S3 Ep324: OceanGate: A Rush to Break the Rules (Part 3)

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. Smalls.com/CrimeWeekly - Get 60% off your first Smalls order PLUS free shipping!2. https://www. HelixSleep.com/CrimeWeekly - Get 27% off sitewide!3. https://www. PDSDebt.com/CrimeWeekly - Get your FREE debt assessment today!4. https://www. EatIQBAR.com - Text WEEKLY to 64000 for 20% off ALL IQBAR products and FREE shipping!

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

• 0:12Stephanie Harlowe?

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

• 0:15Derrick Levasseur?

  And I'm Derrick Levasseur.

• 0:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  We are diving right into the third and final part of the Titan submersible disaster. We're gonna finish up with what happened. We're gonna talk about the actual fateful day that the Titan did implode, and we're gonna give our final thoughts. And there's actually some really interesting things. I found some videos that I had never known about before, most likely because the content creator that made these videos, I believe, is from Mexico, and they're all in Spanish. So they just didn't pop up when I was looking for things, but I found some footage in in one of these videos that just dawned me.

• 0:52Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, you called me about it. You were like, Derek, guess what I just found. No, it's it's I'm looking forward to tonight because you didn't send me the footage, unfortunately. You made me wait till today. So now I have it. I have not watched it yet, and I am looking forward to getting into it and wrapping the series up as well. And also, if you didn't watch Crime Weekly News or listen to Crime Weekly News, congrats to the Crime Con giveaway winner, Jackie. She has reached out to us. She now has her passes. But keep subscribing, keep turning your notifications on on Apple and Spotify. We're giving away two more tickets. We'll let you know when that goes live. But I wouldn't wait. I would go over there now, get it done, so that you're submitted, and we will be reviewing it and picking another winner shortly. Excited about it.

• 1:35Stephanie Harlowe?

  Also, if you didn't watch Crime Weekly News, Derek and I sort of chatted about the Amy Bradley Netflix documentary, and I've always been interested in that case. I told my subscribers, we've talked about that before, how I've been wanting to talk about Amy Bradley, and Derek covered Amy Bradley on Detective Perspective.

• 1:49Derrick Levasseur?

  And we already don't agree.

• 1:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, and he was like, we should do a deep dive. And I was like, let's get like, let's get everyone's temperature. So if you didn't watch Crime Weekly News and you're watching this, let us know in the comments. Do you want us to do a deep dive on Amy Bradley? Because I do, and so does Derek.

• 2:03Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I was more surface level. It's about an hour episode. Ours will be like, probably a five or six part series. So one hour versus 14 hours. It's gonna be a little different.

• 2:14Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. All right. So let's dive in. Last time in last episode, we followed Ocean Gate's reckless trajectory as founder Stockton Rush ignored warnings from industry veterans and fired his Director of Marine Operations, David Lockridge, after Lockridge refused to sign off on the Titan's final design, citing over two dozen critical safety concerns from flammable materials inside the cabin to missing bolts and unexplained damage in the carbon fiber hull. Lockridge took his complaints to OSHA, but Rush countered with a lawsuit that effectively silenced him. While experts like deep sea explorer Rob McCallum and MTS Chairman Will Conan urged Rush to stop, Rush dismissed their concerns as baseless cries from gatekeepers clinging to an outdated

• 2:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  industry. One of Titan's most controversial safety systems was an acoustic monitoring device that listened for the sounds of the hull failing, essentially relying on the creaks and pops of micro buckling as a warning sign. But as pressure testing moved forward, the danger became undeniable. The sub nearly broke apart in shallow water. At depth, the hull warped far more than engineers had predicted. And finally, under flashlight inspection, came the most chilling discovery of all, a visible crack, followed by the revelation that 11 square feet of Titan's carbon fiber hull had delaminated, peeling apart like a ruptured shell. The warning signs weren't just audible anymore, they were visible and catastrophic. So in 2020, numerous media outlets reported that Ocean

• 3:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  Gate would begin its first tourist dives to the Titanic the following year. The company had announced that it had secured $18 million in equity financing. And this means that Ocean Gate raised money by selling ownership shares. So instead of borrowing money that they would have to pay back, they sold a portion of ownership to individuals and these investors then became shareholders who would benefit if the company grew or if it was sold later on. But they also assumed a lot of risk. If it failed, so Ocean Gate's 18 million in equity financing, it looks like it came almost entirely from private inside investors, meaning existing stakeholders, board members, and associates of Stockton Rush rather than public venture capitalists or institutional backers.

• 4:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  According to an SEC filing at the time, the investment was 100% insider funded, with no external firms participating. Ocean Gate said that this funding would be used to rebuild the Titan hull after earlier structural concerns, as well as accelerate development of next-generation subs, like Cyclops 3 and 4. And these are submersibles that Stockton Rush claimed would be capable of entering even deeper into the ocean, and also general expansion of Ocean Gate's expedition business, their tourism, where their money came from, basically. Now, in February of 2020, NASA announced its partnership with Ocean Gate to develop and manufacture new carbon fiber pressure vessels. They also said they were planning to play a role in building and testing the new carbon fiber hull for Titan.

• 5:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  After the submersible implosion, NASA quickly clarified that they had not been as hands-on as they had initially planned, stating that the COVID-19 pandemic had prevented them from fulfilling this intent. So basically, they never touched anything. They never built anything. They simply consulted. Justin Jackson, who was the NASA materials engineer, testified that NASA had provided remote consultations throughout the build of Titan's one-scale, one-third scale model, but they didn't do any manufacturing or testing of the cylinders, the hull. He also said that at one point NASA declined to allow Ocean Gate to use their name in a press release because the language that Ocean Gate wanted to use sounded more like an endorsement.

• 5:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  And NASA was like, no, we haven't endorsed this. Like, we were planning to be more hands-on, but with the pandemic, we can't be. And so, we don't know, actually, if we would be behind this carbon fiber hull. And so, we don't want you guys to talk about it like we are, even though... Of course, Stockton Rush always threw NASA around. He always threw Boeing around. Anything that would give him legitimacy.

• 6:18Derrick Levasseur?

  Think about how much credibility that gives you. They're sending spaceships up to the moon.

• 6:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  I mean, yeah.

• 6:24Derrick Levasseur?

  And NASA is like, ah, don't put our name on it.

• 6:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think it is funny, though, that Stockton Rush is throwing around NASA, Boeing, all of these things during all of this time. But then as soon as the implosion happened, NASA and Boeing came out and they were like, listen, we were not as involved as he made it seem. And it's like, well, why did you let him make it seem like that then?

• 6:40Derrick Levasseur?

  So what I, and I don't have any proof of this, but what I would think, and it sounds like from the documentary and what we're hearing that there were points where Boeing and NASA may have consulted on certain things and it could have been as informal as an email or a phone call. And in many of those consultations, they might not have agreed with what they were doing.

• 6:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, it's true.

• 7:00Derrick Levasseur?

  But at the point before it's happening, before this implosion happens, NASA and Boeing are thinking, yeah, we're, you know, we're being contracted to do certain things. It sounds like they were being paid because I remember in the documentary, there was a Boeing representative who said, I think they just didn't go with us because maybe it was too expensive. You know, we were just, we were very expensive. So they were definitely charging them.

• 7:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, they had to sell them the carbon fiber, right? Which apparently, allegedly, some, some employees of Ocean Gate have said that carbon fiber was

• 7:30Derrick Levasseur?

  Was no bueno.

• 7:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  Way past its prime. Like it was past its shelf life, which is why Boeing had sold it to Ocean Gate for a cheaper price.

• 7:39Derrick Levasseur?

  That wouldn't seem completely unreasonable to me. And then as far as Boeing not stepping out and saying something during the Ocean Gate marketing and advertising, like, oh, we're not involved because they were, they were, it's a very vague and loosely used phrase, but Boeing's like, yeah, well, technically they're not wrong. We are somewhat involved. However, like you pointed out, as soon as the implosion happens, like any business is gonna do, they're gonna separate themselves as far as they can from this company because they know, no pun intended, it's a sinking ship, right? Like it's going down and they don't want to be attached to it because obviously this is a huge tragedy and they don't want it associated with their names, either Boeing or NASA.

• 8:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, but here's my thing. Like obviously the whole expired carbon fiber thing is like strictly word of mouth. Some employees at Ocean Gate had said that. And I mean, it kind of makes sense considering what happened, but. If it's true, why did Boeing sell Ocean Gate carbon fiber that was past its shelf date, knowing what they were building it for, what they were using it for?

• 8:43Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, that's, can I play Boeing defense attorney right now?

• 8:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:47Derrick Levasseur?

  So Boeing has their carbon fiber that they're using in their airplanes or spaceships, whatever they're doing, right? And they have created tests when they use smaller scale models to test the tolerances to make sure that the carbon fiber they're using will live up to the environment or the applications they're using it for. They're doing the work. They're doing the testing and getting good results before putting people inside of it. Boeing is saying, hey, listen, this carbon fiber is past the date of what we could use it for, for our applications. It won't last. However, we'll sell you the carbon fiber. We're going to be able to recuperate some of the money for the carbon fiber that we cannot use. It's on you to do the testing to make sure that this carbon fiber in its current state

• 9:31Derrick Levasseur?

  will live up to the means that you want to use it for, that it's going to, it's going to be applicable to whatever environment you're going to put it in where it's going to, it's going to survive. That's not our responsibility. So we'll sell it to you if you think it can work, but it's your responsibility to do the test. And you've laid it out very clearly over the last three part, these last three parts that the testing did not live up to it and that Ocean Gate saw that this carbon fiber would not survive and yet they still used it. So if I'm Boeing, I'm saying, listen, we gave you the product, but it was your responsibility to make sure that it would work because we're not a submersible company. We're an airplane company. We put people, we put things in the, in the sky. We don't know what you're doing down there. That was your responsibility.

• 10:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  All right. So what you're saying is if it's true, which it could be not true, if it's true, it's legally no issue, morally a gray area.

• 10:22Derrick Levasseur?

  No, I don't even think so because listen.

• 10:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  You don't think it's morally a gray area? If they knew that he was going to bring paying passengers down in that submersible?

• 10:28Derrick Levasseur?

  Because here's, here's my thing. The airplanes have different tolerances that they need. So Boeing, a responsible company is saying, hey, listen, we know it's not going to work for us. However, there are other applications that we're not as familiar with where this carbon fiber may be. More than fine for what you're using it for. We don't, we're not in your business. We're not doing it. We're not sending a sub down to the Titanic. So if we can sell you this stuff, we have put a date on like carbon fiber. And I'm no, by no means a carbon fiber expert, but I use carbon fiber in my 3D prints. Now, certain prints that I use need higher tolerances. And maybe certain carbon fiber weaves wouldn't work for others, but there's still a use case for that carbon fiber. It might be past the date for Boeing.

• 11:12Derrick Levasseur?

  But carbon fiber doesn't necessarily expire, right? It can be in a vehicle for its entire life.

• 11:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  It weakens though.

• 11:20Derrick Levasseur?

  But we're talking about

• 11:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  Over time and exposed elements, it weakens.

• 11:23Derrick Levasseur?

  Small, small amounts. So what Boeing is saying, hey, listen, we're going to sell it to you because you're telling us that even though it's past our prime, it would still work for you. But listen, let it be known. We're not saying that this is going to work for your sub, or maybe they did, that this is the big if, right?

• 11:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, we don't know. Yeah.

• 11:41Derrick Levasseur?

  Now, if you showed me documentation or evidence that said Stockton Rush or one of his team members said to Boeing, hey, listen, we know it's past your expiration date for airplanes. But do you think this would work in a submarine that's going to be going down 4,000 meters? And there's documentation from Boeing saying, yeah, it's gonna be more than fine. You're good to go. That's a huge legal issue for them.

• 12:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  All right. So here's, here's the thing. The whole like, where did this carbon fiber come from is a huge mystery, which is crazy to me because

• 12:12Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. How the hell does that happen?

• 12:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  The, the coast guard did like this huge, very in-depth investigation. So Stockton Rush once told a journalist that he'd obtained the carbon fiber at a big discount from Boeing, and he even admitted it was past its shelf life for use in airplanes.

• 12:28Derrick Levasseur?

  Boom. See what you said there?

• 12:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  What? Past the shelf life for use in airplanes. Yeah. Which I do. If it's past the shelf life for use in airplanes, it's past the shelf life for use in submersibles.

• 12:37Derrick Levasseur?

  It's a pressurized cabin.

• 12:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  Which is, yes, exactly. There's way more pressure.

• 12:41Derrick Levasseur?

  I completely agree from the layman perspective, but that's the key phrase there. Boeing said it's past their expiration for airplanes.

• 12:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  But listen, Boeing. They took a while to respond to this, but when they did, they said, we have no record of selling any composite materials to Stockton Rush or Ocean Gate.

• 12:59Derrick Levasseur?

  Stockton was getting this stuff from China or somewhere.

• 13:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  So where was he getting it? Now, now, we really don't know where. Now, listen, I think Boeing, this is just allegedly, don't come for me, Boeing could have potentially sold it. And, and they're saying, hey, we have no record. Maybe it was kind of an under the table sale. Who knows? Or Stockton Rush got his carbon fiber for some bolt, from some like bullshit place? Yes.

• 13:21Derrick Levasseur?

  He got it from Amazon Prime.

• 13:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  Not from Amazon Prime.

• 13:24Derrick Levasseur?

  He got it from Amazon Prime.

• 13:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  I feel like there's records of that, like the, the Coast Guard would have found it.

• 13:28Derrick Levasseur?

  You have a good conspiracy theory. What if Stockton was going through back channels at Boeing? Where there's someone on the lower level who says, hey, this carbon fiber is no good. They're going to throw it in the trash. They're going to throw it in the dumpster.

• 13:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  I'm going to throw it in the dumpster. And if you want to pick it up, it'll be there.

• 13:43Derrick Levasseur?

  And would that be the first time, like something like that happened?

• 13:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  So officially, they might not have any record.

• 13:48Derrick Levasseur?

  The higher ups might be like, ah, we never sold them anything.

• 13:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  Unofficially, Stockton Rush could have still gotten it from Boeing or from some random, like you said, maybe from China. Who knows?

• 13:58Derrick Levasseur?

  If I had to guess, and I could be wrong, I definitely could be wrong. I, I would lean towards Stockton trying to give some credibility to the naysayers of this carbon fiber who were saying, oh, it's no good. And him saying, oh, I got it from Boeing. It's gotta be good. But maybe he really wasn't getting it from Boeing.

• 14:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  But why? But he was publicly saying he was before the implosion. So at that point.

• 14:20Derrick Levasseur?

  Was he saying he was getting the carbon fiber or working with them?

• 14:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  Carbon, he said, he told a journalist, I got the carbon fiber from Boeing at a huge discount and said because it was past its shelf life.

• 14:29Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. I mean, why would he say that?

• 14:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  Stating that publicly, don't you think at that point Boeing would come out and be like, no dude, what are you talking about? But they didn't.

• 14:36Derrick Levasseur?

  I agree.

• 14:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  They didn't. So that's weird.

• 14:37Derrick Levasseur?

  That is very weird.

• 14:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  So we know that they have to make a new hull, right? Because they've got all these issues. It got hit by lightning. Stockton Rush was like, the hull's fine, just some other issues. But the hull wasn't fine because then he goes in the shallow water.

• 14:51Derrick Levasseur?

  The hull has never been fine.

• 14:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  It's flow, the hull's never been fine. So they got to build a new one. And that's going to be the V2, the version two hull. And the Titan's version two hull was one of the most ambitious and ultimately most fatal components ever built for a manned submersible. Ocean Gate contracted Spencer Composites to manufacture the hull. Using a co-bonding method that fused hundreds of layers of carbon fiber with titanium interface rings in a single curing process. The final design included 480 alternating layers, some wet-wound in a hoop pattern, others laid axially in pre-peg strips, all cured in a high-temperature autoclave over the course of seven days. Now, to the untrained eye, it looked like cutting-edge innovation, but beneath the surface, literal and figurative, serious flaws were already taking root.

• 15:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  A later analysis by the National Transportation Safety Board found wrinkles in the fiber layers, air pockets known as voids, signs of porosity, and areas where the carbon fiber had begun to delaminate. This is the V2 hull, and that meant the tightly compressed layers had started to separate. There were also rubbing features, evidence that the bond between the carbon fiber and the titanium rings had degraded over time, reducing the structure's ability to distribute pressure evenly. Now, this hull did pass pressure tests at the University of Maryland, but Ocean Gate chose to use the old titanium rings from the damaged hull, the version 1, even though there were proven fatigue issues, because Stockton Rush was against further delays and additional costs.

• 16:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  So after the hull was rebuilt, new metal lifting eyes were added to the titanium interface rings. These are components that connected the carbon fiber cylinder to the end caps. These were advertised by Ocean Gate as additional hoisting points for easy handling of the vessel, and a representative from the original ring manufacturer had expressly advised Ocean Gate in 2017 that these titanium rings should only be lifted using nylon straps, not rigid metal attachments, writing, quote, "The titanium cannot take load/tension," end quote. So bolted lifting eyes are going to focus all the load at one point, and without careful engineering, this can cause the titanium ring to deform or crack under the sub's roughly 23,000-pound weight.

• 17:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  Makes total sense. It does, and these rings were actually bonded to the carbon fiber hull using epoxy, which meant applying weight to the rings was going to transmit shear or peel stresses into the bond line, degrading it. So they didn't... They, when we say hoisting point, we mean getting the, the submersible off the support ship and then like onto the, the platform that's in the water and then once again into the water. So you have to hoist it onto the support ship. Then you have to hoist it on to, down into the platform that's in the water. So you're picking it up, putting it down, picking it up, putting it down several times.

• 17:39Derrick Levasseur?

  That's a lot of pressure on those individual points. I mean, I'm working, we were talking about, I'm renovating my house right now and I think about porcelain tile, right? And if I take my hand and I put it on top of a piece of porcelain tile and I push down as hard as I can, nothing's going to happen. But if I took a screwdriver and I put it on that tile and I applied the same pressure, it's going to crack it because all that poundage, all that force is on that one little speck of the top of that screwdriver hitting that one point on the tile, which is going to cause it to crack. Now, in this case, you're still applying the same methodology where you have these points where these attachments have been added. So all the weight of that submersible is now on those points instead of being dispersed throughout the, the nylon strap. So you're going to have that flexing,

• 18:24Derrick Levasseur?

  you're going to have that cracking, you may have some carbon fibers delaminate or even just stretch, whatever it could be. The up and down is not going to be good for the overall integrity of the submersible and you would think these engineers would have known that.

• 18:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, they weren't, um, they weren't even supposed to really use those.

• 18:43Derrick Levasseur?

  At all.

• 18:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  At all.

• 18:44Derrick Levasseur?

  Right. They wanted the pressure of the lifting and dropping, or I shouldn't say dropping, but lowering. They wanted it dispersed evenly throughout the submersible, not on those individual points. That makes perfect sense to me because that happens in a lot of different applications.

• 18:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  They, they shouldn't have used it. So the, what, the lifting eyes were a recent addition to that hull. It wasn't on the V1 hull and they were added for convenience to hoist, tighten more easily. That meant, you know, saving time with a single hook and cable rather than using a sling or a spreader bar, which would distribute the load more evenly. They, they should be using a sling. That's what they had done before. They didn't even put them in, in a way where it would like separate it from the hull. They just bonded it right to the hull. So all the pressure that the lifting rings would be taking would be transmitted. Into the hull, which is just bananas to me. It's bananas, but that's what they did. So despite warnings, Ocean Gate kept the new lifting points on Titan, but there's no record of them being structurally tested

• 19:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  or verified by an analysis before Titan returned to service, which it did in June of 2021. So basically, the version one hull, it's scrapped. There's too many issues, lightning strikes, this, this and that, it's bad. They build this new V2 hull. They put the new things on them, the bolting lifting eyes that they hadn't had before. And then before returning it to service, they did not have these things tested or analyzed by, it doesn't even appear to, not even an outside party. It doesn't even appear that their engineering team did any tests with these. So that's crazy. And so they bring it back. They put it back in the water, June of 2021. Multiple dives were conducted that year. So Titan missions, for everybody who's unaware,

• 20:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  they're not just going out in the ocean for one day. They're structured as multi-day expeditions. Typically, they lasted between eight and 10 days, with some time spent on Titan and most of it on the support ship, the Polar Prince. And Stockton Rush knew that each attempt to reach the Titanic might not succeed the first or second time, maybe due to weather, technical failures, ocean currents. So extra time was baked into these expeditions to maximize the odds that each mission specialist, AKA paying customer, would get a chance to dive and hopefully to view the Titanic wreck. So they're going out for like over a week. And the whole thing is, you know, the weather might not be good today, or maybe something on the submersible isn't up to par, we've got to fix it.

• 21:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  So this way, everybody, all the mission specialists are there for an extended period. And they have the opportunity to go on multiple dives in Titan and hopefully get to the Titanic, which is what was promised, right? Because what happens if they don't get to the Titanic? Well, then Stockton Rush is going to have to refund them their money or give them a free trip on a future mission, which is taking money out of his pocket. Now, we're going to talk about some of these attempts. The first attempt was called Mission One, and it began on June 28, 2021, with the Polar Prince arriving to a spot in the ocean above the Titanic wreck on June 30. Later, Ocean Gate would write on its blog that during this mission, Titan had reached a depth of 1,700 meters, which was nearly halfway to the depth of the wreck.

• 21:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  And this is really the only time they're like bringing paying customers down too, right? So they have never done that before, but they're doing it now. And Ocean Gate also mentioned in their blog that only one dive occurred, which they claimed took place on the sixth day out to sea. But according to mission specialist Fred Hagan, who was on this mission, an earlier dive had taken place that Ocean Gate didn't advertise, they didn't talk about on their blog. And when you hear his recollection of the dive, you'll see why. According to Hagan, just days before his dive, there was an incident where Titan was being pulled onto the ramp. And for some reason, the crane operator let it go a little prematurely and kind of abruptly, and it caused Titan to slam down onto the deck.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Well, we attempted to launch the Titan and we experienced some issues. And when we they were pulling it back up onto the deck, I believe what happened was that we, you know, it came up and the crane was pulling it up the ramp. And it got to a point where it was seesawing, you know, there's the the flat plane of the deck, and then there's the angled plane of the ramp, which is fairly steep, probably a little too steep. But again, this was all experimental and we were feeling our way through it. So it was teetering back and forth. And then the crane operator let it go a little bit too abruptly. So I would and it slammed down on the deck with quite a bit of force. Now, the complicating factor

• 23:21Speaker 02

  was that a decision had been made to only install four of the 18 bolts in the 3,500 pound titanium dome. And that decision was made. I was there when the decision was made. I was not, I did not articulate any opinions one way or the other. But the the thought was that once the ship went or the Titan went to depth, that the pressure, the pressure would be so intense that you didn't need any bolts, you wouldn't be able to pry it off with a with a jack. So They were trying to minimize the time it took to get the mission specialist out of the Titan after the mission ended. And that decision was made.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  The problem was no one anticipated that the platform was going to be dropped with such force. And you're also in the North Atlantic, so the ship's going up and down. There's a lot of factors that combine together. The force of the platform hitting the deck of the, was that the Horizon Arctic that you're? Yeah. The Horizon Arctic, it just basically sheared off several bolts and they shot off like bullets. And the, as you know, the titanium dome fell off.

• 24:37Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, it just, overall, there's just so many points of failure on this thing. It's a death trap, literally.

• 24:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, and I mean, this is the titanium dome, which is the end cap. There's two on either end of the carbon fiber hull. And he said it dropped and hit the deck and then bolts were like shooting out like bullets. Okay, which, just as somebody who's standing there watching this, I'm concerned because, yeah, obviously it shouldn't, it probably hit the deck pretty hard. What kind of pressures are you dealing with under the water, though? Like, if it can't hold up to being dropped on the deck, do you really want it under 6,000 PSI of pressure? And you think it's going to hold up there? And he also said something like, I forget, and I wonder if I'm gonna, you know, have him say this in the clip later, but he said that they only used a small percentage of

• 25:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  the bolts, and this was intended to make it easier to get the people on the Titan out once they brought it back up to the surface, so they didn't have as many bolts to undo, which is insane.

• 25:36Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, it's all about convenience, the economics of it, the efficiency.

• 25:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  It doesn't feel like they were thinking about safety at all.

• 25:43Derrick Levasseur?

  Safety's at the bottom of the list.

• 25:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  I don't even know if it's on the list at this point, like...

• 25:47Derrick Levasseur?

  I mean, it's on paper on the list, but it doesn't seem like they're putting a lot of thought into it.

• 25:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, so let's take a quick break, and we're gonna come back, because Fred Hagan has more to say, and he actually gets on the Titan, even after this, which, it's kind of like, I don't know if you have anybody to blame but yourself at that point.

• 26:03Derrick Levasseur?

  I don't know, I don't know. Even me, the adventurer, I'm not doing that.

• 26:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, exactly. Let's take a quick break, we'll be right back.

• 26:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay, we're back. So Fred Hagen said after this little, you know, little big issue with the bolts coming out and the end caps just falling off, Titan was not supposed to take any mission specialists down for its next dive because of that incident. So they weren't bringing any paying customers down. But Hagen was like, well, I told Stockton Rush, like, we had agreed I was going to be on the first dive, and so I wanted to be there. So he insisted, and Stockton Rush said, okay, which I don't understand. But if you saw the waiver, like, they had them sign this waiver, and did you see something about it when you were watching the documentary, like how stupid that waiver was? It was basically like, if you die or have bodily harm, or like, anything could happen, this is very experimental, like, you

• 26:57Stephanie Harlowe?

  could die, and basically, you're signing that waiver before you've been setting foot on the ship. So Stockton Rush was probably like, whatever, if this guy, like, if there's an accident and it doesn't go well, at least we can't, you know, Ocean Gate can't be sued because he signed that waiver. But Fred Hagen insisted to be on. So they go down on July 3rd, Titan's going to attempt to dive again, and onboard Titan was Fred Hagen, Stockton Rush, P H Nargalay, and Scott Griffith, who was the pilot. Now, you may recognize the name P H Nargalay as one of the passengers who was on Titan when it imploded in 2023. He was a legendary deep sea explorer, a former French Navy commander who was known as Mr. Titanic due to his decades of experience diving to the wreck. Nargalay had completed

• 27:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  about 37 expeditions to the site, more than anyone else in the world, and with his unparalleled track record, he was highly sought after by Ocean Gate to legitimize their Titan missions. He joined as a mission specialist and a technical advisor, so his public presence at the company lended tremendous credibility to Ocean Gate. A few days after the titanium cap popped off, Stockton Rush put the submersible back in the water, loaded it up with people, and it went as you would expect.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  We realized very early on that we had weighted the Titan

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Slightly off balance. And the original intent was to go down nose forward and, and kind of go down on a, on a long gradual angle. And we had unfortunately weighted at ass heavy, so it, it began spiraling. So instead of going down on a gradient, we were going through a very, it wasn't a violent spiral, it was a very slow spiral through the ocean. And we descended through, you know, the shades of light until we entered a world of utter darkness, a complete absence of light, as you're aware. So we basically free fell, I believe it was for two, two and a half hours. I don't recall the exact timeline, but it was a few hours.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  And because we were spiraling slowly through the void, we were off course and we were caught in the currents and we were in this kind of unusual attitude. So when we were approaching the bottom of the, the seabed, we received a text message. And, and again, communications were very erratic. We would lose comms, which was not unusual because of the different, you know, climatic zones and, and the ocean, it was hard to get signals, but it would come in and out. But we received a text message that we were off course. So at that juncture, we, we were all discussing all these things together jointly.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  We decided to throw the thrusters on and correct our course and make our way towards what we believed was the bow. Now you have to remember that, you know, the, the Titan only has a sonar that can go out about a hundred yards. So when you're at the bottom, you're basically operating in the blind until you actually get within a hundred yards of anything. So you, you could actually go down and completely miss the Titanic because it's such a vast area. So, but we were given a heading by the mothership and we then threw on the port thruster. And when we fired the starboard thruster, it, it failed to activate. And, and as everyone in this board, I'm sure is well aware, electronics, saltwater and

• 30:20Speaker 02

  extremely intense pressure are, they're just not always, well, they're not compatible at all. So the starboard thruster failed and we realized that all we could do was spin around in circles, like making right turns.

• 30:34Derrick Levasseur?

  Doesn't that point, this almost seem like a movie? Like a, like a fictional movie where it's like the Bad News Bears, but submarine version.

• 30:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, he's like, we just, you know, we're kind of like driving in circles. We were going on a descent with no control and you know, it is what it is.

• 30:51Derrick Levasseur?

  No, I mean, listen, there's going to be problems, trials and tribulations when you're doing something that's never been done before. I'm not sitting here saying, oh, shame on you. You should get it all right the first try, but it just seems like they went into these trials or these experiments ill-prepared.

• 31:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  These were not trials at this point. They were running paying missions.

• 31:09Derrick Levasseur?

  That's what I'm saying. They got other people down there with them.

• 31:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Derrick Levasseur?

  And, and I mean, they're having them sign a waiver. So I'm sure they're gonna, they would say, well, listen, these people knew the risk, but that's your, it's your company. You have to understand, it doesn't matter what waiver they sign. If you bring a bunch of people down on that, on that submersible and they die, your business is done. It's ruined.

• 31:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  Stockton Rush also knew he would die. So he's on, he's on the Titan every time. So he's not around to answer for it.

• 31:33Derrick Levasseur?

  Right. That, that is true. And I also think, and it's horrible that this was the case, they were running out of funds and in order to continue to, to provide the financial stability to continue to do this project, they needed people to pay. And so they were putting people on the sub before they should be on there and they probably knew it, but they had to because they needed them to pay for those tickets. And by getting those people on the sub, they could take the money they were paying and put it towards improving, or I say, you know, I say that very lightly, improving the sub to make it better, but they needed the money to do it. They were, they were running out of cash. And the only way to get it fast was to promise the dream of seeing the Titanic and people were willing to pay a lot of money for that.

• 32:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. And, and we know that they were running out of money. I think

• 32:20Derrick Levasseur?

  That's it.

• 32:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  Several Ocean Gate employees came forward and said, we didn't have any money.

• 32:24Derrick Levasseur?

  I think that's what this really came down to.

• 32:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. And sometimes they would get like cash infusions and they'd be like, we don't even know where, where it's coming from, you know, we, we didn't have money.

• 32:33Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm sure Stockton would have preferred to go down and buy B on his own because it was really his mission. He wanted to do it. He clearly had no issue with being on it. But I think it was just a necessity in order to, to provide the funding needed to get the equipment and the material, to make the sub adequate for this trip. He needed to sell the tickets early and this isn't a movie.

• 32:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  And he did.

• 32:53Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, this wasn't a movie that you're just gonna show them an early cut of it without having all the kinks worked out. You know, there's life and death on the line here. So that little piece of paper with the waiver. If you know going into it, the dangers, and I said at the end of last episode, without a doubt to me, this is, this is criminal negligence for sure. And you're putting people at risk, their lives at risk knowingly. Putting their lives at risk without disclosing all the in and outs of where the company is right now and what the level of expectations are on the sub that they've built. It hasn't passed any tests. You did not disclose that to these people and therefore you are criminally liable.

• 33:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. And in fact, there's evidence that messaging that they were sending out to these people was like really positive, like rah rah, like yeah, we're doing great. It's passed these pressure tests. Everything's great. Like, and technically they weren't lying, but they weren't talking about all the other issues. They weren't being a hundred percent transparent.

• 33:46Derrick Levasseur?

  Are you a roller coaster person?

• 33:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, I used to be, not anymore.

• 33:50Derrick Levasseur?

  So well, bad example, but we're gonna go with it anyways. All right. I, we mean, you go to Six Flags. Okay? There's a roller coaster there. It looks scary, but millions of people have been on it. It's been around for years and I convince you somehow to get on the roller coaster with me. Okay, we go on, no problems. If there was a sign now, and you, and you sign the waiver to get on the roller coaster, whatever, but if there was a sign outside this roller coaster that said, hey, just so you know, this is a new roller coaster. It's gonna be the best roller coaster ever. However, we have to tell you, we've been running tests on it and we haven't had a successful test yet. Do you still want to give it a shot?

• 34:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, dude, I'm not doing anything I have to sign a waiver to do.

• 34:27Derrick Levasseur?

  It's like, I, and I know that's like a real basic version, but that's essentially what's happening here. But they're not disclosing that information.

• 34:35Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, I'm not signing a waiver where it says you could possibly die. Have fun on this ride. No, I'm not doing anything like that. Yeah, I don't even care if this roller coaster has completed 5,000 successful rides. You look at those roller coasters and you just see all the bolts and you're like, one of these, you know, it's final destination. That's what happened to us. It's final destination. One of these bolts could just go shoot now and all of a sudden, you're on a free ride to your death and I'm all set with it. I don't do it anymore. There's no reason. I don't think it's normal that humans were never intended to be put in these seats strapped in. By the way, those things that strap you in. You know what they're like controlled by machines and and some like 18 year old kid who's got a summer job. What if he accidentally like falls and hits the thing when you're on

• 35:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  there and you're all of a sudden boop, your thing's just gone. The whole time I'm thinking this is not even fun for me. The whole time I'm thinking this. So, no.

• 35:26Derrick Levasseur?

  We need a video like a 360 camera. We need to put it on the front of a roller coaster. You and I need to go on one.

• 35:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  I don't know if I if I could.

• 35:34Derrick Levasseur?

  That would be a great video. I think everyone in the comments right now should pause and say, listen, we'd really appreciate it, Stephanie, if you do this for us.

• 35:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  I mean, you've seen me on a plane, so.

• 35:43Derrick Levasseur?

  It's terrifying. I don't want to sit next to you on a plane, that's for sure.

• 35:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, the people that sit next to me don't want to sit next to me either.

• 35:48Derrick Levasseur?

  I was like, who is that woman clawing onto the little window? Like, what is she doing? Why is she on her? Why is her feet on the seat itself?

• 35:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  It was me.

• 35:55Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, that's Stephanie.

• 35:56Stephanie Harlowe?

  I'm curled up in a ball of terror.

• 35:58Derrick Levasseur?

  And this is while we're on the ground. I haven't even sat yet.

• 36:00Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, that's the worst part, the anticipation of the takeoff.

• 36:03Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe you should stay off the roller coaster. You didn't have been the person that gets me thrown out of the cart.

• 36:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, knowing my luck, how my life goes, I'd be the one that fell to my death from the roller coaster and I'd be a cautionary tale for everybody else who would still ignore it.

• 36:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay.

• 36:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, Fred Hagen said, at this point, they realized the dive wasn't going to work. It wasn't going to be successful. So they had to go back up and they started dropping weights so they could go back up. But there was issues with this as well. And I think this was the one where Stockton Rush was like, we have to like shake the submersible to make the weights come off. So everybody had to like run from one side to the other. I don't know. He did this on several missions where the weights were having issues coming off. And he was like, all right, guys, like, let's get in here. We're going to stand up and we're going to all run from one side to the other to make Titan sort of, you know, what is it? Rock? So that the weights fall off? I swear to God, this is crazy.

• 36:55Derrick Levasseur?

  Jiggle them loose. Exactly what you want to hear.

• 36:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yep, exactly. So they slowly started to ascend for the next three hours. And when they were back at the surface, Titan had to be towed to St. John's for repairs. Mission two began on July 7, and onboard the Titan for this mission was Alan Estrada, best known for his YouTube channel, which documents his global travel adventures. So he goes on adventures, he documents them. And Estrada would go down in Titan, not only in 2021, but again in 2022, or he would attempt to go down. He would join the the mission in 2021 and 2022. And Estrada documented his experiences with Titan in a four part series available on YouTube. I highly suggest you watch them. Really good. There are subtitles for those of you who don't speak Spanish.

• 37:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  But in part one, which covers his July 2021 mission, he explains that the first mission was not successful because Ocean Gate had faced technical challenges, but the company was confident that this mission, his mission, mission two, would be successful. And Estrada films Stockton Rush walking him through the workings of Titan and how the mission would go. And then they sat down to chat, at which point Stockton said this.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  I'd like to be remembered as an innovator. Um, I think it was General MacArthur said, you're remembered for the rules you break. And, you know, I've broken some rules to make this. I think I've broken them with, with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fiber and titanium, there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did. It's picking the rules that you break that are the ones that will add value to others and add value to society. And that really, to me, is about innovation. It's taking, it's not invention. You know, innovation is when you take an invention and you make it, you know, accepted broadly.

• 38:35Stephanie Harlowe?

  You want to be remembered for the rules you break, dude. Success. You are a success in being remembered for the rules you break. He seems like a little boy. He's all excited. He's all wide eyed and, and passionate. And he seems like, he, he does. He sounds like a little boy talking about this, this new bug he found. That's just the most exciting thing that's ever happened.

• 38:53Derrick Levasseur?

  I want to clear the deck quick because what Stockton did on every level was wrong. And he, he's a major reason, if not the, the sole reason. No, he's not the sole reason, but a major reason why he and all those passengers are dead. He, he ignored the signs. He intimidated and threatened people who pushed back against him. But do I think he was doing this knowing he was going to kill himself and those people? Like, I don't think that was his intent. I do believe at his core, for whatever it's worth to any of you guys listening or watching, he felt like he was an innovator, like he said in his own words, where he had to push the envelope to expand human capabilities. And he knew that because it had never been done before, there was going to be pushback.

• 39:37Derrick Levasseur?

  And he was going to have to be forceful and continue to move forward and quote unquote, break some rules in order to prove what we were actually capable of doing. So I think in his mind, the intent, if this, I hope I'm saying this right.

• 39:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, I think I understand what you're saying.

• 39:51Derrick Levasseur?

  The intent was good. But the execution was horrible.

• 39:56Stephanie Harlowe?

  See, I don't necessarily agree with you that the intent was good.

• 39:59Derrick Levasseur?

  But what was it? Let's talk about that. What was his overall intent?

• 40:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think his overall intent was to create a legacy and he didn't really care what that was in. Right? Like, I think he came from a very high-profile, successful family, whose ancestors were all successful. I mean, signers of the Declaration of the Independence, like, um, you've got building is named after you in San Francisco. You're growing up in the city where you have big shoes to fill. And most likely, throughout his life and his childhood, this is what was communicated to him by his parents. Like, you're gonna be something, you know, and, and not in a, an abusive way, but in like, you're going to be someone, you're gonna be something, of course you are, you're, you're a rush, of course you are.

• 40:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  So I think Stockton grew up feeling that he had a lot of pressure to, to succeed. And not just succeed in life, but to succeed in the way where like, I will be remembered. My name will be synonymous with innovation. And it didn't really matter, because remember, he wanted to be an astronaut. And he wanted to do space. And then he was like, and he wanted to be a pilot. And then they were like, yeah, your, your vision's not good enough for that. And he's like, well, I guess I'll go in the sea. It was kind of like, okay, well pivot, pivot, pivot. Like, what, what can I do now that I can make my name in? And I think that that was his main issue. He would talk about this all the time. Oh, I want to be like Elon Musk, and I want to be like, um, Richard Branson, and all these, and I want my name to be among them. It didn't really seem like he cared how his name was remembered, as long as it was.

• 41:24Derrick Levasseur?

  He was just trying to find an avenue. Okay, so I don't think we're completely on a different page, because I agree with you. I think there was a lot of selfish reasons behind what he was doing. He wanted, he wanted the glory. He wanted the fame. He wanted, like you said, he wanted a legacy. And he wanted to be remembered. And he was gonna do it in any way he could. And when the astronaut angle didn't work, he decided to go into the sea. I guess what I was trying to say is, yes, it was for, it wasn't for the betterment of, of our society for, for our species, right? It was for the betterment of Stockton Rush. That I agree with, but I do think overall, he was trying to do something that could potentially benefit our species as a whole, long-term. So I, I, I-

• 42:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  Wait, I, I think, I think if he had been successful-

• 42:10Derrick Levasseur?

  If he was successful, correct.

• 42:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  Then what he had discovered and what he had achieved would have been beneficial, but I don't think that was his main goal. No.

• 42:17Derrick Levasseur?

  I don't disagree with you. I don't disagree with you. I can't, I can't defend him. I don't disagree with you and-

• 42:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  Cause if it was, he would have focused mainly on the research aspect of it, which is what he was claiming, that, that's what Ocean Gate got all these patents on, right? That's what they claimed they were interested in doing, but all of a sudden, we, we find out like, no, it was, you wanted to get people to, to Titanic. If that was not your main goal, you wouldn't have rushed it. You would have listened to your engineers. You would have listened to Lockridge. You would have listened to all these experts saying, hey, slow your roll, take it down a notch. Like you can do this, but take some more time to make sure it's good.

• 42:48Derrick Levasseur?

  No, you're not, there's nothing I can push back on. You're not wrong. I mean, it's just such a tough balance because maybe I'm going to get shit for this, but I, I don't necessarily think like Stockton was an evil person.

• 43:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  I think he was a mentally ill person.

• 43:03Derrick Levasseur?

  See, I don't, I don't agree with that. I don't agree with that. Like we were, we were watching the episode last week and we were, you were playing a clip and there was a, um, a, a photo of him associated with it. It was like a cartoon drawing and it was like him as a clown face and stuff and I, I don't know how you feel about it. I'm not trying to have you subscribe to whatever I'm believing, but I, I, I think that's wrong. I mean, I think it's disrespectful considering what has happened for me personally, and I know, I know I'm going to be in the minority.

• 43:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  For four other people losing their lives. I don't think, I don't think so.

• 43:32Derrick Levasseur?

  I see, and that's, that's the point, right? Like we're-

• 43:34Stephanie Harlowe?

  I, I like, to me, I don't know. Like I think men have this- This need, this passion to be like, you know, on the cutting edge and like our founding fathers and like all those people, you know, the men who made America, like, these are people that are remembered far past their lifetimes.

• 43:51Derrick Levasseur?

  But I think about, I think about Amelia Earhart too, and I mean, she like pushing the envelope, like what she did was crazy.

• 43:57Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, you're right. It's not a man thing. It's, it's just a personality thing.

• 44:00Derrick Levasseur?

  It's a, like, like, I am so inspired by those people because I don't have the courage to do it. Like, they did things that everyone told them, you're crazy for doing this. You're probably not going to make it. And some of them, like Amelia, they didn't. But they were willing to take that risk.

• 44:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, but Amelia Earhart wasn't like, oh, load up my plane with paying passengers. Let's go and so I can make millions of dollars.

• 44:21Derrick Levasseur?

  That's why this is a slippery slope because on one hand, I completely agree with you. Like, he, he did it all the wrong way. He was putting people in danger in order to pay for what he was trying to build. Wrong, in every sense of the word. It's wrong. But when I watch videos like that, and I could be, he could be fooling me, just like he fooled a lot of people initially. I believe, when I look in his eyes, that there was something there where like you had described, like a little boy, like he was, he was truly passionate about this and he really wanted to get it done. Now, his intent behind it, like you said, it might have had nothing to do with anybody else visiting the Titanic. He just wanted his name attached to that.

• 45:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  He just wanted to be known as the person who did.

• 45:04Derrick Levasseur?

  Who did it.

• 45:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  What no one else could.

• 45:05Derrick Levasseur?

  In spite of what everyone thought was possible. Yeah, it's such a slippery slope.

• 45:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  When I see him talking like that, yeah, I do see this like wide-eyed like little boy, but what I also know is I've seen that same look on people who are talking about conspiracy theories that they have spent their lives looking into and they are so passionate about it and they just get this like bright-eyed sort of glassy look like they're on drugs, honestly. And because it's, it's bringing them so much dopamine, just this idea. And so like when I say those people are not nefarious, like these conspiracy theories that are. So far possible from being true and they're crazy.

• 45:41Derrick Levasseur?

  But they truly believe it.

• 45:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  Like the lizard people thing, you know, like, oh, we're, you know, are they truly believe it?

• 45:47Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, the lizard people I'm fine with, but if you start telling me that the earth is not flat.

• 45:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  Or the, or the flat earthers. Yeah, and they will talk about this like they know what the hell they're talking about. And if you, as the layman, didn't know anything about how the earth actually looked, you might be like, holy shit, the earth is flat and you would believe it. It's dangerous. It's dangerous when people like this.

• 46:06Derrick Levasseur?

  I think that's a great way to put it. They believe what they're saying.

• 46:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  That's why I think he's mentally ill because it's like, you knew.

• 46:12Derrick Levasseur?

  I think that's an extreme for you to diagnose him from.

• 46:14Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, because you said he was gonna be on every single time the Titan went down. He was gonna be there. He didn't think he was gonna die. How could you not, when you had every piece of information to show you that Submersible was not safe for repeated dives? How would you go in there every time not being afraid every single time that something was gonna go wrong? So you put yourself in that position. There's something wrong with you. You don't have the self-preservation that humans are built with to protect themselves.

• 46:44Derrick Levasseur?

  I mean, I would argue that astronauts going up into a rocket ship into space.

• 46:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  Way safer, way more, I mean, we've been doing that since the 60s, man.

• 46:53Derrick Levasseur?

  No, none of that's safe. That, that's a different type of breed. I mean, I think there's a big jump from ignorance and lack of self-awareness and mental illness. Like, he had a lot of character flaws that contributed to the decisions he was making, but I wouldn't go to the level of mental illness.

• 47:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  I just, I feel like when a human being loses the desire to keep themselves alive and they do things consistently in the face of that, like, there's something going on there that needs to be looked into. That's all. Like, when you continue to put yourself in a position where you're like, I can die today and you happily do it with a smile on your face and you continue coming back for more, that's, that's an issue.

• 47:34Derrick Levasseur?

  Wouldn't you, couldn't you make the same argument for? I'm not trying to equate myself, this is gonna sound horrible, but like, I used to go in on search warrants and I would always put, put myself in the front of the line, knowing that I could be shot in the face.

• 47:47Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, I kinda would. But I mean, somebody's gotta do that, but like, you guys are thrill seekers.

• 47:52Derrick Levasseur?

  But it wasn't about thrill, it was about doing what I needed to do to get the job done.

• 47:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  I don't know, I think that's different. That's like, you're trained for these scenarios. You go through extensive training, so you feel confident in yourself, just like astronauts do. They go through extensive training, like, hey, if this happens, these are all the possible scenarios that could happen, and you know how to react in every single one. Did Stockton rush? No, he couldn't even get them out of the Andrea Doria, and David Lockridge had to. So you can't even be confident in yourself that if shit goes down, you'll be okay to handle it and get out of there. He couldn't have that confidence in himself, because he didn't have that knowledge, he didn't have that experience.

• 48:25Derrick Levasseur?

  So for the record, everyone, Stephanie is saying, "I'm mentally ill."

• 48:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, like I said, you have training. How long did you go into training for this stuff, right? Where it's like, basically like a military, military is the same, you know, you put yourself in, in the military wartime, but you're trained. Could you, could you die? Yes, but you're, I don't know, I don't know.

• 48:44Derrick Levasseur?

  No, listen, I think you are confusion and our inability to articulate exactly what we're trying to say is exactly what everyone's feeling, because...

• 48:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  It feels so weird, yeah.

• 48:54Derrick Levasseur?

  There's some parts of it where you can understand what was attempting to be done, especially when you start to see the other crew members of Ocean Gate, and you see their, their eyes light up when they talk about how excited they were to be part of this, and the anticipation that they could be part of something this monumental, they are genuinely excited about it.

• 49:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, but they all eventually realize, holy shit, and they backed off, but he didn't.

• 49:16Derrick Levasseur?

  I get it, I get it. And so, my point being, there was something good happening here, and Stockton was the biggest problem with the whole organization. This could have been something that was monumental to, to our human species, and we could have had something really, that would have been in the history books. And instead, it's a tragedy and I don't know if anyone will ever attempt it again because of it. Because now there's this black eye on it.

• 49:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, I do have thoughts on that. I just think if you look at Stockton Rush, he was a cult leader. And when you look at-

• 49:44Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh my god, now he's a cult leader?

• 49:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, cuz you look at the people who were like excited-

• 49:47Derrick Levasseur?

  I think you're gonna get shit for this episode.

• 49:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, if you look at the people who are excited, the Ocean Gate employees, like yeah, of course, when cults start, everybody goes in and they're like, "Ah, this is awesome." But then after they're there for a while, they're like, "Oh, this is not awesome." And they try to leave and they try to get out, whereas the cult leader is the only one who always stays like firm because he has something to gain and he has something to lose. And it's like, if anybody's been in a super corporatized environment and you go in for these work meetings, they get you all pumped up and they're like, "We're gonna sell and we're gonna do this and you're gonna get trips to the Bahamas and Cadillacs." And everybody's like, "Yes." And then three months into the work, they're like, "This sucks. Nobody's getting Cadillacs. What the hell's going on?" And they're disenchanted by the whole setup. It's pyramid schemes, you know, it's like that stuff, like MLMs. They get you all excited and then before you know it,

• 50:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  you have three pounds of hideous leggings you have to sell because you bought them all. And then you don't want to be a part of it anymore. But the leaders, the people at the top are always the ones who are like keeping that status quo. So yeah, he was a cult leader. People were excited because they didn't know the logistics, but when they started to see the truth, they were like, "We gotta get out of this." And Stockton Rush, from day one to the last day, never wavered. As a cult leader wouldn't.

• 50:58Derrick Levasseur?

  Mike, I mean, listen, I'll let all you guys tell me what you think. Maybe I'm wrong on all this. I just don't see it as that, and especially the fact that as a cult leader, usually people will follow you to their death. And as we can see, there are many people-

• 51:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, I mean, some of them did, right?

• 51:15Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, those were clients who were unaware of what was going on. If you notice, there wasn't many, I think there wasn't many Ocean Gate employees volunteering to go down with Stockton Rush.

• 51:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  Not all of them were unaware. They were just very confident in him. They were very confident in him.

• 51:30Derrick Levasseur?

  They believed in him, yeah, I don't know.

• 51:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  Because he was smart, right? Like we were talking about last episode. He was smart. He knows what he's talking about. He's built planes, you know, but... Okay, so we're gonna go back to Mission 2, but first, let's take a quick break.

• 51:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  So we're back to Mission 2 with Alan Estrada. And on day six of the mission, Estrada talks about how Ocean Gate was going to be performing a test dive with crew members only, no mission specialists. So this is after they have, obviously, you know, some issues and things are going great. So he said, quote, "Being a test immersion, it is expected to last less than the immersions with mission specialists like me. They'll stay at the bottom a couple hours instead of the four hours planned for regular immersions. This is why the platform launch has been set for 10:30 a.m. while it would usually take place at 8 a.m." End quote. And this is why I heavily suggest checking out Alan Estrada's series because you can see everything that's happening. He's filming everything. And Estrada said that there was some issues that came up.

• 52:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  This delayed the launch an hour while they did repairs and the crew went into Titan around 11:30 a.m. And then an electrical issue happened at 1,700 meters, which forced the submersible to return back to the surface. So then Titan went back down again with only crew members. And according to Ocean Gate's blog, this was the dive, the first dive, which would reach the Titanic. The blog claims this happened on July 9th, and on July 13th, Ocean Gate put out a press release showing pictures they'd taken while at the shipwreck, the quote unquote shipwreck. However, the pictures only showed the debris field around the ship. None of the photos show the Titanic itself. Titan on this dive actually couldn't find the ship, but this did not stop Ocean Gate from claiming they had successfully made it to the Titanic.

• 53:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  Once again, very creative, questionable, not super honest marketing. So during that dive, the ballast tank stopped working. And this was at a critical time crunch period because Titan was going to have to start their ascent within 30 minutes or they'd, I don't know if it was they would run out of battery or they wouldn't get back up to the support ship before the sun went down, which was kind of important because they needed to be able to see to get the Titan back on the ship. Either way, they had to start ascending within that 30 minutes. So going up, as we already heard from Fred Hagen, takes about three hours. And Estrada said at this point, he's on the ship and they're all like watching and they're in the, the control room and everyone's watching to see what's happening.

• 53:57Stephanie Harlowe?

  And the mission room was evacuated at this point because they didn't want anybody who wasn't like, you know, needed to be in the room.

• 54:05Derrick Levasseur?

  Part of the main.

• 54:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. So after trying to fix this issue for two hours, Titan began to ascend using the propellers, but this was way too slow. Titan wouldn't reach the surface until 1 a.m. and they were expected back at like 5 or 6 p.m. And once again, we have an issue of do we have enough oxygen? Do we have enough battery? Do we have enough life support to get us to 1 a.m.? Probably not. So the pilot of the Titan then decided to initiate emergency protocol and abandon the ballast tank system altogether, which allowed Titan to ascend a little bit faster, getting to the surface around 8 p.m., but still after dark. But when they were there at the surface, more chaos ensued when the crew realized that without the ballast tanks, the submersible was too floaty and not steady enough to lock onto

• 54:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  the platform, the platform that's in the water. So they ended up having to send in divers who anchored weights to Titan so it would be easier to secure it at the platform. The issues continued. Like, this is why you have to watch it because there was just issue after issue and he's watching and recording these people trying to get the Titan back on the support ship and they just can't. So there kept being issues. They couldn't get it. They couldn't get the sub on the platform. They had issues getting the platform on the ship. It seemed like a nerve-wracking experience. They didn't have Titan back on the support ship until 4 a.m. But because Estrada was not able to experience an actual dive, Stockton Rush invited him back the following year for another mission.

• 55:29Stephanie Harlowe?

  But before he left Mission 2 in 2021, Rush also took Estrada and other mission specialists into Titan for a shallow water test dive and Rush actually allowed Estrada to drive the submersible. And some people are like, why did he do that? Well, Alan Estrada has several million subscribers. Stockton Rush is looking for advertising for his submersible. So yeah, he's gonna do stupid things like let somebody who is not trained at all to pilot a submersible, he's gonna let this guy do it.

• 55:58Derrick Levasseur?

  Hey, I mean, he wouldn't be driving it any worse than Stockton Rush based on... The previous, previous missions.

• 56:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  Why don't you watch the clip first and then say that?

• 56:05Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay.

• 56:06Speaker 04

  Well, I need to go a little bit up before... No, we're pretty, we're, you might have to go up a little bit. You're okay. You're at a pretty good height, but just be, you know, don't get much lower than this. So just inch forward.

• 56:16Speaker 05

  Al and ba amaneja. And we're done. El submarino.

• 56:21Speaker 04

  I'm trying to go up. Are you pulling back on it? You're a dead man. You gotta push the dead man all the time. Oh. All the time, all the time. You gotta hold it. It does nothing. Now pull up on that left stick.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  Oh shit. Uh, that's bias.

• 56:40Speaker 04

  I'll go a little higher next time. I ran into a rock. Sorry for that. Higher.

• 56:46Speaker 05

  You're gonna get a ticket.

• 56:47Derrick Levasseur?

  I can't, man. This is just too much.

• 56:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  They're treating it like a toy, you know, not something that goes to 4,000 meters under the ocean.

• 56:56Derrick Levasseur?

  Just hit a rock, just hit a sharp rock that just scraped along the side of this carbon fiber.

• 57:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  Carbon fiber? Oh my god.

• 57:04Derrick Levasseur?

  I don't know, man.

• 57:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  It's painful. Don't worry. It's, it's got that coating on it.

• 57:08Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, the coating will protect it.

• 57:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. What is that called?

• 57:10Derrick Levasseur?

  I mean, one thing that we haven't mentioned with Stockton.

• 57:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  Is it called gorilla coating?

• 57:13Derrick Levasseur?

  Whatever it was. No, the, um, the rhino.

• 57:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  The rhino, the rhino coating. Yeah, don't worry. It's fine.

• 57:18Derrick Levasseur?

  The one, the one thing we haven't really mentioned with Stockton Rusha, or at least I haven't, and we've said a lot of things. Mentally ill, cult leader. I think stupidity would be a more simple way to describe it. Like, this is pure stupidity.

• 57:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, like no impulse control, kind of.

• 57:32Derrick Levasseur?

  Right. Like, Stockton's smart enough to know, I mean, as you said a couple of minutes ago, he's built airplanes. He knows, he knows a little bit of something, right? He's not a complete moron, but this is pure stupidity. To have an untrained person with no experience piloting a test submarine.

• 57:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  He's a YouTuber. It's like letting me drive your, your, your submersible. Who would do that? No one in their right mind.

• 57:54Derrick Levasseur?

  I wouldn't let you drive my car.

• 57:56Stephanie Harlowe?

  Exactly. That's what I'm saying.

• 58:01Derrick Levasseur?

  Derek, can it, no.

• 58:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  You don't know what this guy, like, you don't know if he's right. You don't know anything about him. And I think that when it happened, Stockton Rush inside was like, oh shit, this is bad. But he was like,

• 58:12Derrick Levasseur?

  Can't say it.

• 58:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  You just hit a rock. It's fine. Don't worry.

• 58:14Derrick Levasseur?

  Huge gash on the side of the hole.

• 58:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  He didn't want to like reveal how like.

• 58:18Derrick Levasseur?

  Cost a quarter of a million dollars to fix, but no big deal.

• 58:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. And I, I do think it's weird that this was the mission Ocean Gate touted actually reaching the Titanic, mission two. And they knew they had a very popular vlogger on the mission who's documenting everything and would eventually reveal that Titan had only gotten to the debris field. And had been unable to locate the actual ship because in the footage. Um, Estrada's got his cameras and he's in, you know, the control room and, and there's a woman. She's like, we made it. We like, like a cult member kind of. She's like, we finally made it to the Titanic. And she's all like, her eyes are like glistening with tears. She's like, we did it. You know, you didn't. You couldn't find the ship. You got to the debris field, which is quite large. If you look into it.

• 59:00Stephanie Harlowe?

  And, uh, and Alan Estrada's like, they made it to the debris field. And then he's like posting pictures and there's no pictures of Titanic. It's like, you didn't make it to the Titanic, but. Stockton Rush is like, we made it, guys. We got to the Titanic. And everybody on the, the service is like, we did it. We did it. Our precious leader, he came through. He said the date of the apocalypse was today and it is, it is. So yeah. Really weird.

• 59:22Derrick Levasseur?

  That video is really, uh, a good video though, because you can see even more from inside the sub. And we've had numerous videos and photos throughout these episodes, but you can see that titanium hole, like, like that, the end cap, if you describe, well, you have the carbon fiber hole.

• 59:35Stephanie Harlowe?

  The carbon fiber titanium end cap.

• 59:37Derrick Levasseur?

  The titanium like end cap. And then you have that little acrylic viewing hole.

• 59:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  It's not even that big.

• 59:42Derrick Levasseur?

  It's not that big. And that's why he wanted that kind of bubble look to make it a little bit wider and to make it appear bigger. So. Yeah, no, it, it makes more sense when you see it and you can see even just me watching it, all the points where these different materials are meeting up and melding together. Where those are potential failure points.

• 59:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, they, they were. It's not even potential failure points. They were failure points.

• 1:00:03Derrick Levasseur?

  Right. They're all fail, failure points where you have the titanium up against the carbon fiber, the acrylic up against the titanium. They have to be adhered together somehow. It's never going to be one solid piece. And that's always in a point where something can go wrong. And at that depth, you're dead. You're dead if something doesn't work right, and that's why we're talking about this case.

• 1:00:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  So Mission 3 began on July 16th, 2021, just six days after Mission 2 had concluded. Once again, there were issues. This dive never reached the Titanic. Mechanical problems resulted in Titan settling on the ocean floor for almost five hours due to the weights, once again, not coming off. I also found Ocean Gate's log of dives through the Coast Guard investigation. They have a bunch of documents, so I found their log of dives. And the drop weight motor failure incident is noted, as well as another incident two days before the 17th, where it says, "Incident electrical cable fire in forward dome from dehumidifier." So they had an actual electrical fire onboard the Titan two days before they put it back in the water.

• 1:01:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  This is just bananas to me. And then the results were like, no issue, no damage from the fire. But it's like, did you fix the problem that caused the fire? Because there's no sign of that in the logs. So Mission 4 began on July 22nd, and three dives were attempted over a course of eight days. And this was the mission that, I'm probably gonna say this wrong, Scott Peresinski, who was a NASA astronaut, would be on. And Scott actually had a lot of involvement with Ocean Gate. I found an article where he eventually, I think in 2022, became a part of their Board of Directors. He was very vocal in talking about Ocean Gate and the Titan and talking about his mission. He was very supportive of it.

• 1:01:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  So, looking at Ocean Gate's own dive log, there were multiple issues during this mission. On this dive, both emergency ballast systems failed. One thruster stopped working. The sub had no power for two hours. The sonar navigation systems went dark, and smoke started coming out of the emergency system when they tried to use it. At the same time, their backup drop weight didn't work, and the sub was basically blind and half paralyzed in pitch black, miles beneath the surface. It's like your only escape route caught on fire. Your steering wheel locked up, your headlights went out, all while being trapped inside a metal can at the bottom of the ocean. Titan did, however, reach the bow of the Titanic on July 28th. But during this dive, when the weights wouldn't come off and they couldn't ascend,

• 1:02:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  Stockton once again encouraged his passengers to start rocking back and forth from one side of the submersible to the other to make the submersible like twist far enough on its sides so that the weights would fall off, which is exactly what they had to do. And after 30 minutes of doing this, the weights did fall off. There was one more mission in 2021, Mission 5, and various issues continued as Titan continued to bring down paying civilian passengers. Overall, in 2021, Ocean Gate conducted five missions. Out of these five missions, only two dives reached the Titanic bow and one reached the stern. Four of the dives were canceled before getting to the bottom of the ocean, so they went in and then they had to abort and come back up. Two dives reached the Titanic debris field. So when you say like, oh, they had five missions and they

• 1:03:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  they reached the Titanic in two dives, remember again, during each mission, there's multiple dives happening, multiple dives. So that's not a great track record. I'm sorry, it's just not.

• 1:03:28Derrick Levasseur?

  It's not. And to me, I just, I, all I see when you're, when you're reading that is dollar signs. They're getting as many people down there as possible because every time they send someone down, that's another quarter milli in their bank account to, to get, to keep this mission going. It's not about the experience, it's not about giving these clients or these mission specialists an opportunity of a lifetime. It's about, hey, these are all walking ATMs. Let's send as many down as we can because we need money. That's truly what I believe. That's my personal opinion. This, this, this sub was not ready for this yet. And yet they, it was the quickest way to get money. And that's why they did it.

• 1:04:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  Because they needed the, the influx.

• 1:04:08Derrick Levasseur?

  They were gonna, they were gonna go under if they didn't have the money.

• 1:04:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  They had all this money going out and not really any coming in.

• 1:04:13Derrick Levasseur?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:04:14Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, I agree. So he was preemptively selling these tickets, even though it wasn't ready.

• 1:04:18Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm happy that all of these people survived because I'm sure now.

• 1:04:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  I mean, they all didn't, right?

• 1:04:24Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, not the last, the last mission didn't. And I was, when I was watching the documentary, there was, and I apologize, I don't know his name, but it was another YouTuber who was on the mission right before, maybe you're gonna get into this tonight, but he was on the mission right before this and he starts talking about it. And he just breaks down. He just breaks down in tears because he's like, I feel so guilty because it could have been me and I'm relieved it's not, but then I'm also thinking about the people that were down there.

• 1:04:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, but it's only gonna, it would have only ever been the five people. So whether it happened on Mission 2 or Mission 5, obviously Titan's not gonna be in operation after that. It just was a Russian roulette of which five of these people.

• 1:05:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  You know, or four, because it's Stockton Rush, and then four other people. Which four of these people are going to come to their deaths in this, in this death trap, basically? It could have been any of those missions.

• 1:05:13Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. If I had to guess, Stockton Rush is probably telling people, hey, see, look, told you it was gonna work.

• 1:05:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yep.

• 1:05:18Derrick Levasseur?

  We're fine.

• 1:05:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  He was. He was very proud of himself. So, the missions continued in 2022, and according to Ocean Gate's log, so did all the problems with Titan. But, um, like, I could talk for hours about going through their log and all the issues, but that would be boring, and we get the point. So that brings us to 2023, where blog and social media posts coming out of Ocean Gate would lead anyone to believe that their missions had been nothing but a glowing success. In January of that year, an article in The Guardian reported that Ocean Gate had taken 60 paying customers down to the Titanic, and Ocean Gate posted pictures of their mission specialists on the deck of the support ship, smiling, happy, toasting with champagne, just on a high from having done something that very few human

• 1:06:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  people have done. Now, it's important to know that after completing its 2022 Titanic missions, Titan was taken ashore, and it was taken ashore to, you know, go through the winter and be in storage until they resumed dives the, the following spring and summer. And this is very important, and anybody who watched the, the Titan documentary knows exactly what I'm about to say. So I want to talk about what exactly, how exactly Ocean Gate stored Titan during their, their period when they were not having it in the water. But first, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.

• 1:06:40Stephanie Harlowe?

  After completing its 2022 missions, Titan was taken ashore and stored on a dockside parking lot, uncovered without protection from the elements from July 26, 2022 until February 6, 2023. Now, this, too, I think anybody would sound...

• 1:07:00Stephanie Harlowe?

  Just ludicrous, ludicrous. Leaving an experimental high-pressure submersible like Titan, exposed to harsh marine and weather conditions for so long, was essentially skipping an entire suite of post-dive inspections and maintenance. The fluctuation from warm summer conditions to near freezing temperatures could have and most likely did degrade the composite bonds, creating thermal stress and accelerated micro-cracking in the carbon fiber. Additionally, since the submersible was uncovered, so keep in mind, they didn't put a tarp on it, they didn't put it in a building, it's sitting next to like saltwater in direct sunlight, and we know that sunlight can damage epoxy resins and adhesives,

• 1:07:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  which would weaken the joint interfaces and compromise the structural integrity of the bond lines. And once again, it's sitting by the sea, so as it's sitting there uncovered by the sea, Titan was drenched in salt spray and humidity, which you know what that does? It corrodes metal components, it compromises seals, it degrades protective coatings, like that half-assed Rhino coating they did. And although he was kept unprotected for over six months, there's no indication that Titan received regular inspections, cleaning, or structural checks during this time. They just put it there, they set it and forget it, and they came back in, you know, the following summer, and they were like, alright, let's, let's bring this, this baby in the water. So, that's absolutely insane to me. I don't, I don't understand,

• 1:08:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  why would they not have gotten like a bunker, or a garage, or even a tarp? Like something, something.

• 1:08:33Derrick Levasseur?

  If anything, like an insulated, like something you could plug in, to actually keep it at a certain temperature, or like a, like a heated blanket, but like an industrial-style one, to kind of keep it regulated, the temperature of the whole, the materials.

• 1:08:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  Put it inside.

• 1:08:46Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that would be the smartest thing.

• 1:08:49Stephanie Harlowe?

  You don't even leave boats like that, we winterize boats.

• 1:08:52Derrick Levasseur?

  Rent a, rent a U-Haul space or something, just throw it inside, yeah.

• 1:08:56Stephanie Harlowe?

  It's something, something. If they just put it in a parking lot, and they were like, see you later Titan, see you next year, have a good winter, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, weird. So when Ocean Gate launched Titan for its descent into the Atlantic on the morning of June 18th, 2023, five men were seated inside its carbon fiber hull. Each came from vastly different worlds, but they shared a common dream to witness with their own eyes the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. And that morning, they began a 12,500-foot descent into darkness, and they would never return. At the helm was Stockton Rush, who we already know maybe too much about. Hamish Harding was a British billionaire, aviator, and extreme adventurer.

• 1:09:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  If there was a record to break or a frontier to push, Harding was already on it. He'd flown to space aboard Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin rocket. He dove to Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench and held multiple Guinness World Records. He saw the Titanic expedition as the next great challenge, an ultimate feat to add to his list of extraordinary achievements. And he posted enthusiastically on social media in the days leading up to the dive, calling it "one of the most difficult missions in the world." For Harding, this was more edge of the earth to conquer. Now, P H Nargyle was also there, and like I said, he wasn't just an expert on the Titanic. He was part of its modern story. A former French Navy commander and pioneer in deep sea exploration, Nargyle had visited

• 1:10:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  the Titanic wreck more than 35 times. He'd led artifact recoveries, filmed documentaries, and worked for years as director of underwater research for RMS Titanic. And so to many, he was called Mr. Titanic. That's how he was known. His name and his life was synonymous with the Titanic. But as the years passed, it wasn't just expertise, it became personal. His family has since said that he was obsessed with the Titanic. It haunted and fascinated him. Even as concerns mounted over Titan's construction, its unorthodox materials, its lack of certification, Nargyle likely saw a chance to return to a site that had gripped his soul for decades. He may have known the risks, but those who loved him believed that his lifelong bond

• 1:11:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  with the Titanic, a shipwreck frozen in time tragedy, outweighed his doubts. For PH, it wasn't just a dive. It was a return to a place he never truly left in his mind and in his heart. The final two passengers were Shazada Dawood, a Pakistani-born British businessman and philanthropist, and his 19-year-old son, Suliman. Shazada was a scion of one of Pakistan's wealthiest families and vice-chairman of the Dawood Hercules Corporation. He had a passion for science, sustainability, and adventure, but it turned out to be his son, Suliman, who was excited to see the Titanic. And by all accounts, Suliman had an insatiable curiosity about the world and wanted to share this once-in-a-lifetime journey with his father.

• 1:11:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now tragically, reports later emerged that Suliman may have been hesitant. Some said he was anxious about the dive, but he joined and he went anyways to please his dad over Father's Day weekend, which is really, really sad.

• 1:12:01Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that is, that's terrible. And that's the tough thing here. You don't want anybody to die. You know, with these stories, it sucks. But when you have a kid who's got their whole life ahead of them, to have it cut short like that, it just makes it that much harder to process because it's a young person who had apprehensions about going in the first place and...

• 1:12:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, he wanted to, and then it seems like kind of on the cusp of it, he was like, "I'm kind of nervous."

• 1:12:27Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I can understand why.

• 1:12:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  Totally. They boarded Titan together, unaware of the fate that awaited them. At 5:15 a.m., the Polar Prince arrived at the Titanic wreck site. By 8:30 a.m., the five passengers and Titan were aboard the launch platform. Rush sealed the forward dome and prepared for the dive, which would have been Dive 88. At 8:55 a.m., the platform was flooded, gently lowering Titan into the ocean. By 9:18 a.m., Titan had disengaged from the platform and began its descent. From this moment forward, text updates and acoustic pings marked the submersible's progress. OceanGate used a numeric system to quantify the overall risk of each dive.

• 1:13:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  And this is something else that I had not known until doing more research. And it's, it just blows my mind. So, the risk index aggregates dozens of variables: weather, sea state, equipment health, crew readiness into a single number, which would be the number of how high the risk was. And while Ocean Gate didn't publicly publish their exact scoring thresholds, the Coast Guard's investigation timeline confirmed that the final risk index for Dive 88 was calculated at 35. And a risk index of 35 was the highest score ever recorded for any dive before Dive 88. That placed this mission at the top of the danger scale flagged

• 1:13:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  by Ocean Gate's own risk model, meaning Ocean Gate considered this dive to be at the limit of acceptable risk with multiple warning flags.

• 1:14:01Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that's the problem here, right? Because accidents can happen. You have airplanes where all the precautions are taken, everything is measured, pilots do their best, and then while up in the air, there's a bird strike, or there's something that's, you just can't plan for, and there's a tragedy. All the warning signs were here, and they were ignored. Which is why, to me, when people talk about, "Oh, why are you covering this? This isn't a crime." No, yes, it is. It is absolutely a crime. They had the information. They should have not done this dive, or many of the other dives. And they had complete disregard for human life. Not only themselves, but the passengers that they put aboard this thing. And to have this information in your hands before diving and still say, "No, we're going

• 1:14:46Derrick Levasseur?

  forward." And if I had to guess, it was Stockton Rush who made that final decision, that is without a doubt criminal negligence, and would apply to manslaughter, in my opinion. But I wouldn't even say it's my opinion. It's right there, black and white. Those are the laws. So I take back my opinion. That is what it is. And as I said in the last episode, if he were still alive, and that submarine had did what it did without him on it, he'd be on trial right now, and probably in prison.

• 1:15:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, also keep in mind, this was the first dive of the year. After months of Titan being stored out in the open, and the weather conditions on the day of the dive were described as being challenging but acceptable, and there was still obvious equipment concerns. That's where all of these, this is where the dive score of 35 came in, the highest, you know, risk score. They're taking all of this into account and they're still saying, you know, go on, have fun.

• 1:15:40Derrick Levasseur?

  Good news is here, the risk index works because it was right.

• 1:15:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, it was right, exactly.

• 1:15:44Derrick Levasseur?

  So this is a good system for people to use going forward because clearly it's accurate.

• 1:15:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  It's Ocean Gate's risk model. It's their own one that they developed, so.

• 1:15:51Derrick Levasseur?

  Hey, at least we got something good out of Ocean Gate.

• 1:15:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, I mean, it was probably a higher risk score if it had been somebody else's unbiased

• 1:15:57Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  calculations, you know. So to stay connected to the support ship, the Polar Prince, Titan didn't use live voice communication. Instead, it relied on text messages sent via acoustic modem, which is kind of an underwater ping system that converts short bursts of data into sound waves that travel through water. And that's actually really cool. I looked into that. Really cool. And these messages were then received by the Polar Prince and displayed on a console in the operations room. Ocean Gate had also equipped Titan with an acoustic transponder system that sent location pings every five seconds back to the Polar Prince, their surface ship. And this was part of what's called an ultra-short baseline tracking system, a common method used in underwater navigation. These pings would give the support ship team information about Titan's location, their depth, the

• 1:16:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  general direction and distance from the ship, etc. At 9:18 a.m., four minutes after Titan had disengaged from the platform, the Polar Prince sent out a comms check. And at the time, what they sent out the comms check, the depth of Titan was approximately only 165 meters. Forty-four seconds after this, Titan sent a comms check back to the Polar Prince. At 9:54 a.m., when Titan was at about 1,500 meters, the Polar Prince sent out several messages asking the submersible if they could see the support ship on their evil Logix display. And when I say several, I mean seven, with no response from Titan.

• 1:17:20Derrick Levasseur?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:17:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  And, and you heard, I think it was Fred Hagan, who was like, yeah, the communication with the, the surface ship was always spotty. It was never like...

• 1:17:28Derrick Levasseur?

  And that to me is unacceptable too. That's why I'm saying unbelievable. It should, the comm system has to be perfect. There has to be constant communication. There can never be blackouts.

• 1:17:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  There always were, always were with their comm system, always.

• 1:17:40Derrick Levasseur?

  I mean, we're able to communicate with spaceships, you know, that are much further away. I would think that they could have developed a comm system or purchased a comm system that would have been adequate for this mission. And again, it's cutting corners. Playstation remote controls, are we serious?

• 1:17:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  Not even the best one. Remember that guy?

• 1:17:56Derrick Levasseur?

  Not even the best one. No, no, it's just crazy. It's a suicide mission.

• 1:18:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, I remember Ocean Gate tweeting something out, I think on that dive where they were like, thanks to Starlink for helping us keep our comms. So they, they seem to be using, I don't, I don't understand how, I don't understand why the comms weren't better. I don't, maybe it was something to do with being underwater. I don't know.

• 1:18:19Derrick Levasseur?

  To me with all of this, if they're going to 4,000 meters, then the hole should be certified for 8,000. If the comm system is going down to 4,000 meters deep, it should be accessible from 8,000. Right? That should be the minimum. Like the fact that they were just spotty, that means that we were basically stretching the capabilities of this equipment and these communications. That's wrong. We shouldn't be at the peak of what they're capable of doing. We should be just right in the middle at worst. And so everything, there's a common theme there where they're like, what do we need to spend to get just enough? And that's wrong because things can go wrong and you should have the equipment on board that if something does go wrong, you're capable of handling that situation and not having a catastrophe like this.

• 1:19:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  So I actually looked this up because you're right. We can communicate with, you know, spaceships in, in space, but so I looked it up. And yes, in June of 2023, Ocean Gate did tweet out, quote, despite being in the middle of the North Atlantic, we have the internet connection. We need to make our Titanic dive operations a success, end quote. So Starlink confirmed that Ocean Gate's support ship was relying on satellite internet.

• 1:19:31Derrick Levasseur?

  That makes sense.

• 1:19:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  But they couldn't use Starlink for deep water communication. So multiple sources have clarified that sat signals can't penetrate seawater.

• 1:19:40Derrick Levasseur?

  Hundred percent. That seems like common sense.

• 1:19:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, Starlink could have been used, but it looks like that's why there's always an issue with with communications. When you're when you're in the water, you know.

• 1:19:50Derrick Levasseur?

  Does does every, do you think it's common knowledge what what Starlink is at this point?

• 1:19:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  I don't know. Is it? I always see their satellites falling.

• 1:19:57Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm so apprehensive of like saying certain things now because it's like mansplainer.

• 1:20:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh, I don't know. You want to explain it?

• 1:20:03Derrick Levasseur?

  I'll give you the first, I'll give you just a sentence. They're using satellites. The satellites are in space. They're bouncing off the satellites in space down to the little panels or the bigger panels that you have. And that's why you're getting that service throughout the world and they're able to position satellites in different parts of the world to give areas of the world that wouldn't have internet access to it. But when you think about it, even your phones now, the newer iPhones have the ability to you to be a sat phone. But you have to have a direct line of sight. That's why when you're testing the SOS feature on your phone, they say, hey, go outside and make sure you have a direct line of sight to the sky. So common sense, if you're underwater, you're not going to have a direct line to the to space and therefore it wouldn't work.

• 1:20:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  The only reason I know what Starlink.

• 1:20:44Derrick Levasseur?

  Mansplainer.

• 1:20:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  The only reason I know what Starlink is is because one, I was on a long drive one night, and I was not the driver, I was the passenger and I was looking outside and I saw what looked like, I guess, like a rope of stars falling, falling. And I was like, what the hell is that? And I said to everybody in the car, I'm like, oh, my God, do you see this? Do you see this? And they're like, what is it? So I looked it up and the Starlink uses kind of lines of satellites. And when they're falling, they're like being set on fire as they enter the atmosphere, which is making them glow and light up and you can see them. It's very cool to see.

• 1:21:17Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I would love to see that one day. But yeah, they can position them.

• 1:21:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  If you, you, if just look outside sometime when you're driving and I see them all the time now when I'm on long drive.

• 1:21:26Derrick Levasseur?

  I think they did it over Ukraine where they moved them into position over Ukraine when they didn't have internet service, where they can position them and they can bounce the signal from the main satellite off these, you know, other satellites to give a particular signal down to that area where it's positioned over. And yeah, it's a pretty cool system and it takes you off the grid and people are using it throughout the world now. And like I just mentioned, Ukraine, when they were having their defense systems and needed communications. Starlink provided that to them, so they were able to still keep that stuff operational. So it's a, it's a great thing to have, but yeah, it's not going to work very well underwater.

• 1:21:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. So basically the Polar Prince was using Starlink so that they can run their systems.

• 1:22:04Derrick Levasseur?

  So in the middle of the ocean, they still got internet.

• 1:22:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  Exactly. But Titan could not. So they had to use this acoustic modem underwater ping system. And obviously, as we know, super unreliable. It, it doesn't always work. There's moments where you're out of communication for hours. It's not the, not a good thing when this, this ship is not only your life support, your backup, but also supposed to guide you to the Titanic. So.

• 1:22:28Derrick Levasseur?

  I, I wonder why, and this might be a stupid question that someone who's an expert in this area could answer, but I don't know why there wasn't a tethered system. I know it's deep and that would be a lot of cable, but some type of fiber optic system where your communications and also the ability to control the sub from, from the mothership would be capable, right? Where you could send that tether down and let's say communication down below goes out and they're unable to use the joystick. Well, an operator back on the mothership could take control and get you back to the surface. So there just seems like there could have been some more precautions taken where there'd be a secondary pilot on the mothership who could take over the ship. If, let's say the pilot down below becomes incapacitated or gets sick or something, you gotta have that backup. Now, I'm answering my own question

• 1:23:11Derrick Levasseur?

  because even if it was possible, even if an expert came on right now and said, "Yeah, Derek, we could do that. We do do that." The answer here would be they didn't want to spend the money.

• 1:23:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  So there are more advanced acoustic systems, but Titan didn't use them. And here's why. There was no fiber optic tether. Titan was untethered.

• 1:23:31Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm wrong. Boom.

• 1:23:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  Meaning it wasn't physically connected to the ship. Most deep sea ROVs, they, that's called remotely operated vehicles, use tethers for communication and control. But Rush believed in untethered freedom for his passengers while eliminating the option, which, that eliminated the option for stable, high bandwidth data.

• 1:23:49Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, okay. So I'm not wrong in the sense it was possible. He just chose not to use it.

• 1:23:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  You know why else he chose not to use it? Cause he's full of shit.

• 1:23:57Derrick Levasseur?

  He didn't want to pay for it.

• 1:23:57Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh, I, I want untethered freedom. He didn't want to pay for it. Fiber optics. Fiber optic or advanced sonar arrays are expensive, bulky, and require more engineering, more infrastructure. Ocean Gate was cutting costs and streamlining systems.

• 1:24:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  And, and as we know, they did that at their, the expense of reliability and safety. So he could have.

• 1:24:17Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, you think about all the robots that we do see that go down the Titanic, the unmanned ones, they're all tethered.

• 1:24:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, of course, they are all tethered. That's, that's what, they used one of those to find the wreckage and to recover the bodies.

• 1:24:28Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, that, that's, that's the standard, it seems like to me. And again, it's probably very expensive and that's why he didn't want to do it. But fiber optics with this, you know, you're traveling the speed of light. So that communication would be awesome. You'd be able to hear everything. There'd be a, a direct, solid connection to the submersible where you would never lose the ability to communicate. And like I said, backup, if Stockton or the other pilot goes down, essentially the person at the mothership can operate the submersible like they operate those robots. But they took away that feature, which is, to me, should have been the standard.

• 1:25:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, it would cost too much.

• 1:25:03Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, it's called, exactly.

• 1:25:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  It would cost too much.

• 1:25:06Derrick Levasseur?

  They needed to send a couple more mission specialists down before they could add the tether. It's just ridiculous. We're not joking here. We're not trying to make light of it. It's ridiculous.

• 1:25:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  Untethered freedom for my passengers. I believe.

• 1:25:16Derrick Levasseur?

  They don't see the tether above them.

• 1:25:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  Trust me, the passengers don't feel safer without the tether.

• 1:25:21Derrick Levasseur?

  You wouldn't see the frigging tether from inside that little window.

• 1:25:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, but he wanted them to really feel like they were down there on their own, like real explorers, you know? All right, let's take our last break and we'll be right back.

• 1:25:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  Like I said, Polar Prince is sending out messages, um, asking, can you see us? Can you see your support ship on, on your Evillogix display? They sent seven messages, no response from Titan. The Polar Prince is getting stressed, okay? Now Titan did eventually send a message to the Polar Prince at 10:09 a.m. after the support ship had asked for a comms check. When they didn't get a response to their seven messages, the submersible simply sent back a K, which is shorthand for comms check. So Polar Prince would send out a K, Titan would reply back K, and this is just. Them making sure they're still in communication. The Polar Prints again asked Titan if they could see them on their display. They said this another three times before sending a message that said, "I need better

• 1:26:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  comms from you," to which Titan replied, "Yes," at 10:11 a.m., when the sub was at about 2,100 meters. Titan then said, quote, "Lost system and chat settings." This is PH, end quote, PH Nargile, he's talking for Stockton. So PH confirmed to the Polar Prints that they could see the support ship on their screen and sent a message at 10:15 a.m. that said, "All good here." At 10:27, Titan told the Polar Prints that they were southeast of the bow and wanted to know if the support ship was in the same location. The Polar Prints replied back, quote, "Polar Prints not at bow, making our way there," end quote. At 10:30 a.m., the Polar Prints sent a message to Titan saying, quote, "Your position jumps significantly each ping," end quote.

• 1:27:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  Which of course, because the actual communication, the connection between these two vessels is spotty at best. It's, yeah, of course, it's going to look like they're jumping significantly. At 10:38 a.m., Polar Prints told Titan to remember to write down the location and time when they deployed the Ni Skin bottle, which is a capped tube that is used to capture water samples. And Titan replied back that they would not deploy the N Skin bottles because it hadn't been properly cleaned and it could contaminate the sample. Now, this pissed me off because remember, Ocean Gate had claimed that Titan was being used for research purposes to scan the shipwreck in order to track its deterioration and to collect samples in deep ocean water.

• 1:27:45Stephanie Harlowe?

  In fact, in May of 2022, the company had sent a letter to the District Court about their plans for scientific missions to the Titanic. And the letter said, quote, "Every effort will be made to avoid contact with the wreck itself and no artifacts or scientific samples will be collected from the wreck itself. However, this year, the expedition does plan to take free-floating water samples throughout the water column and on the bottom as part of Ocean Gate's scientific efforts to collect environmental DNA with its partners at the University of North Carolina and the University of Edinburgh," end quote. The previous June, Ocean Gate had a patent issued to them for systems and methods for launching and recovering objects in aquatic environments. In May of 2021, the legal and operational consultant to Ocean Gate, David Concanon,

• 1:28:30Stephanie Harlowe?

  Had sent a letter to the district court, which oversees legal issues involving the Titanic. And he said, quote, "The exploration team will conduct annual surveys of the wreck in collaboration with scientific and imaging experts from multiple organizations as part of an ongoing long-term study to document the current condition of the Titanic Maritime Heritage Site," end quote. Ocean Gate liked to call their Titanic dives "scientific missions." But if you peel back the layers, it starts to look more like a carefully crafted illusion. They weren't just exploring the deep. They were navigating around regulations. By labeling their paying passengers "mission specialists" instead of tourists, Ocean Gate sidestepped safety rules that apply to commercial submersibles.

• 1:29:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  They went through the motions of science, filing patents, talking about water samples, even claiming environmental research. But in reality, a lot of it was smoke and mirrors. On the Titan's final dive, the crew didn't even deploy the end skin bottles because it hadn't been properly cleaned. That's not science. That's a photo op dressed in a lab coat. Basically, they're pretending to do these scientific missions, but it wasn't even important enough for them to clean and put the the the collection bottles for the water back on Titan. They didn't even have them. The the Polar Prince is like, hey, don't forget to let us know, because the Polar Prince is up there thinking this is still what they're doing. Don't forget to mark down when you do it, so we have the scientific data that we have to collect. And they're like, hey, you know what?

• 1:29:54Stephanie Harlowe?

  We're not going to do that, because they didn't even get cleaned properly. We're just going to go see the Titanic, okay? Absolutely ridiculous. And the real engine powering Ocean Gate was money. Stockton Rush charged a quarter million dollars per seat. He marketed the experience as an elite adventure, travel, and handpicked thrill seekers and influencers to build hype. He knew there was a market for the ultra-rich who wanted bragging rights, that they reached 12,000 feet below the ocean. And the scientific veneer, that was a convenient shield, one that made the whole thing look noble, even as internal warnings piled up and safety corners were cut. This was not exploration. It was ambition unchecked. And as we know, it would cost five people their lives.

• 1:30:36Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I think it's a great way to describe it. Ambition unchecked. You know, I don't mind pushing the envelope, but we gotta be safe in doing it.

• 1:30:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  At 10:47 a.m., when Titan was at 3,356 meters, it sent its last message to the Polar Prince, and that message was, "Dropped two weights." Six seconds later, Titan was pinged for the final time, and at 10:49 a.m., the Polar Prince sent a message to Titan that they'd lost tracking. There was no response from Titan, and there would continue to be no response as the Polar Prince sent messages every few minutes. The crew of the Polar Prince had expected Titan to ascend and reach the surface by 3 p.m. When Titan missed its scheduled check-in, Ocean Gate followed its emergency protocols. The Polar Prince launched a grid search of the surface, sweeping back and forth across the area where Titan should have popped up, but the ocean gave them nothing: no debris,

• 1:31:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  no beacons, no trace, just silence, and a growing sense that something had gone terribly wrong. When Titan failed to resurface as scheduled, when the Polar Prince had already spent hours scanning the area, they hadn't found anything by 8 p.m. Ocean Gate's surface crew called in the Coast Guard, which, and what followed, was an international race against time. There was aircraft filling the skies, ships patrolling the waves, listening for anything. We saw this all unfold on the news. The news was covering it. Every minute, you could see, at least on several news outlets, just footage of these...

• 1:32:01Derrick Levasseur?

  We were all talking about it, even on social media. Everyone was fascinated by it. As soon as the news broke, everyone was trying to figure out where they were.

• 1:32:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  And that oxygen countdown clock...

• 1:32:11Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep, on all the news networks, yeah.

• 1:32:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  Was really stressful. Once again, I can't imagine being a family member, a loved one of these five passengers, and turning on the news to see that timer just clicking down.

• 1:32:24Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep, thinking about your loved ones being stuck at the bottom, somewhere waiting for help.

• 1:32:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  And I do want to point out that while that was happening, and on social media, people were just being awful, horrible. Like, "Oh, a bunch of millionaires got themselves killed. Like, so what? What are we supposed to wait?" And it's like, listen, when it comes to Stockton Rush, I'm with you, but the others, I mean, they just fell for his bullshit marketing, like everyone else did. Yeah. We got Boeing and NASA all kind of believing Stockton Rush. You got really, you know, scientific people who followed him and were kind of on his side for a long time, and you expect these... You know, regular people who, yeah, they have money, but outside of that, they're not experts or scientists in any way. You expect them to know better. So that was very disappointing

• 1:33:08Stephanie Harlowe?

  to see how people were reacting on social media. But obviously, we know that they didn't find anything. Days passed, hope faded. And then, early on June 22, a lone ROV pierced the deep darkness and spotted the shattered remains of Titan on the seafloor. In that moment, tragedy was confirmed, an implosion, five lives lost. And the deepest question now left for those above. When Titan was discovered on the seabed in late June, search crews recovered portions of the wreckage, as well as presumed human remains embedded within the debris field. These fragments, which were most likely bits of bone, teeth, or tissue, were carefully retrieved by ROVs and safely transported ashore. At the Armed

• 1:33:50Stephanie Harlowe?

  Forces DNA Identification Laboratory at Dover and Delaware, which is part of the DOD Medical Examiner System, forensic experts successfully extracted DNA from these remains. And using methods designed to identify individuals from severely degraded materials, such as mitochondrial DNA testing, the lab was able to positively match profiles to all five occupants of Titan. It was reported that inside the sleeve of Stockton Rush's suit, they found his ink pen, which was still intact, his business cards, and stickers for the Titanic, which is a little eerie to think about that. Like, his pen was still intact? You just, you don't

• 1:34:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  understand what happened here. So what did happen to the Titan at the bottom of the ocean? That's the question everyone was asking. Once the wreckage was found, scattered like broken bones across the seabed, just 1,600 feet from the Titanic's bow. For a submersible designed to withstand crushing depths, the sudden and catastrophic failure raised serious concerns. Experts and investigators believe Titan suffered a violent implosion, a structural collapse that would have occurred in milliseconds, giving those inside no time to react, no time to suffer, just instantaneous death. They said the hull would have collapsed inward at supersonic speed. Temperatures inside the vessel could have briefly spiked to be hotter than the surface of the sun from the compression. And the entire submersible was likely destroyed in milliseconds, long before the human nervous system could register what was happening.

• 1:35:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  The US Coast Guard, after months of investigation and recovery efforts, concluded that the pressure hull had failed catastrophically. Though the full forensic analysis is still ongoing, and that just came out, I think, this month or last month, I think in June, the Coast Guard was like, hey, we're finishing up our report, you know, we'll release it when it's done, but it could still be months. We don't know when it's going to come out. So the full forensic analysis is still ongoing. Several theories have emerged, most centered on the design and construction flaws that plagued Titan from the beginning. One theory points to the carbon fiber hull, a material never before used in a submersible at this depth. Unlike steel or titanium, carbon fiber is difficult to inspect and prone to delamination and micro fractures.

• 1:36:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  And these are, once again, tiny weaknesses that can and will worsen with repeated dives. Stockton Rush had insisted on using this material for its strength-to-weight ratio, but many experts warned it wasn't appropriate for the extreme pressures of the deep ocean. There was also concerns about the 21-inch acrylic viewport, which was only certified to depths of about 1,300 meters, far more shallow than the Titanic's resting place at 3,800 meters. And Titan's acoustic monitoring system, meant to detect stress in the hull in real time, could only warn of a failure. It couldn't prevent one. In fact, some experts argue that, once noises were detected, it may have already been too late. In the end, the Coast Guard seems to believe that Titan imploded on its way down, likely before it ever reached the Titanic.

• 1:36:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  Wreckage was found in multiple large pieces, including both titanium-end domes, and the debris field was consistent with a sudden, total structural collapse. So while there may never be a way to know the exact second it happened, or if the people on board were getting, you know, any indications...

• 1:37:02Derrick Levasseur?

  Indications or something was about that, yeah.

• 1:37:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  All evidence does point to a fatal flaw, ignored warnings, unproven materials, and a rush to reach the bottom of the ocean that ultimately led to a tragedy 12,500 feet below the surface. And that's where we are.

• 1:37:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah. And that's where it's going to be. It's, we talked about it, ignorance, some incompetence, a culture where people were just following the leader because they wanted to get a paycheck, and they didn't want to go against the guy because they knew if they did. At minimum, they would get fired. And this was just a guy who did it all wrong. He, there was multiple examples of what not to do when you're trying to do something for the first time. And we're going to have some footage up here, probably as Stephanie was saying that last part where you're going to see the wreckage itself. So you can get that visual if you're watching on YouTube, but I also want to go back to something I said in episode one or episode two, where I talked about my experiences as a diver and what we would use our hand clapping, right? That's how we would communicate underwater because sound travels.

• 1:38:00Derrick Levasseur?

  And I wanted to play something for you guys now, if you haven't heard it yet, because something that was heard very early on was by the NOAA. They had a moored passive acoustic recorder. That was about 900 miles away from where the Titan was last seen or pinged. And they recorded an acoustic signature that they now believe was the implosion. So I want to play that for you now. We'll be right back.

• 1:38:38Derrick Levasseur?

  So there you have it, and it's terrible to hear that because that is what it is. There's no doubt about it. And the only thing you can take from it is the hope that it was instantaneous. Like you said, they basically, before they even realized what, what was happening, it was already over. And I hope that when the investigation is complete for all of this, we, as a society, learn from it. I don't want it to impede our, our thirst to explore and to evolve and to get to higher limits as far as the human capability and what we're able to accomplish on this little round globe that we live on, right? Like, I want to continue to push those boundaries, but I hope the lesson here is that we do it in a safe way.

• 1:39:23Derrick Levasseur?

  You have to go in increments. It's not going to happen overnight. We're not going to go from point A to point Z and not have tragedy like this. We have to take baby steps. And it can't be dependent on financial status. There has to be a way to do it where we know going into it that it's going to be expensive. There's going to be risks, but they should be done, especially with now with AI and robots, they should be done with using those devices. No human lives should be risked at any point during the experimentation of pushing the boundaries of what we're capable of. And I hope that at the end of all of this, that's what's taken out of it. There's got to be people that are held accountable for sure from a legal perspective, Ocean Gate, anybody else who's still here.

• 1:40:05Derrick Levasseur?

  These families deserve justice. This should not have happened. It was clearly preventable. And like I've said multiple times, yes, Stockton Rush is not here. He cannot be held criminally liable, but if there's anybody else who is pulling those levers or pushing those buttons, who knew what Stockton was doing and, and basically chose to do nothing about it. Basically went with the complacency defense. They should be held accountable and it's not going to bring their loved ones back, but those family members deserve answers and until they have them, we're going to keep pushing for it.

• 1:40:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. And you know, I, I think both Derek and I have expressed the fact that Tony, Tony Neeson was probably, you know, not as innocent, I guess, as he has claimed to be in all the interviews and documentaries he's done. I think that he should definitely be looked into more. He was the head of engineering.

• 1:40:58Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, he was, he was his right hand man. At least that's what appeared. The only thing that saved him or might save him, we'll see, is that he was fired and he's harping on that now. But how much did he let go? How much did he look away from and say, ah, you know what? I don't want to be, I don't want to be fired.

• 1:41:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  We heard him do it and just, you know, we don't know how much he did it, but we heard him do it just when in that meeting with David Lockridge, right? We heard him have Stockton's back and be like, ah, David Lockridge, shush your mouth. We know what we're doing. Leave it to the experts. He shouldn't have done that and that does not look good for him. So

• 1:41:33Derrick Levasseur?

  Nope. He's gonna have some answers and I hope the investigation is thorough and it gets to the bottom of it and the people that need to be held responsible are and that these families who've lost loved ones are able to get as many questions answered as possible and that going forward with all the crimes we talk about, right? We're not gonna change it. We want resolution, but I've said it a million times. I look at it as a history book. We as humans do a lot of stupid shit and the important thing is to take it, learn from it and never do it again. That's the case here. We have to take this tragedy and we can't let it be in vain. We have to see what went wrong here, which is pretty obvious and apply it to future missions that may go down a similar path. Checks and balances. I hope that there's improvement in the future.

• 1:42:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. And honestly, my final thoughts are, um, I don't think that Stockton Rush cared what he was doing to this, this industry that he claimed to be so protective over. I don't think he cared because if something happened in the Titan, if it imploded like it did, he was gonna be on board. And he wasn't, like I said, he wasn't gonna be there to face the, the people who wanted him to be held accountable. And I don't think he cared. Like you said, oh, I don't think people will go down in submersibles ever again. Yeah, he completely destroyed that potential innovation that could have been done safely, that could have been done correctly. Because nobody will ever want to attempt it again. Who would? And I don't think he cared that that whole industry that he claimed to be so important

• 1:43:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  would be unsuccessful after he died and that's a merciful because he wouldn't be around to be responsible for it and to be the person who was on the cutting edge of it and the person responsible for bringing deep sea exploration to the mainstream. If he couldn't be around to do it, I don't care. I don't think he cared if the whole industry went under and nobody ever attempted this again. And that is the sad part. He really only cared about what he wanted and how it made him look and what he would achieve as far as praise and accolades and publicity from it. He knew that if there was an incident with that submersible and everybody died, which if there was an incident, everybody was going to die. There's no backups. There's no safe safeguards under the sea. He knew that that would destroy the entire submersible industry. That's what those people

• 1:43:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  who were writing him letters were saying, hey, you're gonna screw this up for everyone. He didn't care because if he couldn't be the one to do it, he didn't want anybody to do it. And that sucks.

• 1:43:56Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's a tragedy. We're thinking of everyone involved. Let us know what you guys think as far as not only Stockton, but overall, do we try this again? Does another company come in and learn from the mistakes of Ocean Gate and try to explore and get to these depths? Because it's not only about the Titanic, it's about what's down there that could help us as a species, right? There's cures and all these other things. So it is important.

• 1:44:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  But ROVs can do that, right?

• 1:44:23Derrick Levasseur?

  What?

• 1:44:24Stephanie Harlowe?

  Can't ROVs do that?

• 1:44:25Derrick Levasseur?

  I think so. I think I don't think you need to send a human down there. I don't think you do. And I don't think that it should be a tourist attraction, not right now. I mean, 100 years from now, when you and I are long and gone, if this is like second nature, like riding a bike, sure, no problem.

• 1:44:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  The Titanic won't be there by that time.

• 1:44:40Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, the Titanic, but there may be other things that we have to go explore. But yeah, we're not there. We're not even close. And if, if we don't take anything else from this, it's that. We're not, we're not ready for it. And we should definitely not be doing human trials. Absolutely not. But we want to hear your thoughts. What do you think about it? You and I talked about Stockton a lot. I'm interested to hear what you guys think. What's your perception of Stockton Rush after this three-part series, after the documentary on Netflix, after everything you've seen online? Where do you fall on it? It doesn't have to be a clear, direct answer. It may be a combination of things, or you may have a feeling on it and you're gonna let us know. But way down in the comments on YouTube, leave a review, leave your comments there. We've been reading everything. We'd really like to hear your thoughts. Any final words, Stephanie? I know you already said your final

• 1:45:25Derrick Levasseur?

  thoughts about the episode.

• 1:45:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  No, let's wrap it up and look forward to the next series. And just like Derek said, our thoughts are with the families. Anything that Stockton Rush did did not reflect on his wife or his children. This is not their doing.

• 1:45:37Derrick Levasseur?

  Good thing to bring up. Good point.

• 1:45:38Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, it's just they lost somebody too. And yeah, we just, our thoughts are with them. And you know, anybody who Who went on that submersible and saw what happened, they are probably struggling with some survivor's guilt and some trauma as well. So our thoughts and our hearts go out to all of them. And that's it. We're moving on.

• 1:45:59Derrick Levasseur?

  Guys, we appreciate you being with us. Until next time, everyone stay safe out there. We'll see you soon.

• 1:46:04Stephanie Harlowe?

  Bye.