in space. He wanted to be like Captain Kirk. So after graduating from Princeton in 1984, Rush ended up marrying Wendy Wheel. Now Wendy's family history bore its own dark tie to the sea. Oh my god, not Wendy. Yep, Wendy was the great-great-granddaughter of Ida and Isidore Strauss,

• 16:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  incredibly wealthy first-class passengers who died on the Titanic. So Isidore is crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Isidore was a Bavarian-born businessman who jointly owned Macy's Department Store along with his brother Nathan. And in 1871, Isidore married Ida Blune, and the couple were considered to be very much in love and especially close. Now, they'd been vacationing in Europe, and they planned to take another ship back home to the States, but fate intervened. Now, at that time, there were coal strikes in Europe, and coal from other ships had been diverted to the Titanic. For its maiden voyage, so they ended up having to book passage for the Titanic's cursed maiden voyage in April of 1912. And after the iceberg collision, Ida was offered a spot on a lifeboat, which would

• 17:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  have saved her life, but she refused. According to Jessica Strauss, another great-great-granddaughter, quote, "They were in their 60s, had been together for many, many years, and had several children together. Ida would not go without her husband. Isidore was offered a place on another lifeboat, but he chose not to go without her. He begged her to get on, and she turned and said to him, 'Isidore, we've been together for all these years. Where you go, I go.'" End quote. Now, the couple was last seen arm-in-arm, sitting together on a pair of deck chairs. Isidore's body would eventually be recovered, but Ida's never would. And if you remember the movie Titanic, James Cameron showed an elderly couple holding each other in bed as the room flooded around them, and this scene was actually inspired by the

• 17:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  real-life love story of Isidore and Ida Strauss, great-grandparents to Wendy Rush, whose husband would one day also perish as he attempted to return to the ship that had taken her ancestors' lives.

• 18:05Derrick Levasseur?

  So first, this is a dumb question, but how do people know what they said on the boat? Like, when she said, "Oh, I'm not, we've been together all this time, I'm not leaving without you." Like, who reports on this?

• 18:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  All right, so, I actually know, I actually know this.

• 18:17Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay, good. Well, I'm sure there's an answer for it, and I'm not disputing it, but I'm like, how, who came back and said, "Yeah, there was a couple, they said this to each other," you know?

• 18:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  So Ida had a female servant with her. Um, I forget that servant's name, and Isidore had a male servant with him. That male servant's name was John. They ended up, I believe, giving their, her spot on the lifeboat to the female servant, who then reported back what had happened.

• 18:44Derrick Levasseur?

  There you go.

• 18:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 18:46Derrick Levasseur?

  Wow.

• 18:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Derrick Levasseur?

  Wow.

• 18:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  That's crazy. You remember that scene in Titanic, where those two older people are holding each other in bed? Like, I always remember that scene. It was one of the most-

• 18:54Derrick Levasseur?

  The water's rushing underneath the bed.

• 18:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh, yes!

• 18:56Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, yeah, it's, or, or mine was, the part that kills me every time, is when she, the mom, puts the babies in bed.

• 19:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  I I would mine is when she's got her kid's hand and then it's like they're in between the grate and the kid like she's like holding on and then the kid like lets go and gets pushed away. It's just

• 19:13Derrick Levasseur?

  I may have to watch the Titanic again for research purposes.

• 19:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  To cry.

• 19:17Derrick Levasseur?

  What a great movie.

• 19:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  So I mean, I saw it in the theater over and over again and I sobbed like a I was a kid, but

• 19:23Derrick Levasseur?

  We gotta do a crime weekly watch party.

• 19:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh, that would be fun. So, yeah, so we got Wendy Stockton's wife, who's got very close ties to the Titanic, right? And obviously Wendy comes from wealth and power and privilege. I mean, her great, great, great grandparents owned Macy's. So these families end up all marrying each other to keep the money and the power in one place. So Stockton Rush, he then began working for aerospace giant McDonnell Douglas in Seattle, testing F-15 fighter jets. But it was beneath the waves, not above the clouds, where his fascination would take root. He became an avid scuba diver, exploring the Red Sea, the Cayman Islands, Tahiti, and the Puget Sound in Seattle. But he did grow frustrated with the limitations of scubaing, you know, the

• 20:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  the gear, the

• 20:11Derrick Levasseur?

  Scubaing.

• 20:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  Scubaing? Is that a real word?

• 20:17Derrick Levasseur?

  That stayed in there. Scubaing.

• 20:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  Scubaing? That's a real word.

• 20:20Derrick Levasseur?

  It probably is.

• 20:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  You knew what I meant. It's not. It's definitely not. It's probably scuba diving, but

• 20:24Derrick Levasseur?

  Scuba diving. You know, I'm a certified scuba diver, right?

• 20:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  Did you? Are you a certified scubaer?

• 20:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Scubaing.

• 20:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  Scubainger?

• 20:31Derrick Levasseur?

  No, I am not.

• 20:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  I didn't know that, really. I you just said you were claustrophobic. That was so am I. And that would

• 20:37Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, no, certified scuba diver, patty certified. I used to go lobstering all the time with my buddy and we'd go down. You can catch lobsters in the rocks and come back up. And I went as deep as like, I want to say 25, 30 feet, not too deep. I never went super down there. But it is crazy at that depth. And yeah, even though I was claustrophobic, that didn't bother me for some reason.

• 20:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  That would have taken me out. I'll tell you what.

• 21:01Derrick Levasseur?

  No, it was pretty fun. The only thing that got me nervous is the decompression sickness. Like you'd have to come up at different levels. And I'd always be like, well, if my buoyancy's not correct, and I go up too fast, I'm gonna

• 21:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  It's terrifying.

• 21:10Derrick Levasseur?

  You have to be in a recompression chamber. That's not gonna be fun.

• 21:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  And you can get embolisms, all sorts of things can go wrong.

• 21:15Derrick Levasseur?

  No, but scuba diving is awesome.

• 21:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  I'm sure it would be. And I'm sure I would love it if I could get around. I'm always afraid that like my oxygen tank's gonna

• 21:22Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, that's why you have an octopus.

• 21:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, like an actual octopus?

• 21:26Derrick Levasseur?

  No, so it's your secondary hose. So whenever you see a scuba diver and they have like the main hose that's black or yellow, there's usually a second one that's like yellow or green. And that's a secondary respirator that's hooked up to that oxygen tank. And what you're supposed to do is you always have a partner with you. And part of the reason you always have a partner with you is because they have an octopus as well. So if you ever have a malfunction with your primary respirator, you can switch to your secondary, which is your octopus. But if there's a problem with the actual tank, because you're diving with someone else, or you're supposed to be, they'll have their octopus available. So you can both use that same tank to get you back to the surface. That's why you're not supposed to dive alone.

• 22:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  But people do.

• 22:05Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, I mean, I never did. But yeah, you could actually, in fact, the part of the reason I stopped diving was because my buddy moved away. I had met him at diving school and then he moved and I didn't have anybody else to go with.

• 22:14Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh, you lost your scuba diving buddy?

• 22:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. Yeah, man. Joe, shout out Joe. I haven't even talked to him in years.

• 22:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, now you'll have to watch Titanic and reach out to your old scuba buddy.

• 22:24Derrick Levasseur?

  Maybe you'll be my diving buddy.

• 22:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, right.

• 22:26Derrick Levasseur?

  I would never let you be my diving buddy.

• 22:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  I would never let you let me.

• 22:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  Sounds like a lot of ways to die there.

• 22:33Derrick Levasseur?

  You had some frigging panic attack while we're down there and all of a sudden you're holding on to my flipper.

• 22:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, I absolutely would. I promise you. And I'd be like scrambling, like I'd be crawling on you, trying to get up to the surface, pushing you down. A real octopus would have to come and save you.

• 22:46Derrick Levasseur?

  There's like, when you're underneath, you communicate by clapping. So you clap, that's what you can hear underwater. So you clap your hands together, you pound your fist together, and you would just be clapping the minute we got underneath there. The whole time. I would just hear the clicking every five seconds.

• 22:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, I'm not gonna do it. I'm sorry. So Stockton Rush, he was, he was diving like the Puget Sound. That's in Seattle. I don't know if anyone knows, it's freezing in there, like freezing. And he hated the, the suits you have to wear when you're diving in cold water, how like heavy and cumbersome they were. And he said, quote, Puget Sound is full of nutrients. So you have sharks and whales and crabs and dolphins and seals and anemones. It's an absolutely incredible place to dive, except that it's freezing. 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 two hour decompression, hanging in deep water, end quote. I agree only about the hot chocolate thing. I like hot chocolate.

• 23:39Derrick Levasseur?

  There's some crazy suits too. Like I had a neoprene suit, but you can actually have suits where you put the, you put a under garments on it, but then you put this over suit on and the suit fills up with hot water. So we had, I had buddies who were divers and what they would do is they do the bridge repairs. So it's like 30 degrees outside, right? And the water's freezing. But what they would do is they'd get into this bigger suit. It fills up with hot water that's constantly being supplied to the suit and circulated. So they're underwater, like 50, 60 feet deep repairing this, this bridge and they're perfectly warm.

• 24:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. It sounds like a lot of work and a lot of money, too.

• 24:14Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, it's expensive. They get paid.

• 24:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 24:16Derrick Levasseur?

  There was a part of me that was like, if I left law enforcement, I was thinking about going into commercial diving because there's so much money.

• 24:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  You could do that stuff where they like go and find, try to find missing people and stuff. It's so cool.

• 24:25Derrick Levasseur?

  Uh, dive teams, I wasn't, I would have loved to do that, but that's more the fire department for our, for our agency. But I was thinking like bridge repair and stuff. They do cement work. So much money because there's such a select group of people who do that type of work. There's a lot of money in it, but it's not the most glamorous job. You know, you're, it's frigging dangerous.

• 24:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  Sounds like it sucks.

• 24:45Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  Honestly.

• 24:46Derrick Levasseur?

  It's, it's, you're not looking at tropical fish down there. That's for sure.

• 24:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, you're not looking at dolphins and sea anemones.

• 24:51Derrick Levasseur?

  No, no, no, no.

• 24:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  So Stockton Rush, he was like, listen, I love the ocean. I love exploring the ocean and the water, but he dreamed of a vessel that could take him deeper while he was warmer and safer. So he built one. By 2006, after earning an MBA from UC Berkeley and failing to buy an existing submersible, Stockton completed his own. And if I remember correctly, he got like a kit sort of, I think from somebody in England, like they sent him a kit and he just had to put it together. But it was a 12-foot-long tube outfitted with a plexiglass window and a stomach-down control position, meaning the driver, the operator, would be on his stomach. And it wasn't glamorous, it wasn't fast, but on his first dive, just 30 feet below the surface, Stockton was hooked.

• 25:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  The silence, the strangeness, the alien quality of the underwater world called to him, and he believed as fervently as any explorer before him that the future of human discovery wasn't in the stars, it was in the sea. And when I wrote that, I actually took that from an interview that he said, he was like, it was like being on a different planet when I was down there, you know, like, things that I had never seen before and things that you don't see every day, I felt like there, you know, I was surrounded by aliens and stuff.

• 26:03Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, I mean, what do they say? It's like, only like 10%. I'm off on these statistics, but it's like, a very small part of the ocean has been explored.

• 26:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  There's a reason for that.

• 26:11Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm just, but it's like, there's a lot down there that could help with curing illnesses and stuff. I mean, that's probably the truth. They're looking in space for those things. There's probably stuff in the ocean that could help as well.

• 26:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, from that moment on, Rush dedicated himself to deep-sea innovation, and he was astounded to learn how few private submersibles existed, and he was even more shocked by the lack of funding and regulatory support for ocean exploration compared to NASA. "Why," he asked, "did we pour billions into space exploration while the majority of Earth's oceans remained unmapped and unexplored?"

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Earth is really a water planet. I think we probably all appreciate that. But I also was a space person, and half our mission specialist clients who go to the Titanic have either been to space or are going to space. One of the reasons I started the business was I didn't understand why we were spending 1,000 times as much money to explore space as we were to explore Earth and the oceans. Sorry, the oceans. And NASA has come out repeatedly now, talking about the fact that there are more aquatic, it's more liquid water in the solar system than they imagined, that many things, Pluto as well as moons of Jupiter and Saturn, have liquid oceans capped over. And the belief is that there's far more aquatic life in our solar system. And in the universe.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  And I didn't understand why we weren't exploring. And part of that gets down to the media, and I'll come back to this, which is appreciated that people are all about emotion. And we've had such amazing movies about space and not as many about the ocean. The ocean is a scary spot. And because of that, I think is one of the big things. And what I wanted to do with the business was just move the needle. Get people excited about the ocean, explore the ocean and discover what was what was out there. We all get the three quarters of the planet is water, but that's really deceiving. It's actually 98% of the livable volume. If you think about livable volume, you have, you know, on the surface from the earth to the dirt to the top of the trees. In the ocean, it's the full depth.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  People don't appreciate the average depth of the ocean is 4,000 meters. And yet there are only a handful of subs, things about five subs. Most are owned by governments, run by research institutions. There is no private access to the deep ocean. And yet there's all this life to be discovered. And as we go down to the Titanic, it's amazing the creatures we see on the two and a half hour descent, the most bizarre things you can imagine.

• 28:36Derrick Levasseur?

  Before we continue, and I know some people are not very fond of Stockton, and maybe I won't be by the end of the series, but can we just stop for a second and acknowledge that this guy's brilliant and he's accomplished? Yeah, I mean, he's brilliant. I mean, what he's been able to accomplish, just his resume that you've read so far. I'm not talking about how he overlooks certain things, and you don't agree, obviously, you know more about him, but I'm just coming into this cold. And without knowing all the details or the things that he circumvented or ignored that resulted in this tragedy, just on the surface, what we've talked about with his resume so far, his education, his ambitions, his courage to go and do things that are dangerous to do for the sake of exploration, I can't, I don't think it's wrong to say that that's impressive.

• 29:21Derrick Levasseur?

  I mean, you're talking about being 19 years old and flying these planes. I mean, this is. This is an impressive person and someone who has a lot of talent. Maybe didn't use it the right way, but I think it'd be wrong to not acknowledge that this is a reality. This guy was, he had a lot of potential. He had a lot of potential and you can hear when he speaks that he definitely knows what he's talking about.

• 29:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  He had a lot of potential, but I think potential combined with hubris is probably the worst combination ever. Hubris and ego and potential are really-

• 29:50Derrick Levasseur?

  I don't disagree and that's why we're talking about him today and that's why we are where we are. I'm just saying compartmentalizing the two. We can acknowledge on one hand that this guy was a very impressive person as far as what he was able to accomplish.

• 30:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, I will give you that and we will discuss it more as we go along.

• 30:07Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay. Like I said, some people will be pissed at me for saying it, but I'm going along with this and reading his resume as you're speaking it, it's impressive.

• 30:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, Stockton Rush said and saw the submersible industry as obscenely safe and woefully stagnant, choked in his view by decades of government overregulation. Safety, he believed, had become the enemy of progress and that belief, that calculated defiance of convention that Stockton Rush is known for, that would eventually shape the entire philosophy of Ocean Gate. Now, the company was founded by Stockton Rush and Guillermo Sonnen in 2009 and they claimed their mission was to open up the oceans to exploration, discovery, research and commercialization. They wanted to build a private sector alternative to the government-run deep manned submersible program.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Sonnen met Rush in the summer of 2009. The idea behind Ocean Gate was Rush would put in the money and Sonnen would run the business. But Sonnen says they had no intention of building the subs themselves.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  Our vision was to create a fleet of four or five deep diving submersibles. At the time, we were thinking they'd be 6,000 meters.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Capable of carrying five people, available for charter, anywhere in the world.

• 31:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, in 2010, Ocean Gate did acquire a five-person submersible built in 1973 by the Perry Submarine Company. The submersible had once operated in the North Sea oil fields as a ferry for commercial divers, but in 1994, it was modified by Marlin Submarines to be adapted for recreational use such as tourism and research. The submersible, which would become known as Antipodes, had a modified hull, was tested up to 1,000 feet, and was certified by the American Bureau of Shipping Standards. When Ocean Gate purchased Antipodes for $295,000, it had already completed 430 dives as deep as 920 feet, and the company began advertising it as a chartered sub,

• 32:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  which would cost between $15,000 and $20,000 a day to kind of like rent and charter. Antipodes was also certified as an oceanographic research vehicle with the Coast Guard, and Ocean Gate got their first taste of notoriety and praise in June of 2015, when researchers aboard Antipodes were out studying artificial reefs off the coast of Miami, and they discovered a mostly intact wreck of a US Navy World War II fighter plane lying upside down 240 feet deep. So, let's take a quick break, and then we're going to talk about that.

• 32:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  All right, we're back. So, Antipodes is being used as kind of, you know, research, and this is where Stockton, Rush, and Ocean Gate started, and this is where they said they kind of wanted to stay, where they wanted to be able to open up the oceans and open up bodies of water to better research, so they could find things, you know, like you said, maybe things that could cure diseases, maybe new species and things that had never been discovered. And they found this World War II fighter plane. And Bob Rasmussen, who is the director of the National Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, he told the Miami Herald that more than 12,000 Hellcats, those are the fighter jets, they had been delivered to the Navy, but only a handful of them were still around. And he said, quote, "The discovery of one more, even under 240 feet of Atlantic Ocean,

• 33:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  is important to naval aviation history," end quote. So now Ocean Gate and Stockton Rush, they're being touted in the media as like,

• 33:43Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep, they're on the map.

• 33:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, they're like, oh, this is huge. You know, this is so important, so important for research, so important for history. And Stockton Rush added to the conversation, claiming that if someone was willing to pay possibly hundreds of millions of dollars, Antipodes stood a good chance of finding other planes missing to history, such as Flight 19 and even Amelia Earhart's plane. He said, quote, "The technology to find these planes exists. It's really a question of, is it worth the investment?" end quote.

• 34:10Derrick Levasseur?

  Isn't that the case in a lot of things, right? All comes down to money.

• 34:14Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, of course, but you know, once again.

• 34:17Derrick Levasseur?

  You do need manpower, you do need resources, you do need technology, you do need equipment, I get it. And it is a good question. Is spending all this money, like, let's say, to find what happened to Amelia Earhart?

• 34:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  Amelia Earhart's plane, yeah.

• 34:29Derrick Levasseur?

  If you find her and it costs, you know, $200 million, yeah, it'd be cool to find her at this point, but does the cost justify the result?

• 34:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 34:38Derrick Levasseur?

  You know, we know she's no longer with us.

• 34:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, there's obviously a small sector of people, and specifically in research and history, that would love this, right?

• 34:46Derrick Levasseur?

  They would argue it is, yeah.

• 34:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, there's a big mystery of like, where did her plane even go down, really? You know, is she still alive or did she survive it? There's so many questions out there in the historical research community, but that's not where the money is. The money is in like, medical research, government research, um, you know, Department of Defense stuff. That's where the government and even private sector companies would pour a lot of money into because the resulting... Um, discoveries, let's say if you wanted to send Stockton Rush and his sub down to find a cure for cancer, well, obviously that result would be beneficial to people like pharmaceutical companies because now they can make a ton of money. So they might be willing to invest, but just for historical- I would argue they wouldn't want you to find a cure. Yeah, I mean, exactly. That's a whole different conversation, right? I used it as an example. You know what I mean?

• 35:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  But a company- I don't have to convince you of that. I know you don't. A company that will find something that they can market and sell for a ton of money, they might be willing to put- Right. -money into this, but just for historical and research purposes, if I had the money, I would. It's a tough, expensive, justified. But, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people don't, don't really care about that. So in May of 2013, Ocean Gate announced that it would work in collaboration with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Lab to build a new five-person submersible capable of reaching depths of 3,000 meters. This submersible will be named Cyclops and feature a carbon fiber hull shaped like a bullet that could plunge down to depth in less than 60 minutes. Now, this is important.

• 36:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  Remember, University of Washington's Applied Physics Labs, the APL, this is important as well as Stockton Rush's work with NASA and Boeing because after the Titan submersible disaster, all these people and companies are going to come out and be like, no, we weren't as involved as he made it seem like we were. So that's going to be a whole nother layer that we have to dig into later on.

• 36:36Speaker 05

  A new ultra-strong, lightweight manned submersible, born of the partnership between the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory and Ocean Gate.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Cyclops was developed with the goal of being a totally new approach to manned submersibles.

• 36:50Speaker 05

  Cyclops is designed to take up to five people as deep as 10,000 feet.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  It could do both research, environmental assessment work for oil and gas, mining surveying work, biopharma, and even adventure tourism.

• 37:03Speaker 05

  Ocean Gate brings to the table experience in small subs. APL brings to the table-

• 37:08Speaker 06

  The ability for a company like Ocean Gate to come into the university and gain access to resources and gain access to technology that they may not have available to them. APL brings in the ability to do computational fluid dynamics. In other words, how much force, how much power does it require to move this vehicle through the water at a given speed?

• 37:27Speaker 05

  Cyclops is aimed at customers who need to charter deep sea access previously the domain of military submarines or submersibles tethered to support vessels of a size and cost Cyclops won't need.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  We can use an ocean-going tug that might be $10,000 a day versus a specialized research ship that would run, say, $100,000 a day.

• 37:48Speaker 05

  Cyclops will employ carbon fiber reinforced plastic, the same material Boeing uses to build jetliner wings.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  New carbon fiber manufacturing techniques, new high purity glass, as well as new control systems.

• 38:00Speaker 05

  Why risk people where robots can go?

• 38:02Speaker 02

  Subs are extremely safe when operated as a research vessel, not as a military sub. Robots can't do everything. There's a place for people in the ocean, and we're looking at first commercial operations in 2016.

• 38:14Stephanie Harlowe?

  So you heard Stockton Rush, and he's like, hey, this could be big for, you know, research, environmental, biopharma, he's using all this, and then last he's like, and commercial tourism.

• 38:25Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep.

• 38:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  And I really think that the commercial tourism was always

• 38:28Derrick Levasseur?

  I agree.

• 38:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  His main goal, because that's where the money is, right?

• 38:30Derrick Levasseur?

  It's about money. And you took the words out of my mouth, because not only that, he said things like, oh, there's a place for humans in the sea or in the ocean, and there's things that humans can do that robots can't. I would argue the robots can do mostly everything you need to do in the ocean. It's just he's trying to ensure that there's a space where

• 38:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  For paying customers.

• 38:51Derrick Levasseur?

  For paying customers to go down in the ocean, because if you remove that, because he's, he is a smart guy, he's around a smart team, they could probably develop a sub that's, that doesn't need a human being to go down there with it, which removes any type of safety issues you have as far as the life of a human being, and yet, no, he's like, we want that. That's where, like you just said, that's where the money is.

• 39:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  He talks about this a lot, and he's always kind of like, you know, research and finding new things, yeah, that's where you're going to get your accolades. That's how people are going to know about you. But the reason you want people to know about you is so that eventually they're like, oh, I want to go in that submersible, I want to see the ocean and all these species of fish and all these shipwrecks and, you know, World War II planes, I want that, what a great experience. And a lot of people are going to think, this is safer than going to space. But is it?

• 39:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  Not really. It's not really. So at this point, both the University of Washington and Boeing were contributing to the design of Cyclops, with Boeing specifically focused on using the carbon fiber for the hull of this submersible. Now Cyclops I is widely considered to be the first crude submersible to use a carbon fiber hull, and its creation marked a major departure from traditional sub designs. Prior Cyclops I, most submersibles used steel, titanium, or aluminum alloys for their pressure hulls. And why did they use those? Because these materials are known for their predictable behavior under extreme compression, which, in the water, the deeper you go, the higher and more intense the compression gets.

• 40:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  So Ocean Gate, under Stockton Rush's leadership, wanted to challenge the status quo. They believed that carbon fiber composites commonly used in aerospace could be applied to deep sea exploration to create a vessel that was lighter, more fuel efficient, and easier to transport. Now, like you heard him say in the clip, he's like, "We don't need a specialized ship for this. All we need is just a, any ship, basically any large ship that can go out in the ocean and be used as a support vessel. We don't need these expensive ships. We can just use a regular ship, and that's going to cut down on costs." Why is it important to cut down on costs? Well, because if he's using this for tourism, he's going to have to rent that boat that brings the sub out to the water. And if he's paying less for that boat, then

• 41:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  more of the money he gets from the paying customers are going to go, is going to go in his pocket. Yeah. So...

• 41:18Derrick Levasseur?

  It's like anything, right? When you can increase margins, it's a more successful business. The question always becomes, when do you sacrifice quality?

• 41:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, when do you sacrifice quality for safety?

• 41:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, safety even more importantly, but like even on just a business level of, like with Criminal Coffee, we could do a lower, a lower costing bean. We could do a bean that's not as, from a certain farm that maybe doesn't produce the highest quality.

• 41:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm-hmm. And it would be cheaper, which means we would make more per bag. Yeah.

• 41:46Derrick Levasseur?

  We could make our bags cheaper. We could do a lot of things to lower the costs associated with our company, but yet, the experience from, for the consumer would decrease. We'd make more money, but the product wouldn't be as good. And like you said, that's just something you're consuming. With this, this is about safety. It's about protecting your consumer. So when you're cutting corners there, that's a whole different ballgame.

• 42:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  Especially when you've made it clear from the get that you want to bring just regular old civilians down there who are paying you for that experience.

• 42:15Derrick Levasseur?

  You are responsible for their safety because clearly they don't know the ins and outs. They're trusting you that you're taking the proper precautions.

• 42:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm-hmm. Yep. And, and let's talk about carbon fiber for a minute because yes, it's true. Carbon fiber is used in things like planes and stuff. And, and so there's a reason.

• 42:32Derrick Levasseur?

  I use carbon fiber in my prints, all my 3D prints all the time, showing my nerd here, but love carbon fiber filament.

• 42:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  Things like skis, like sports equipment, stuff like that. Very common. Carbon fiber's high strength to weight ratio makes it an appealing candidate, but its performance under repeated compressive loads, especially let's say in a sub-water environment, that was not well understood at extreme depths at the time that Stockton, Rush and Ocean Gate were creating these subs. Cyclops 1 was an experimental prototype intended as a test platform and a proof of concept for the carbon fiber hull idea. Now, carbon fiber is a composite material made of extremely thin strands of carbon atoms bonded together in a crystalline formation. And then these strands are bundled together and woven into a fabric and then they're combined with a resin to create a rigid, strong and lightweight material.

• 43:23Derrick Levasseur?

  Super strong, super lightweight, used in cars all the time, used in a lot of different applications to have speed with durability.

• 43:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, carbon fiber is often used in aerospace for planes and spacecraft because it does have many benefits in that sort of environment. It resists being pulled apart. It's stronger than steel for its weight. It doesn't rust or degrade like metals. It's very rigid. It doesn't flex much under tension, which makes it ideal for planes because it's strong and lightweight. However,

• 43:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  The pressurization cycles in aircrafts are moderate compared to what deep sea submersibles endure. Now, at the time that Cyclops was being developed, Rush and Robert Miyamoto, the director of the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington, they talked about how they planned to integrate modern control systems into the vehicle. So they were going to replace the many dials and levers on submersibles with joysticks, like video game joysticks.

• 44:17Derrick Levasseur?

  Playstation remotes.

• 44:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, and more automated systems that allowed it to operate with a single pilot. Stockton Rush said it was like going from a Model T to a Tesla. In June of 2013, Ocean Gate teamed with Nova Southeastern University to study invasive lionfish in Florida. And then a few months later in August, Ocean Gate announced that the University of Washington and Boeing had completed a design feasibility study for the hull design of Cyclops One. They said that the basic hull design had been validated as being able to reach depths of 3,000 meters, that's about 9,800 feet. And Cyclops One would allow its five members, their crew members, to observe underwater environments for up to eight continuous hours.

• 44:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  Jerry Young, who was the head of Boeing Research and Technology Director of Materials, he said, quote, "We're looking forward to bringing our design and manufacturing knowledge of hybrid materials to help Ocean Gate meet this technology challenge," end quote. Remember, later Boeing and the University of Washington and NASA, they're all going to be like, "What are you talking about? We weren't that involved." It seems like they were all pretty, pretty deeply involved, all right? So the following August, Macklemore, you know who Macklemore is, right?

• 45:25Derrick Levasseur?

  The artist?

• 45:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, like the singer rapper?

• 45:27Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  He joined the crew of Antipodes on a dive in the Puget Sound that was filmed for the Discovery Channel's Shark Week. So once again, Ocean Gate, Stockton and Rush, they're getting some more sort of media attention.

• 45:39Derrick Levasseur?

  Notoriety.

• 45:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. And then in 2015, Ocean Gate launched Cyclops One, the first submersible to be built by the company. Now, according to the founder, Guillermo Sonolín, who ended up leaving Ocean Gate in 2013, it had never been in the cards for them to build their own submersibles. During the Coast Guard's hearing about the Titan implosion, Sonalene said that they eventually realized they would need to build their own to achieve their business model of giving humanity greater access to the ocean. He said, quote, "If you think about our business requirements of being able to carry five people 6,000 meters without a dedicated mothership, deployable anywhere in the world, none of the sub builders could really do that. Then, if you did factor in the cost, yeah, it was going to be ridiculously expensive." End quote.

• 46:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  He said that both he and Stockton Rush convinced themselves that it would be possible to build a sub that could meet all their business requirements, and that is when they started looking at carbon fiber as a potential alternate for a pressure hull. So in 2013, as Ocean Gate shifted to developing its own submersibles, Rush actually took over as CEO with Guillermo Sonalene, saying that it made sense for Rush to take the reins because they were transitioning from an operations phase, which was Guillermo's kind of main, you know, expertise. And they were going into an engineering phase, which for Stockton Rush, which is with his degrees and his experience and expertise, that would be more his wheelhouse and he should now take over.

• 47:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  And then Guillermo Sonalene left the company, but not under bad terms allegedly.

• 47:11Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I know, I know we talked a little bit about carbon fiber here. And I, when I was walking, watching the original documentary on this, I forgot what, what it was on, there's been so many. But I know this carbon fiber conversation is a big part of it because in theory, you would think, okay, you have these pressurized cabins on planes using carbon fiber and it works great. Maybe the same would be applicable underwater. Now, we're going to find out that's not the case. But the question that I'm going to have by the end of this series, as I start to judge Stockton Rush and anybody else he was associated with, was the decision for this carbon fiber made because of cost effectiveness? Or was it made because they truly believed it could be an alternative underwater

• 47:52Derrick Levasseur?

  and have the same sustainability, the same durability that it would have in the air? And that's the big question we have to answer because I think based on that answer, we'll, we'll decide how a lot of people view Stockton.

• 48:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  I mean, we're going to talk about some tests they did and stuff, but...

• 48:07Derrick Levasseur?

  That may, that's, that's going to be the great stuff because if it's proven that he knew... That that this wasn't going to be a a a healthy alternative. It wasn't going to support what they want to do. And yet he still did it. That's a major problem.

• 48:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  In my opinion, the test that they did showed that the carbon fiber would not hold up.

• 48:26Derrick Levasseur?

  Start to crack, right?

• 48:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  And it just wasn't, it wasn't even a matter of if it would happen. It was just a matter of when.

• 48:32Derrick Levasseur?

  Right.

• 48:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  And nobody would have the ability to to determine that. And we're going to talk about why they wouldn't have the ability to determine that. But there's also rumors that I'm going to talk about where they purchased the carbon fiber from Boeing. But allegedly, just allegedly, the carbon fiber they purchased from Boeing was over its expiration date.

• 48:53Derrick Levasseur?

  So like the shitty stuff that Boeing was just looking to get rid of?

• 48:56Stephanie Harlowe?

  They got it for cheaper because they didn't want to pay full price for the carbon fiber.

• 49:01Derrick Levasseur?

  You can't cut corners with stuff like this.

• 49:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  You think?

• 49:03Derrick Levasseur?

  You can't.

• 49:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  I mean, that's putting it lightly.

• 49:06Derrick Levasseur?

  You can't, regardless of the reason behind it. Oh, you know, we're just trying to do more with less. Like, you can't. Even if you still think it's good. Oh, you know, carbon fiber is still, you know, 90% effective at that point. You need 100%. You have people on board that that's submersible. You need it to be at the best of its ability at all times. Yeah, that's crazy.

• 49:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  As an engineer, he should know what happens to carbon fiber and how easily it does crack and degrade under pressure and how it's really difficult to to figure out that that's happening. We're going to talk about that, but yeah.

• 49:42Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I'm looking forward to that because I do, I know a lot of people are not fans of Stockton Rush. It sounds like you may be one of them. And I'm coming from it just looking at this guy who, in my opinion, was a smart guy and had a lot of, a lot of talent, a lot of knowledge that could have been used in a good way. But it does seem, just as we're like halfway through this first episode, that he started to get a little bit of tunnel vision on the commercial applications of this and how much money could be made in that venue. He wasn't as much concerned about. Exploration for the stand from the standpoint of curing illnesses or finding things that were missing more so how could I monetize this?

• 50:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, and I think that all that other stuff like if it happened to be a byproduct.

• 50:20Derrick Levasseur?

  Yes, yes.

• 50:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  Then he'd be he'd be cool because once again, it's just adding to his legacy. It's adding to his mark on the world that he wants to leave. And I'm not denying he's he's not a he wasn't a smart guy, but it's that that intelligence mixed with the ego.

• 50:33Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 50:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  That becomes a problem. And also how he grew up, you know, born into a very influential, wealthy family, probably told from the moment he could hear and understand words, you're gonna do great things, Stockton, just like your ancestors before you, and you're gonna make a mark on this world, and the world is your oyster. And this entitlement that builds from being raised in that environment, this entitlement of like, I have money, I have power, I know people, and you know, there's even stories that were told during the Coast Guard hearings where he was like, well, if I can't find someone to like push this through, I'll just I'll just buy someone off. This I I can do what I want because I have money, because I have power, because this money and influence gives me the ability to do whatever I want that other people, normal

• 51:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  people couldn't do, and I will do it because this is my legacy and that's what I care about.

• 51:22Derrick Levasseur?

  Legacy is a great thing to talk about here because you mentioned it earlier, and I've seen it in places before. He was someone who admired Elon Musk.

• 51:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos.

• 51:31Derrick Levasseur?

  He wanted to be the Elon Musk of the ocean. And and how do you do that? You gotta be first. You gotta take chances.

• 51:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  Gotta be innovative, yeah.

• 51:40Derrick Levasseur?

  You don't want someone else to steal your thunder. And so that can allow you to make mistakes as well. And I think that is a part of this narrative.

• 51:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  It almost also felt like he kind of didn't think anybody else was gonna steal his thunder because most intelligent people who were well versed in this area of expertise knew that it was dangerous and not possible, and they weren't even trying. So he was like, oh, this is pretty much an open market, man. Like, no one's gonna try to, you know, compete with me here. This is all mine. I won't even have the the challenge of having somebody like racing with me. I'm it's it's what I want to do, and this is like a pretty much untapped market. And once again, there is a reason for that. So the Cyclops 1 submersible was steered with a video game controller. It used computer air fans in the air filtration system and showed a sonar data on a consumer grade flat screen. So, you know, once again, we're cutting costs where they think they can.

• 52:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  Ocean Gate announced that they were planning to build two more submersibles, both with carbon fiber composite hulls. The Cyclops 2 would be ready by June of 2016 and the Cyclops 3 would be completed by early 2017. This was very, very unrealistic.

• 52:44Derrick Levasseur?

  An ambitious timeline.

• 52:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. The Cyclops 1 had five dives planned as part of its sea trials and it was reported that the company expected testing to be completed by June. Now, in June, investigative reporter Mark Harris met with Stockton Rush to learn more about his innovative submersible and to take a trip in Cyclops 1 himself. Harris said that when he met Ocean Gate's CEO, Stockton Rush was already styling himself as a subaquatic Elon Musk. And Rush told Harris, quote, "I wanted to be the first person on Mars until I realized there was nothing there. But in the ocean, there are new life forms, things people have never discovered. My goal is to move the needle." End quote. So the two men went for a test dive in Elliot Bay in Seattle, and at first, everything seemed great, but then things took a turn, according to Mark Harris, who said, quote,

• 53:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  "90 minutes later and 130 meters deeper, we were totally lost. First, the thruster software had glitched, leaving us floating just above the seafloor. Now, the sub's compass was acting up. The shipwreck we aimed to capture, a rail ferry that had once carried Teddy Roosevelt, was nowhere to be seen. All I could spy outside the Cyclops 1 forward dome was the occasional salmon dancing in the frigid water. As I began to feel the chill seeping through the sub's steel hull, Rush asked me to open my iPhone's compass app. He wanted to compare it to the one on his phone. The headings did not match, but he rebooted the thrusters and we set off in what he was pretty sure was the right direction." "You're heading in exactly the wrong direction," said a faint voice transmitted via an acoustic

• 54:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  link from the support ship tracking us on the surface. "We eventually located the sunken ship, its rotting bow emerging into the Cyclops headlight. Back at the dock, Rush brushed off the problem we had encountered. This is exactly why Ocean Gate started with the Cyclops 1," he said, "rather than anything capable of deeper diving." I could have built a multimillion dollar version and all of a sudden I've got to figure out really stupid stuff like the magnetic compass. He told me the Cyclops one is getting us ready. When we do the Cyclops two, then all these bugs will be out. End quote.

• 54:47Derrick Levasseur?

  Man, can you imagine? I mean, it's not funny, but can you imagine being on this ocean floor? And, and, and the thrusters stop working?

• 54:57Stephanie Harlowe?

  And then he's like, open your compass on your iPhone?

• 54:59Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I'm gonna be looking at him like, what?

• 55:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  He's like, can you just pull up your compass? What are you talking about, dude? I just wanna, and it's like, first of all, you're under the water, so service ain't gonna be great.

• 55:08Derrick Levasseur?

  No.

• 55:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  To begin with.

• 55:09Derrick Levasseur?

  And you can't get out of the boat. You can't get out of the submarine.

• 55:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  Can't, you can't move around trying to find, no. And then, and then, and then he's like, hold on, I'll get us going in the right direction. And then the support ship is like, you're not going in the right direction. And he's like, oh, let me try this direction. You know, like completely guessing down there, guessing with an investigative journalist. So there's like a lot of, a lot of lack of self-awareness here, I think. Like, he doesn't realize that this seems bad because to him, he's like, yeah, this is experimental. We're pushing the boundaries. We're breaking the, the ceiling. But to the guy who's under the water with him, he's like, yo, this is my life, dude. I don't, I don't like-

• 55:44Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm not trying to be a guinea pig.

• 55:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  I don't, exactly. I don't wanna be a guinea pig. Like, you kinda made it seem like this was all, you know, good and perfect. But now I'm down here and you're like, yeah, this is why we started with this. And when we do our next version, it's all gonna be fine. So-

• 55:57Derrick Levasseur?

  Here's where I sit on this. I mean, listen, these explorers, they're a different breed. They're, they're pushing the boundaries. And I think there's two things that can happen. There's gonna be mistakes when you're doing something for the first time, right? When we went to space for the first time, I mean, there's gonna be things that don't go according to plan. The problem is the lack of acknowledgement. That's the issue here, which you're bringing up. It's okay to have those things because when you're doing something that nobody has ever done before, you're gonna have mishaps. Even with Elon Musk, we see with SpaceX, there's rockets that are landing perfectly, and then he has some that hit the ground and blow up immediately. And he's like, yeah, that's part of doing business. But the difference is, they're looking at that, they're evaluating the data, and they're taking measures to ensure it doesn't happen again. And they're doing that well before they put anyone on the rocket

• 56:42Derrick Levasseur?

  ship. Right? This is different. He's, he's risking the lives of others while quote unquote, working the bugs out. That is the problem.

• 56:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. And the fact that he minimizes all this stuff, and he always does this. That you come back up to the surface and everybody down there with you was like, "Holy shit, that was crazy." And he's like, "Ah, nah, not a big deal."

• 57:01Derrick Levasseur?

  No, it's a big deal.

• 57:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, it is a big deal.

• 57:03Derrick Levasseur?

  You could have died.

• 57:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  And if you minimize this stuff enough to others, you'll start to almost mirror that same feeling to yourself. If you're like lying to others enough, if you're denying enough, then you'll start to convince yourself, "Hey, it's not that big of a deal." And that may be what happened here, but let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.

• 57:26Derrick Levasseur?

  We're back from break, and just to piggyback on what you said, I also think it creates culture, right? Like, he's the top person in that organization, and he's complacent in a lot of these things. And when he's flippant about these quote-unquote "bugs", the people underneath him could become that way as well. And now it creates a culture that's dangerous for everybody that's working on the project, but also the consumers of that product. So, it's a major issue. And at the top of the food chain, if you're the boss, you have to be the most critical of everything that's being done.

• 57:56Stephanie Harlowe?

  And here's what I think happened also. Not just with the culture of like, "Oh, well, the boss thinks it's okay, and he's the engineer, and he's the one with this illustrious, you know, education in this field. So if he thinks it's okay, it's okay." It's also a culture of being afraid to speak up, because there's, you know, he gets upset. He doesn't like when people kind of push back. He's like, "I'm the smart one here. I'm the boss. What are you peons even, you know, questioning me for?" And when enough of that happens, which as we'll find out, happened quite a bit, there's going to be a culture of silence, because people are too afraid to speak up, because they're afraid to be told they're stupid, they're dumb, they don't know what they're talking about, or to have him angry at them, which could put their job in jeopardy, and then just their reputation in general.

• 58:42Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, don't like what I'm saying? Get lost.

• 58:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  And that's kind of what happened with the next person we're going to talk about, who's David Lockridge. And David Lockridge, for anybody who's familiar with this submersible disaster, he was actually considered to be the whistleblower, who was one of the earliest people to start raising concerns about Ocean Gate and the submersibles that they were creating. So in May of 2015, Ocean Gate hired David Lockridge as their Director of Marine Operations. And Lockridge, originally from Scotland, he had extensive experience as a submarine pilot. He was trained to recognize flaws and points of failure in subsea equipment. He'd been in the Royal Navy, he'd worked as a commercial diver, and he'd been working with submersibles for over 20 years by the time he took this position with Ocean Gate.

• 59:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, at the time, Lockridge was running tests with the companies' two existing subs, which would be Antipodes and Cyclops. They were already classed, which means the vessels had been inspected, tested, and certified by an independent classification society, in this case, the American Bureau of Shipping, or ABS. So this was done to ensure that they met specific safety, design, and construction standards for operation. And Lockridge said when he started with the company, Ocean Gate was already building their next sub, which was originally supposed to be called Cyclops 2, but as we know, that name would be changed to the Titan. And he was told that the Titan was also set to be classed. Being classed matters so much for submersibles,

• 1:00:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  because in the deep-sea conditions, pressure increases by about one atmosphere every 33 feet. So at Titanic depths, which is over 12,000 feet, that's over 400 atmospheres of pressure, which is roughly 6,000 pounds per square inch. So without rigorous engineering and oversight, a submersible can catastrophically implode. Now, being classed doesn't automatically mean that nothing will go wrong, but it dramatically reduces the risk by ensuring the vessel has met internationally-recognized safety standards and was built by people who are accountable to those standards. So when Lockridge came on, he said the Titan was just a concept. So this would be the Cyclops 2. It was just a concept, and it was his understanding

• 1:00:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  that he was supposed to assist with the build, and that his experience working with the classing system was going to be very important in producing a successful product in the Cyclops 2, aka the Titan.

• 1:01:02Speaker 07

  At the same time, the intention was, the, once everything was finished with Cyclops 1, and the company and APL were happy with everything, those systems would be fully not integrated, so they weren't going to get moved from Cyclops, but they would be built. Hardier, stronger, more reliable, and they were going to get built for Titan. When I moved across, there was nothing. Nothing was produced, nothing was finalized with APL.

• 1:01:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  So he's basically saying that the Cyclops 1 was sort of a prototype, right? It was seaworthy and could go down, but it was a prototype to make another vessel, which would be the Titan, that could go deeper and go down for longer. And then whatever.

• 1:01:45Derrick Levasseur?

  Better equipment.

• 1:01:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, whatever systems and equipment they had in Cyclops 1 that were successful with the depths they wanted to go to, they were going to make those better.

• 1:01:53Derrick Levasseur?

  Right.

• 1:01:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  So that the Titan could reach lower depths and be under there for longer and withstand more pressure, which you would need at lower depths. That's what he's saying. And he said when he came on, nothing was ready for that. And he was supposed to kind of like help with that because of his knowledge. Now, in 2016, David Lockridge was aboard the Cyclops 1 when it ventured down off the coast of Nantucket to visit the famed shipwreck, the Andrea Doria. Now, the Andrea Doria went down in 1956 after colliding with another vessel. It's one of the best known shipwrecks in New England. It sits about 200 feet below the ocean's surface, making it a popular sight for divers who do refer to it as the Mount Everest of diving. And that's because it's very dangerous. For the past six decades, divers have used this wreck to test their limits, and more

• 1:02:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  than a dozen lost their lives while trying to navigate the wreck. And Stockton Rush spoke about the shipwreck and the rate at which it was deteriorating, saying, quote, "When the Andrea Doria first went down, it was pristine, and you went straight into the hull and through the windows. Now it's harder to get inside and far more dangerous. Imagine it as a collapsing cave. Once the cave loses its basic structure, it deteriorates very quickly." End quote. So Stockton Rush knew how dangerous this shipwreck was if you got too close, not only for divers, but for someone exploring it in a submersible. The purpose of this mission with the Cyclops 1 was to capture HD video and 3D sonar images. And they, they said they wanted to do this because they were like, hey, we want to get

• 1:03:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  an exact image of how bad this shipwreck is deteriorating. And hopefully this will assist in divers who go down there. So they'll kind of know which parts to avoid, which parts are more dangerous. And so we'll hopefully, you know, reduce the risk of life. From what Ocean Gate reported, you would have thought this dive was a resounding success. But David Lockridge had other things to say. He said that the dive was meant to be his. You know, he was going to be piloting the Cyclops One and he was going to take four paying clients down with him, but it's a last minute Stockton Rush decided he was going to be the one to man the submersible. I also want to mention that although David Lockridge refers to the passengers of the sub as paying customers, Ocean Gate called them "mission specialists," a term borrowed

• 1:04:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  from NASA and professional exploration, implying that these paying customers were part of the crew, not just along for the ride.

• 1:04:15Derrick Levasseur?

  It's all branding, it's all for experience.

• 1:04:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  And listen, this actually wasn't just some clever branding. It reframed the passengers' legal and operational role aboard the sub. So Ocean Gate claimed that these individuals were actually contributing to the mission, such as helping operate sonar, taking photographs, gathering data. And under U.S. Coast Guard and International Maritime Law, a vessel that carries passengers for hire triggers much stricter safety requirements, especially under the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993. And this was actually a law that Stockton Rush often and openly criticized. He was like, "This is ridiculous. Their safety concerns are just really keeping people from seeing the ocean." So by calling their passengers, their paying passengers, "mission specialists," Ocean Gate

• 1:04:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  attempted to sidestep classification as a passenger vessel. And by extension, the burdens of meeting classing requirements. This would also later help frame Titan as a non-commercial research or exploratory craft rather than a tourism vessel, even though its clients were paying a lot of money.

• 1:05:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Lots of money.

• 1:05:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  For each dive, yeah.

• 1:05:18Derrick Levasseur?

  No, I mean, and when I say by branding, I think it's more for experience from the consumer's perspective where, you know, again, if you have aspirations to explore, whether it's, you know, the stars or the sea. I'd rather be called a mission specialist, personally. I'd like mine to say mission specialist Levasseur, as opposed to, you know, tourist Levasseur. I want my, I want my jumpsuit to say mission specialist. Even if I have two, you know, two weeks watching a video on how to run the sonar equipment with the PlayStation controller, yeah, I'm a certified stud. I want to be a mission specialist.

• 1:05:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  So, do you remember the Challenger?

• 1:05:54Derrick Levasseur?

  The spaceship?

• 1:05:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Stephanie Harlowe?

  So, I remember-

• 1:05:58Derrick Levasseur?

  I was like, wait, is this a trick question?

• 1:06:00Stephanie Harlowe?

  The spaceship. So, I remember when I was a kid in like 5th grade, they brought us to like a Challenger thing and they were like redoing it and they put us all in there and they gave us badges and they said mission specialist.

• 1:06:09Derrick Levasseur?

  100%.

• 1:06:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, but you're not a 5th grader and you're not certified and you're not trained and you don't know what you're doing.

• 1:06:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Right. So, the fact that they're running the equipment and they're called, like you said, it was a way of circumventing certain laws, certain safety measures. And I also think it just built the experience like, hey, guys. And I saw the original documentary where these people are in like suits, they're on the boat for a little bit, they're doing training.

• 1:06:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  They were all introducing themselves as mission specialists.

• 1:06:34Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, yes, yes. It seemed like a little bit of a gimmick to me.

• 1:06:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  A gimmick that also, you know, made it so that if something happened, they wouldn't maybe have the same kind of clapback or blowback that they normally would. And Ocean Gate also made every mission specialist sign an extensive liability waiver, which mentioned death and serious injury multiple times, even including a statement that Titan was an experimental vessel, not approved or certified by any regulatory body. So, on the day that Cyclops 1 was ready to venture out to the Andria Doria, David Lacridge said they'd already done their research and they knew the shipwreck was very dangerous and falling apart. So, he knew they had to keep the sub a good distance away from the wreck. And the plan was all in place when suddenly on the day of, Rush decided he would be the one to take the sub down.

• 1:07:20Speaker 07

  Unfortunately, the CEO decided that he wanted to take it down. I objected because I knew sometimes he could-

• 1:07:32Speaker 07

  Do things to please himself. Uh, he told me I was staying out. I objected again. Um, I was sort of reined in at the time. Just remember, I'm the CEO, you're just an employee. I eventually persuaded him to let me come in on the dive, so we reduced the paying passengers down to three. And Stockton said he was taking it down. He had on sonar, clear sonar image, could see the wreck and boom, as I said, it's not very deep. Visibility's not excellent, but it was clear enough, good ambient light that day. And he came straight down, hard on the bottom, no, no trimming, no ballast, nothing. Smash straight down on the bottom.

• 1:08:15Speaker 07

  Visibility went everywhere, you could see a silhouette and it was the two clients that were sitting in the viewing dome, right next to the acrylic. And they were like, oh my God, we are right on the wreck. So I said to Stockton, please, all stop, stop telling me what to do. Stockton, all stop. We have to see what's going on here. We have to look at our surroundings, which is standard practice for any competent submersible pilot. And from there, visibility cleared. We could see metal plates and we could clearly see the starboard side of the bow of the Andrea Doria. We could see all the debris, we could see hazard lines, we could see panels coming off.

• 1:08:59Speaker 07

  It was an absolute mess. So I said, Stockton, please, and he just kept arguing with me in the sub, very unbecoming of a submersible pilot. I was trying to guide him, I'm trying to give the, the best course of action to get him out of it. No matter what, I'm doing this. So he blew air in the tank, in the ballast tank, came off the bottom, motored full stick ahead. Unbeknownst to everybody else, and I don't know why, he decided to turn the submersible 180 degrees at speed.

• 1:09:36Speaker 07

  Still coming ahead, so he wasn't looking at his surroundings. He could have quite easily went up into the viewing dome. He could have went up into the tower because it's got a clear acrylic hatch on there. And he basically drove at full speed into the port side of the bow. And we could hear the cracking of the fairing as he got us jammed in underneath. So I'm not going to say how foul my language was, but it wasn't good. And at that point, it was unprofessional behaviour on him. He started to panic.

• 1:10:17Speaker 07

  And the first thing was, do we have enough life support on board? I was like, Stockton, of course we've got enough life support. We need to get out of here. When do you think the dive team could come to get us out? Stockton, please, give me the controls. I'm going to get us out of this. We're stuck. We're stuck. We're stuck. Repeatedly, every time I went to take the controller from him, he pushed it further and further behind him, inside the submersible itself. I said, I can be quite vocal sometimes.

• 1:10:50Speaker 07

  At that point, it went on and on and on. I'm looking up inside the upper hatch. I could see where there was fishing line driving over the top of the sub. All the metal rebar. There was debris everywhere. He never once got out the seat in the back of the sub to go and look at his surroundings.

• 1:11:09Speaker 07

  So I said, let's get a communications check. Let's talk to the top side. Let them know what's going on.

• 1:11:16Speaker 07

  What if there's no comms? I'm like, give me the controls. Let me, let me talk to them. Let me talk to top side. And I'm going to get us out of this. This went on and on and on for a period of time. And eventually it took one of the paying clients to turn around and she shouted at Stockton to give me the F and controller. She had tears in her eyes. He leached round behind him. I was, I had my head up inside the tower, so I'm still looking at the wreck. And he clattered it off the right side of my head. The controller landed on the deck plate. One of the buttons came off, the robust.

• 1:11:56Speaker 07

  Playstation controller. And I picked it up, repaired it, and had us out ten, fifteen minutes.

• 1:12:03Derrick Levasseur?

  All right, well, let me, let me weigh in first here because this is a different side of Stockton.

• 1:12:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  It is the villain side of Stockton.

• 1:12:11Derrick Levasseur?

  I was complimentary of his accolades leading up to this, but this guy sounds like an idiot. Not David, I'm talking about Stockton. He sounds like a child. He sounds like exactly what we were describing earlier, right? This is a guy who wants to be the first. He want, it's me, me, me. This is about my ego, my hubris, this is about my credit, right? I want to be responsible for this. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. Then when it goes wrong, now he's pouting. He's literally pouting in this small tube with two paid customers in front of his clients. He's arguing with a guy who clearly knows more than him.

• 1:12:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  That's what I'm saying, man. David Lacridge has been manning submersibles for twenty years.

• 1:12:52Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, he knew his shit.

• 1:12:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  Stockton Rush can fly a plane, he's an engineer, but he does not have the same experience with submersibles that the person he hired for his experience with submersibles has. But he still wants to be this guy. So now you're kicking one paying passenger off so that you can go down. You're taking complete control. What you just heard was a story about-

• 1:13:10Derrick Levasseur?

  Thank God David convinced him to let him go.

• 1:13:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 1:13:13Derrick Levasseur?

  Imagine?

• 1:13:14Stephanie Harlowe?

  Imagine. And what you just heard was a story about a grown man, a Princeton graduate with an engineering degree, throwing what I like to call a baby bitch boy fit, yeah.

• 1:13:22Derrick Levasseur?

  He's throwing a tantrum.

• 1:13:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  He pulled them right into the wreck, when that was never the plan. He then got the submersible stuck in a very dangerous position where something could fall on it at any time, and then you're screwed. Then he refused to let the train submarine pilot get them to safety because it bruised his ego. And when he was finally told by a paying customer to man up, he threw the Playstation remote at Lacridge, risking it getting broken.

• 1:13:45Derrick Levasseur?

  It did break it.

• 1:13:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  It did, and thankfully Lacridge was able to fix it, but that risked them, all five of them, never being able to get back to the surface again. And the ego of Stockton Rush is going to be something that many people who knew him and worked with him would often talk about. And like when you said he pouted, yeah, so in the Netflix documentary, they show them coming back up to the surface. He's still pouting.

• 1:14:07Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm gonna have to watch this. I'm gonna wait till after our series is over, though.

• 1:14:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, he's still pouting when they get back up. And when they got the Cyclops one to the surface, Lockridge said that Stockton didn't speak to him for the rest of the day. And from then on, the dynamic between them changed. And this is important because now Stockton Rush almost has an idea of like, I don't know if it's because he didn't like that Lockridge challenged him, or he didn't like that Lockridge saw him in that like, very vulnerable, sort of like childish kind of tantrum. But he's, he's on a mission now to kind of phase David Lockridge out. And that's going to be very important.

• 1:14:46Derrick Levasseur?

  This is a critical point in the story. Because clearly David Lockridge knows what he's talking about. He's someone who could, who could have potentially prevented this tragedy. But he, as you had said earlier in this episode, Stockton surrounded himself with people who were yes men and who wouldn't challenge him.

• 1:15:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  And if he weren't that, yeah.

• 1:15:06Derrick Levasseur?

  They got booted out and it created a culture where everyone just kind of flippant when things go wrong. And here's a guy who's willing to step up to him, challenge him and call him out. And as soon as he does, he reminds him that I'm the CEO, you're just an employee. He reminds him of that hierarchy and the position of authority that Stockton's in.

• 1:15:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  I'm the king, I'm the king.

• 1:15:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Yes. And that's not good when you're trying to do something for the first time. You need dissenting opinions. You need a collaborative effort. You need people to challenge you so that you get it right. And Stockton wasn't willing to do that. But you're right, this is right here, a recipe for disaster. And when we think about where we're going with the story, this is the type of that could have prevented it. So break time, we'll be right back.

• 1:15:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  So plans to build the new submersible Cyclops 2 aka Titan went full speed ahead with Stockton Rush telling the media that Titan would be one of the safest forms of transportation in the world and by the time they were done testing it, the sub would be pretty much invulnerable. Now Ocean Gate did conduct pressure testing at the University of Washington's Applied Physics Lab. They conducted this testing on a one-third scale model of Titan and there was some concerning outcomes.

• 1:16:25Speaker 05

  The first test of a scale model of Cyclops new filament-wound carbon fiber hull, designed and manufactured by Spencer Composites in collaboration with Ocean Gate and APLW.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  We're testing a one-third scale model of the pressure vessel that will be used on Cyclops 2. Initially, when we launched the Cyclops program, we planned to have Cyclops 2 go to 3,000 meters and we found through our engineering that in fact, we can achieve at least 4,000 meters and maybe more. Cyclops 3 has been planned to be 6,000.

• 1:16:58Speaker 05

  The pressure at 6,000 meters, about 8,762 pounds per square inch. By comparison, Navy submarines commonly operate at depths of 180 to 250 meters.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  The pressure vessel consists of three parts, a cylinder and two hemispheres. One of the unique elements of this test will be the hemispheres. So the hemispheres are also carbon fiber, which has never been done at this size or to this depth.

• 1:17:23Speaker 05

  The goal of this test, pressure of 6,000 pounds per square inch. The pressure is raised gradually. At the 71-minute mark, the pressure increased to 4,000 pounds per square inch. At 72 minutes, the pressure was turned up to 5,000 PSI. But three minutes later, at a pressure of 4,285 PSI, representing a depth of about 3,000 meters, the test was aborted by apparent water intrusion into one of the carbon fiber domes.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's open. That is the most risky part of the test and the most difficult to analyze. Since it's never been done, there's no test data on how carbon fiber in a hemisphere will respond to the pressures.

• 1:18:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  So yeah, during these these testings, you heard what what was like cracking sounds almost. Snapping sounds, that's, that's the carbon fiber snapping, basically.

• 1:18:19Derrick Levasseur?

  Cracking, flexing.

• 1:18:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, which is not what you want, right?

• 1:18:23Derrick Levasseur?

  Not what you want to hear, especially if you're inside the thing.

• 1:18:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, so throughout 2015 and 2016, OceanGate, in collaboration with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Lab, conducted four tests on this one-third scale model of Titan. In December of 2015, the model failed at 2,943 meters. In February of 2016, it failed at 4,121 meters. The following month, it failed again, this time at 2,753 meters. And then in July of 2016, it failed at 4,465 meters. So basically, the Titan would be built to have a cylindrical hull, like a tube. And at each end, there would be two domes that capped the vessel. Now, the original plan had been to use carbon fiber for the cylindrical hull, as well as the domes.

• 1:19:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  But due to the test failures, OceanGate switched to titanium domes. However, they made the decision to use grade three titanium instead of grade five titanium. The most common grades used in engineering are one through five, with grade five being 90% titanium, extremely high strength, with excellent corrosion resistance. Grade five titanium is often used for things like jet engines and deep-sea submersible components, because it withstands high-stress, high-pressure environments. Grade three is obviously a lower strength than grade five, with half the ultimate tensile strength, and is not typically used for high-pressure structural components. It's also, surprise, price cheaper and easier to manufacture.

• 1:19:49Derrick Levasseur?

  There you go. There's your reason why. Because why, everything you just said here, other than the price, why would you choose three over five?

• 1:19:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  You wouldn't, other than the price.

• 1:19:57Derrick Levasseur?

  Other than the price. So nobody, no can, nobody can say, in hindsight, "Well, we went with three, because the properties of three were better in certain areas." No, five is better across the board. There's no reason you would use it other than cost efficiency. That's it. You're cutting costs. Simple.

• 1:20:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  And Ocean Gate did start with grade five titanium, but then substituted grade three in later builds, which would have dramatically reduced the strength of the titanium to carbon fiber joints, which was already the most vulnerable points of the vessel. So in an April 2016 newsletter, Ocean Gate announced that since the testing of the scale model had been concluded, their engineering team was moving forward with construction of a full-size pressure hull capable of reaching depths of 4,000 meters or 13,000 feet, which is just about where the Titanic sits. Okay.

• 1:20:48Derrick Levasseur?

  But like There needed to be a lot more testing.

• 1:20:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  There's, there's literally no wiggle room here.

• 1:20:52Derrick Levasseur?

  No, there, there needed to be a lot more testing. For me, just going back over some of the numbers that you were laying, and I know they switched over to a titanium end cap there, but you have 4,000 meters, 2,900 meters, 2,700 meters. To me, that screams inconsistency.

• 1:21:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  It does.

• 1:21:08Derrick Levasseur?

  It's unpredictable. And I will say, I'm not an expert by any means in carbon fiber, but like I was saying earlier, I use it a lot in my 3D prints and carbon fiber is not all created equal. And I would even say that the same manufacturer producing that carbon fiber, depending on how it's woven together, depending on how it's created, there could be variance in that carbon fiber weave that makes it less strong than the version before it and after it. So that human element that goes into it, there may be factors that even though it's on the surface, on the label, the exact same carbon fiber, there is a variance there. And with something like this, where these centimeters can be the difference in life or death, you can't have that. So just from the, just from a layman's perspective,

• 1:21:53Derrick Levasseur?

  the inconsistencies and the unpredictability of the carbon fiber itself would be a reason not to use it. The titanium five seems like a great alternative. It's also, it's a little heavier, but

• 1:22:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, they just used it for the cylindrical caps, not the hull.

• 1:22:07Derrick Levasseur?

  But they could have used it for everything, maybe.

• 1:22:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  They cut it up, yeah.

• 1:22:09Derrick Levasseur?

  It would have been a lot more expensive, but my point being, there's a lot more predictability with the titanium five. It's been used in other applications that are similar to, you know, other submarines. The only problem being to make that Cyclops, this would be Cyclops two or three.

• 1:22:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  This would be Cyclops 2, which would become the Titan, yes.

• 1:22:27Derrick Levasseur?

  So Cyclops 2, the only difference being is that it would have been a lot more expensive to produce it. And but they could have done testing with an entire titanium tube under that pressurized setting. And I would believe that the amount of pressure would have been able to handle PSI per, you know, would have been a lot higher.

• 1:22:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  And it's interesting that you say that because they did say that during the trials. They were like, hey, whoever you have winding your carbon fiber for your model should be the same person you have winding your carbon fiber.

• 1:22:53Derrick Levasseur?

  There you go.

• 1:22:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  For the full sized hull.

• 1:22:55Derrick Levasseur?

  There you go.

• 1:22:56Stephanie Harlowe?

  They need to be the same people using the same materials from the same manufacturer. That's how a testing, you know, procedure would be done because otherwise, like you said, there's risk of maybe this guy winds the carbon fiber different than this guy. Exactly.

• 1:23:09Derrick Levasseur?

  But also what you said at the end there before I just went on that whole tangent. Even if everything's perfect, even if it's exactly what it should be, same person, all that good stuff, right? The maximum was 4,000 meters or 13,000 feet, which is right at the distance of Titanic. When you're doing something, anything like this, you don't want your maximum to be right where you're trying to go. You want your maximum to be, in this case, 2,000 or 3,000 meters more than where you're trying to go to. Like you said, there's no margin for error there. They're go, they're basically, they have this maximum amount of pressure that can be applied or distanced to 44,000 meters. And they're going to push it to the absolute limit. That's what the best, when you've had variances in the.

• 1:23:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  When you've had it fail far before that.

• 1:23:52Derrick Levasseur?

  Correct.

• 1:23:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  In other testing. Yeah.

• 1:23:53Derrick Levasseur?

  That's a problem.

• 1:23:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  That's important. And what you're talking about is, um, it's called a, a target testing margin, basically, a target safety margin. So in March of 2017, Ocean Gate actually announced that they would be bringing paying passengers to the wreckage of the Titanic and the price to ride would be 105,129, which would be the inflation adjusted cost of a first class ticket on the maiden voyage of Titanic. So right there, it feels like you're trying to curse people. But while it's true.

• 1:24:22Derrick Levasseur?

  But they're, they're selling a story.

• 1:24:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, they're selling an experience. Yeah.

• 1:24:26Derrick Levasseur?

  There's, these people had an obsession with the Titanic. You see the documentaries, they wanted to go to the Titanic. It wasn't necessarily, they wanted to be in a submersible. They wanted to visit the Titanic.

• 1:24:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  Exactly. The paying passengers.

• 1:24:38Derrick Levasseur?

  That's it. Yes. They wanted to go to the Titanic.

• 1:24:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  And now while it is true that the scale model of Titan. Did not fail until over 4,000 meters in some tests. And the Titanic is technically only 3,800 meters under the Atlantic. It was obviously still a bit premature to be announcing that this submersible, which wasn't even built yet, would be ready to take actual people to such depths. The tests done at the University of Washington showed the scale model imploded at about 6,500 PSI, which was close to the water pressure at 3,800 meters, the depth of the Titanic, but thousands of meters short of OceanGate's target safety margin. Right? Because the target safety margin is going to be significantly like

• 1:25:22Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, probably 8,000 PSI, 9,000 PSI. You want to have some margin there where you're like, hey, guys, don't worry. We could go another 2,000 meters and still be fine. You don't want to be right on, you don't want to be living on the edge. That's not where you want to be.

• 1:25:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  In fact, Cyclops 2, aka Titan, the prototypes never survived the targeted safety margin pressure in testing. And the company never tested the titanium components of the final submersible. OceanGate instead made the decision to thicken the hull from 4 and 1/2 inches to 5 inches, which is going to turn out to be too thick for portable ultrasonic testing equipment to detect minuscule flaws or weak points in the final product. And we're going to talk about that in a minute. Because we have to hear about Tony Neeson's testimony. Tony Neeson was hired by OceanGate to be their Director of Engineering in March of 2016. And he said he was originally asked to finish the Titan, which was then still known as the Cyclops 2.

• 1:26:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  And he was under the impression that this would take about a year. And during his testimony in front of the US Coast Guard, Neeson was clearly emotional and stressed.

• 1:26:29Speaker 08

  I know up to June of 2019, and there's some things that I saw in this presentation

• 1:26:38Speaker 08

  that are disturbing. I didn't think I'd need a break, but I wasn't kidding when I said I might need one later on. There's some things that bother me professionally and personally. So.

• 1:26:52Speaker 08

  So I apologize for some of my pauses. So I was pitched by Ocean Gate that the Cyclops II craft was nearly complete in the sense that all the items were in place. They just needed somebody to take it over the finish line. And they wanted somebody with an extensive marine background. I didn't talk about that in my calls. Taught sailing and yachting. I have a Coast Guard Master's License, 50 ton. In their minds, I was gonna put together the parts and then just start executing it. And so I was... My apologies, that's my

• 1:27:35Speaker 08

  watch telling me I have an abnormally high heart rate. I was originally asked to just finish this. It was gonna be a year, and that's it. I wasn't asked to design the sub.

• 1:27:49Derrick Levasseur?

  Poor guy's about to have a heart attack up there.

• 1:27:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  He's super stressed.

• 1:27:53Derrick Levasseur?

  Excuse me, Mike, that's just to let me have an abnormally high heart rate.

• 1:27:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  He's like, "Don't worry about that, it's just..."

• 1:27:59Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm about to pass out.

• 1:28:00Stephanie Harlowe?

  Exactly.

• 1:28:02Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh my god.

• 1:28:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  So Tony Neeson, he said when he was hired, he had no idea. They planned on going to the Titanic, but he felt he was a good fit for Ocean Gate because he had broad experience complying with regulatory requirements and he thought outside the box, right? But by the second week, he started questioning, like, "What am I even doing here?" Because he felt like he could never catch up. He said by the time he started at Ocean Gate, a lot of Titan was complete. Dave Dyer at APL, which is the University of Washington Applied Physics Lab, had done a mechanical systems drawing. UW engineer Peter Brodsky had already done the control system on Cyclops I. Everything external to the hull, mechanical and electrical, from Cyclops I had already been done by APL. Brian Spencer of Spencer

• 1:28:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  Composites had the hull figured out. And a design analysis report claimed Titan would go well beyond what the target depth was. Neeson said they were supposed to get the same parts from Cyclops I. Put them on Cyclops 2, test it and certify it and then be done. But it ended up not being so caught in dry. Nissen claimed that Cyclops 1 had power for the thrusters internally, which with a big battery under the floor, but they couldn't do that with Cyclops 2, aka Titan. Additionally, Ocean Gate had been promised thrusters from Interspace, which they had used on Cyclops 1, only to eventually be told that they would not be provided with the same thrusters from Cyclops 1, making everything that Peter Brodsky had done

• 1:29:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  at the Applied Physics Lab irrelevant. So when the team at the APL began to move with Ocean Gate from Cyclops 1 to Titan, Stockton Rush began butting heads with Peter Brodsky.

• 1:29:42Speaker 08

  Pete wasn't okay with using glass spheres on the outside and decided to remove himself from the project for that reason.

• 1:29:52Speaker 08

  And respectfully,

• 1:29:55Speaker 08

  Stockton didn't make a big issue of it when to Pete at all, but he was madder than I'll get out, for sure. He was not happy about that because we were losing Pete.

• 1:30:11Speaker 09

  And so the University of Washington Applied Physics Lab said that utilizing glass spheres in the atmosphere on the outside, so not in the pressure hall, was a no starter for them.

• 1:30:22Speaker 08

  For Pete Brodsky, for sure. And you wouldn't put glass spheres inside? Well, I guess you could. It'd be overkill. But for the outside, no. And even oil filling them, Pete was not okay with it. And so personally, he didn't want to be part of it.

• 1:30:42Speaker 09

  And that was the point at which Ocean Gate ceased the engineering?

• 1:30:46Speaker 08

  With Pete.

• 1:30:46Speaker 09

  With Pete?

• 1:30:47Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 1:30:48Derrick Levasseur?

  Man, red flag after red flag. Not good. You got multiple people telling you you're going to crash. This is going to crash and burn. And Stockton's saying, nope, full steam ahead.

• 1:30:57Stephanie Harlowe?

  So at this point, Ocean Gate broke from APL. And then Tony Nissen hired in-house engineers. And Nissen testified that Stockton Rush was not the best at accepting constructive criticism or releasing control. So Nissen did the best he could with both hands tied behind his back most times.

• 1:31:17Speaker 09

  And as the Director of Engineering, did you make all engineering decisions?

• 1:31:20Speaker 08

  No.

• 1:31:23Speaker 09

  Did you make any engineering decisions?

• 1:31:24Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 1:31:26Speaker 09

  And who would make the majority of the engineering decisions?

• 1:31:28Speaker 08

  It was Stockton. If I could control it, or if I did control it, it was a significant problem, or a significant issue, which maybe we'll talk about. That's how 18 string gauges got on the hull. I wasn't going to settle for, for anything else. So, an engineering decision like that, I made it. And Stockton and I argued about it, a lot. Well, let's say the technical decisions for the case itself, the carbon fiber structure, that was Brian Spencer. I could raise the alarms all I want, but it's Brian Spencer and look at Stockton and, you know, he'd say, "This is what we got. This is what we're going with."

• 1:32:12Speaker 08

  To the extent that I, I was uncomfortable really with, with the fact that we weren't going to have witness panels. I couldn't understand that about Brian. Like, how, how would you build this without a witness panel? That's so basic. Seems so basic. But I couldn't stop that. To get the witness panels, the mandor was already done and Stockton wanted to, to go with that. So, this is just a couple of examples of how I could influence it and some things that, if it mattered enough, then I'd fight for it. And if it didn't matter enough, I'd find a way I can mitigate it.

• 1:32:47Speaker 09

  And was that Mr. Rush's management technique just to you? Or was that employed throughout others that you witnessed at Ocean Gate?

• 1:32:56Speaker 08

  Yeah, Stockton, I don't, I'm struggling to find the professional words to be able to put it.

• 1:33:04Speaker 08

  I'm an old Navy diver, right? There's a bunch of words I could use, but,

• 1:33:09Speaker 08

  Stockton would fight for, he would fight for what he wanted. And what he wanted,

• 1:33:18Speaker 08

  even if it changed from day to day, right? Like, he, he would fight for what he wanted and he wouldn't,

• 1:33:25Speaker 08

  he, he wouldn't give an inch much at all. So, the fights that I had with Stockton, most of it behind closed doors, because as the Director of Engineering, let's keep continuity in the crew. And they can't really know that the two people on top are in solid disagreement. Most people would just eventually back down from Stockton. Like, it was almost death by a thousand cuts in most of the things.

• 1:33:53Speaker 08

  I hope that answers that that question. I don't know really good professionally to organize that in my brain right now.

• 1:33:59Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that's what we've been saying all episode, right? Like he just he had Stockton had it in his mind how things were gonna go. He tried to surround himself with people that would eventually concede to what he wanted. And he had these people on board because he needed them, he wanted them, but he was only hiring them to affirm what he wanted.

• 1:34:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, and I feel like almost for looks, right? Like, oh, I have this this expert here, and I have this expert here. But if you're not listening to them, it doesn't matter who you surround yourself with.

• 1:34:25Derrick Levasseur?

  He was looking for their endorsements. And when they didn't give them just easily, and he would push back and say, Well, you know what? If you're not with me, you're against me, you got to go. And and he was open to hearing other opinions. But in reality, he wasn't receptive to them to the point where he would make changes. It was more like, I understand what you're saying. Thank you for bringing that to our attention. Now we're gonna do exactly what I've already planned on doing.

• 1:34:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  Exactly.

• 1:34:50Derrick Levasseur?

  So that's not the way you operate.

• 1:34:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  And you heard Tony Nissen talk about something called witness panels, and the carbon fiber hull of the Titan being designed without them. And I was like, what the hell are witness panels? I had no idea. So I looked it up. And this is what I'm talking about, like, really liking doing these cases because I learned things. But he would eventually explain, and then I did some more research. Witness panels are small sample pieces of the exact same materials used to build the submersibles pressure hulls. So they're going to be manufactured at the same time, using the same process and the same basically material. And they're going to do this for monitoring and testing purposes. Having witness panels would allow engineers to regularly inspect how the material was aging without having to cut into the actual hull. They could also detect

• 1:35:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  early signs of fatigue, delamination, cracking, or water damage in the material, and run lab tests on the panels after a certain number of dives or years to see if the carbon fiber was weakening. Witness panels are like check engine lights, only more precise and science based. So if a witness panel starts to show signs of degradation, then obviously, it can be a warning sign that the actual hull might be experiencing that same degradation. Peter Bruski, former Ocean Gate consultant from the University of Washington APL, he criticized the decision to exclude witness panels from Titan's carbon fiber hull. And obviously, this probably had something to do with why Peter Brodsky and Stockton Rush started butting heads and Peter Brodsky eventually decided to not work on the project

• 1:36:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  anymore. Without witness panels, there was no non-destructive way to monitor the long-term health of the material. And this is especially dangerous because carbon fiber can look fine on the outside, even when it's deteriorating internally, and stress from each dive can build up invisibly. No witness panels means there was really no early warning system. Now, Tony Neeson did say that he and Rush were concerned about the possibility of voids, which they had seen in the carbon fiber during the 1/3 scale testing. Voids are tiny pockets of air, gas, or empty space that get trapped inside carbon fiber composites during the manufacturing process. Like we talked about, carbon fiber is made by layering sheets of fiber and bonding them with resin.

• 1:37:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  So if that process is not done perfectly, if there's too little resin, if air gets trapped inside, or if the layers aren't properly pressed together, you can end up with voids. Carbon fiber is only strong when it's dense, solid, and uniformly bonded, and voids obviously weaken that structure. They create points of stress concentration where pressure can focus and begin to cause cracks. They can also grow over time under repeated stress, like, I don't know, multiple deep-sea dives, eventually leading to something called delamination, where layers of carbon fiber peel apart. Under extreme pressure, like at Titanic depths, those tiny imperfections can become catastrophic failure points. Even a void the size of a grain of sand can become a huge problem under 6,000 psi of

• 1:37:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  ocean pressure. So not only did Ocean Gate not use witness panels or conduct thorough post-dive inspections to look for internal damage, not only did they not do any third-party inspections or bring in classing agencies to rigorously check for voids or other imperfections, But there's also been reports from whistleblowers and former employees that the carbon fiber used for Titan was way past its shelf life and may have had quality control issues, and we'll be talking more about that later.

• 1:38:19Derrick Levasseur?

  I just want to say, just to me, it just seems like carbon fiber wasn't the right material for this choice. Even there was just too many variables in it.

• 1:38:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  Way too much, like, unknown.

• 1:38:29Derrick Levasseur?

  And we know that it's used in airplanes and all this stuff, and it has a lot of applications that it's incredible at. Carbon fibers are a great material for a lot of different things. It just, here, there's the unpredictability of it. When you talk about avoid the size of a grain of sand being a stress point that could result in death, if the material affords for anything like that, it's probably not the right material. There were better substances out there that they could have used, like a titanium, that would have removed these variables, these variances that could have led to catastrophic failure. And, again, I think it was based on cost effectiveness.

• 1:39:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  It was cost, and also the lightness, like, how fast could it get to depth? How much time would they have at the ocean floor? Because you got to depth quicker. The vessel that can assist in the submersible doesn't have to be as...

• 1:39:20Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, it'd be easier to move because it's lighter, but the trade-off is it's weaker. And that's a trade-off you can't make. Like, if it's an extra half hour to get to depth, but I'm going to guarantee you get there, I think that's a trade-off most people would make. So, yeah, it's a problem. I think what it really came down to is cost.

• 1:39:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, basically, because there was no witness panels, and because Ocean Gate had not conducted any third-party testing or certification of Titan's hull, the company implemented something they called the Real-Time Monitoring System. And this was an acoustic system that Stockton Rush had invented and then got a patent on. So, the RTM, the Real-Time Monitoring, it included acoustic emission sensors, which are basically underwater microphones that would be mounted on the inside of the submersible and then on the surface of the carbon fiber hull. And they would listen for high-frequency signals that would suggest the carbon fiber was cracking or stressed. And you can see these microphones working in the Netflix documentary because you can

• 1:40:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  see them doing the test on the one-third scale hull. And you can see on a screen, every time there's a spike, that means that there's a sound the microphones are detecting. And the sound would be, once again, that carbon fiber snapping, cracking. It sounds like a rubber band, like, and you could see how much it was doing that. So Stockton's like, oh, yeah, don't worry, we have these, these microphones that's going to detect if, you know, the, the carbon fiber is having issues or is stressed. So in interviews and in a patent filing, Rush explained that the idea was to detect the smallest sound of structural failure, something like a snap of fiber under stress,

• 1:41:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  before it turned catastrophic. And there's a lot of obvious problems with this system because it would only detect a problem as it was happening. And under crushing pressure, a structural failure in carbon fiber can go from first crack to full implosion in microseconds. We talked earlier about how the decision to make the carbon fiber hull five inches, remember, they were doing the test with the one-third scale model and it kept like failing. So they were like, oh, we'll just make the

• 1:41:34Derrick Levasseur?

  Make it thicker.

• 1:41:35Stephanie Harlowe?

  We'll make it thicker. Right? And that made it impossible to test for flaws with portable ultrasonic equipment. So

• 1:41:42Derrick Levasseur?

  Couldn't penetrate deep enough.

• 1:41:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  You could do testing with a stationary ultrasonic rig, but Stockton Rush decided that transporting and testing the Titan to one of these stationary rigs would be too expensive. So ultrasonic equipment was never used to test the submersible. They have portable ones you can bring with you on the ship that the, that the Titan would be pulled out to sea with. And then you could test after the dives, before the dives, to see if there's issues with this ultrasonic, like it's basically looking inside of it. But because the hull was too thick, they couldn't use that. And he just decided against using an actual stationary ultrasonic rig. He said, no, we don't need to do that. It's too expensive. It doesn't matter. While you're using carbon fiber and you're just depending on these little microphones

• 1:42:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  to be the, the thing that tells you that there's an issue, which is crazy to me. So Tony Neeson and Stockton Rush would talk about classing Titan, but ultimately, that never happened because carbon fiber was not an approved material to be used at the depths that they wanted the Titan to go to.

• 1:42:47Speaker 08

  Stockton's first issue was, it was time and cost, like to go through their plan. And I think he really wanted them to be part

• 1:42:58Speaker 08

  Of it. But I think the plan that they came up with, if I remember right, one of the days he was crying on my shoulder, it's gonna take too long and way, way too expensive. It's ridiculous. And in his words, it stifles innovation. I said, well, you know, you could still be innovative. Might take a little bit longer, but there was, there was a divorcing, so to speak, over the idea when he couldn't get traction on what he wanted.

• 1:43:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  And it was in 2017 when Ocean Gate was promising the trip of a lifetime to the bottom of the sea to view the holy grail of shipwrecks, that tension started to really build within the company's ranks. And when those outside and inside the company began expressing their concern about the construction of Titan and how safe it would be during dives to extreme depths. And this is when reportedly Stockton Rush went full steam ahead, ignoring the red flags and scoffing at the warnings. He just pretty much was like, and this wasn't just people in the company, this was like experts, like I think even James Cameron was like, this is weird. You know, like people were coming out and, and, because Ocean Gate was getting a lot of traction in the media and people were coming out, his, his peers, his colleagues,

• 1:44:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  people who worked for him, people who had worked with him in the past, just people in the submersible industry who knew better. And they were like, hey, we suggest you don't do this.

• 1:44:24Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, it's a problem.

• 1:44:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  And he's like, no, I mean, how do you, how do you blaze a trail if you're not willing to set stuff on fire? He didn't say that, but it sounds like something he would say. And yeah, that's pretty much when he, he was like, I'm doing this. I've put a lot of time and effort into this. I, I feel that this is very safe. I feel that it, it cannot fail and so we're doing this.

• 1:44:43Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, no, I started off the episode giving Stockton a compliment. I probably won't have many for the remainder of this series. I mean, listen, you could be talented and I mean, you hit the nail right on the head. Talent, but with hubris can be a dangerous combination and you have what it appears to be a situation here where Stockton felt that he was the smartest guy in the room. Couple that with trying to expedite this process to start turning a profit. He was blinded by his own ambitions and his own greed. At least it's what it sounds like so far. And anytime he was given an opportunity to make a course correction by someone who was smarter, or at least more knowledgeable in a specific area than him, he would, he would disguise his rationale behind the need for exploration, right?

• 1:45:27Derrick Levasseur?

  And knowing that there were going to be risks that needed to be taken in order to do new things. But in reality, I think at the core, a lot of his decision-making process was based on the bottom line as far as money. So that's an issue.

• 1:45:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  I also think not even just future money, but he had put so much of his own money and investors' money and stuff into this and they'd gotten so far. And before this thing's even built, he's going on TV shows, talking to the media like, oh yeah, we're going to do this, we're going to do this. So he had basically gone out to the world and said, this is happening. And so how now could he turn back?

• 1:46:00Derrick Levasseur?

  He would do it under this price point. Yeah.

• 1:46:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  Dude, he'd even taken money from people who were booking passage on this Titan submersible to the Titanic far before it was even ready. So he'd taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from paying passengers that he probably spent, okay? And then couldn't reimburse them. He's taking all this money from investors and he's using his own money and he cannot reimburse this money. So it's like, what choice do I have? I have to go full speed ahead at this point.

• 1:46:29Derrick Levasseur?

  No, it's terrible. We're gonna, we're gonna have to wait to watch this. I'm gonna have to wait to watch this documentary until we're done with the series, but maybe we'll do like a crime weekly watch party or something. That'd be kind of cool because I'd like to watch the documentary, but I want to wait until after we complete the series because it wouldn't make a lot of sense to do it now when you've watched it and you're telling everyone the story, including me. So yeah, looking forward to part two. Any final words from you before we wrap this one up?

• 1:46:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, I'm excited to get to next week and start telling more of the story and getting into really, you know, some really shocking stuff, honestly. I think, yeah.

• 1:47:03Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm already, I've already heard a few shocking things.

• 1:47:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  I don't think you're going to have much nice to say about Stockton going forward.

• 1:47:09Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I'm done with it. Listen, two things can be true. You can be, you can be a smart guy, you can have talent, but again, promise versus actual execution is two different things. And at this point, the takeaway from episode number one is. It was preventable.

• 1:47:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:47:24Derrick Levasseur?

  It was preventable, so that's a problem because people's lives were lost, not just Stockton's. Um, and, and that's, that's a big issue because they were not aware of these things.

• 1:47:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, playing with your own life is one thing. If you want to be the only guy down there testing these things out, then it still sucks.

• 1:47:37Derrick Levasseur?

  A great example was, we talked about Amelia Earhart.

• 1:47:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:40Derrick Levasseur?

  Sure, she knew the risks, right? She knew there was going to be some issues, but she risked her own life, not the lives of others, so.

• 1:47:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  She did have a co-pilot, but.

• 1:47:47Derrick Levasseur?

  Did she?

• 1:47:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:49Derrick Levasseur?

  Did not know that. Well, the co-pilot risked their life as well. They knew what they were getting their, their hands into, right?

• 1:47:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  We don't know where he's at either. Yeah, we don't know where he's at either.

• 1:47:58Derrick Levasseur?

  Did not know that.

• 1:47:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  They think there was something going on.

• 1:48:00Derrick Levasseur?

  Maybe we gotta do that series at some point. Have you ever covered that on your channel?

• 1:48:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, I mean.

• 1:48:05Derrick Levasseur?

  That'd be a cool one to cover.

• 1:48:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, let us know if you want us to do that.

• 1:48:08Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  I love history, so I'm always down.

• 1:48:11Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay, cool. Guys, we appreciate you being here. Everyone, Crime Con again, if you want, go over, check it out, leave a comment and a review. You gotta subscribe, turn your notifications on. There's already a bunch of you already. Leave a review. You can write Crime Con. You can write some, everyone's writing nice words underneath it. That may sway the decision as we're scrolling through. You never know. So leave a comment, leave a review. We'll pick someone next week. If you want to go get your Crime Con tickets, you don't want to wait and go over to Crime Con and just use our code CRIMEWEEKLY. We appreciate you being here. Everyone stay safe out there. We'll see you next week.

• 1:48:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  Bye.