Pod Insights American Scandal Titan Sub Disaster | No Risk, No Reward? | 5 About this episode Is the genius American innovator just a myth? In this special episode of American Scandal, tech journalists Mark Harris and Kara Swisher, and former CEO and author Safi Bahcall unpack the dangerous allure of this narrative, and how Stockton Rush and OceanGate were far from the only examples.
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0:00 Lindsay Graham? Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
0:16 Lindsay Graham? From Audible Originals, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American Scandal.
0:40 Lindsay Graham? Stockton Rush cast himself as a visionary, as a rule breaker. Through his company Ocean Gate, he set out to open an untapped market in deep-sea tourism and change underwater exploration forever.
0:54 Speaker 01 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 logic and good engineering behind me.
1:04 Lindsay Graham? But in pursuing that dream, he allowed hubris to override safety. He dismissed regulators as unimaginative bureaucrats and argued formal safety certification was nothing more than an obstacle to progress.
1:17 Speaker 02 He was extremely stubborn, extremely stubborn. I think he felt he had absolute license, that this company was his creation, and that ultimately, his decision was the only one that mattered.
1:29 Lindsay Graham? Rush's bravado eventually led to disaster, when he and four of his passengers were killed on an excursion to the Titanic in June 2023. But his attitude towards risk was far from unique. It mirrored a long-established narrative in American business and culture, a narrative that cast founders as geniuses who disrupt entire industries through sheer force of will. And it's an appealing story, but the reality behind it can be far less attractive.
1:58 Speaker 03 I would say generally, anyone who relies on that, there's something wrong. That's already smoke.
2:04 Speaker 04 And it's sort of the emperor's new clothes kind of thing. We just think innovators never are wrong. And in fact, innovators are often wrong and often make mistakes. In this case, it was fatal.
2:13 Lindsay Graham? The myth of the fearless entrepreneur can be used to mask failure, ward off scrutiny, and even disguise outright fraud. Stockton Rush paid the ultimate price for his belief in that myth. But what is it costing the rest of us?
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3:04 Lindsay Graham? Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of the podcast American Scandal. In our latest series, Benedict Arnold turns his back on the Continental Army and secretly defects. He plots to hand over the most important fortress in the colonies to the British and doom the revolution he once served. Listen to American Scandal on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts.
3:35 Lindsay Graham? Journalist Mark Harris has spent years digging into the story of Ocean Gate. He's trying to answer the question of how an experimental submersible could take paying passengers miles below the surface with so little oversight. His journey started in 2015 when Harris got word about an exciting new company based in the Seattle area. Its co-founder, Stockton Rush, claimed Ocean Gate would do for underwater exploration what Google and Uber plan to do for self-driving cars.
4:04 Speaker 02 There wasn't a lot of vision happening in that world. There were rich people, billionaires, having submersibles made for their playthings on the back of their super yachts. And there were scientific submersibles going down and and doing, you know, important scientific work. And I think increasingly, he came to say, well, there's actually a different market here. We can really get real people to do things that previously only the billionaires and the scientists could do. And I thought, well, this is interesting. Let's hear what's happening here.
4:32 Lindsay Graham? Soon after he met Rush, Harris was invited on a trip on Ocean Gate's new Cyclops submersible. It was an adventure he couldn't resist.
4:40 Speaker 02 I mean, it's really exciting to go underwater, to see the color change, the light fades away, you're starting to see different fish. You know, it's a very strange environment that kind of feels a little bit like outer space. And Stockton Rush was leaning into that in his descriptions and talking about this like we're on a spaceship right now because you're in a very, you know, different environment and we have to be very concerned about safety and everything working properly. But unfortunately, that didn't happen.
5:07 Lindsay Graham? When they reached the seafloor, the sub stopped moving. The thrusters failed and they lost their bearings. In the end, Rush had to ask Harris and the others on board to pull out their phones and see if they could orient themselves with their compasses.
5:21 Speaker 02 I was just a bit bemused, I think, that things were failing left, right and center. I only realized afterwards that this was the deepest that sub had been while it was in their control, while they had modified all these systems, including the life support systems and the navigation. So there was a lot of stuff I wasn't really told.
5:42 Lindsay Graham? But Stockton Rush remained remarkably calm. He was an experienced aircraft pilot who had even built his own planes before. He had been in plenty of dangerous situations during his life and lived to tell the tale.
5:53 Speaker 02 He wasn't flustered. He didn't get angry. He wasn't flapping about and trying to shout at people or anything like that. So there were no red flags.
6:01 Lindsay Graham? And Rush didn't just tolerate these problems. He embraced them as part of the process. Everything that went wrong was simply an opportunity for Ocean Gate to learn something new. And in this, Rush saw himself as following in the footsteps of America's most celebrated innovators, inventors and businessmen like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Steve Jobs. These men are remembered not just for their ideas, but for their persistence in the face of doubt, failure and criticism.
6:29 Speaker 04 They become the modern day magicians, right? The modern day wizards. You know, we call Thomas Edison the Wizard of Menlo Park.
6:37 Lindsay Graham? That's Kara Swisher. She's a veteran tech journalist who has reported on and interviewed some of the most celebrated innovators in the world.
6:44 Speaker 04 If you try something, it doesn't work, it doesn't work. You move on to the next thing. And what they try to do is very hard to say, I learned something here, and often they do.
6:52 Lindsay Graham? It's an attitude that's common in the tech industry. One of the most famous commercials in history is Apple's 1984 campaign. It promoted the company's new Macintosh computer with striking images of a futuristic dystopia ripped apart by one brave, modern hero wielding a sledgehammer. In Apple's vision of the world, creation and innovation were in part an act of destruction. The stale, gray status quo had to be broken violently, if necessary, for progress to be made. Decades later, in the early years of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg embraced the same idea. The company's unofficial motto was "Move fast and break things."
7:34 Lindsay Graham? Innovation came through a willingness to take potentially destructive risks, no matter what others might say.
7:40 Speaker 03 There are some people who are sort of innately more excited and have more ability to just go with their gut instinct on something, and some people who are more influenced by outside opinion.
7:55 Lindsay Graham? Author Safi Bakal is a former CEO who ran a biotech company for 13 years.
8:00 Speaker 03 You just need to recognize, are you the kind of person that if someone tells you it's stupid, you're going to stop? Other people can say that I'm stupid, or that my idea is stupid, and I can't change that fact. What I can change is am I willing to go ahead despite that?
8:17 Lindsay Graham? Stock and Rush wanted to be like Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. And when Ocean Gate developed the carbon fiber hull for its Titan submersible, he was certain he'd found the innovation that would write his name in the history books: Mark Harris.
8:32 Speaker 02 I don't think he really appreciated how much of a change that he was suggesting by operating a carbon fiber submersible at this depth. He thought, if my software program shows that it can work, then that should be good enough for anybody, we should be able to do this. But the classing agencies really wanted a lot more rigor than that, and they wanted a lot more safety focused than that.
8:53 Lindsay Graham? Rush had a choice to make. He could change course, stick to more tried and tested methods, or he could push on.
9:00 Speaker 02 You have to make a virtue out of that, right? You have to say, well, you know, there's a reason, I mean, you know, we're choosing not to do that because classing wouldn't make this any safer.
9:08 Lindsay Graham? From then on, Rush took on a more and more defiant stance toward regulators and the rest of the submersible industry. He talked openly about his willingness to break the rules, to take even more risks. To him, that was just innovation 101, part of the Silicon Valley playbook.
9:24 Speaker 02 And if there is no enforcement, and if there's no one telling you can't do it, great, I mean, what's to stop you, right? Why, why not do that? It just seemed that was the path of least resistance in order to get Ocean Gate to where he wants it to be, which was actually providing a service and getting people out there under the water.
9:43 Lindsay Graham? But no matter how many times Rush was warned that what he was doing was potentially dangerous, he continued. The critics didn't deter him. If anything, they just confirmed he was on the right track. In his eyes, Stockton Rush was an explorer and visionary who could ignore the doubters and push past the limits that would stop anyone else. He had embraced the mythology of the trailblazing innovator, and the consequences would be disastrous.
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11:14 Speaker 07 Journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia spent her life exposing powerful people. Then, in 2017, she was killed in a car bombing. I'm Stephen Gray, and for the past nine years, I've been trying to find out who wanted her dead. That search took me to Malta through secret companies, organised crime, and eventually to one of the island's richest and most powerful men. Now, after years of waiting, his trial has finally happened. But when the verdict came in, the case took a turn that almost no one had expected. In a brand-new update to the multi-award-winning podcast Who Killed Daphne?, I'm returning to Malta to find out how we got there and where the search for the truth goes next.
11:56 Speaker 07 Listen to the new episode of Who Killed Daphne? wherever you get your podcasts, and you can hear the full six-part investigation from the beginning, ad-free, with Audible. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app and by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
12:24 Lindsay Graham? Stockton Rush and his company OceanGate planned to send their Titan submersible to one of the most hostile environments on the planet. But they intended to do it in a way no one had ever tried before. The traditional design that had safely taken teams of scientists, explorers, and filmmakers to the bottom of the ocean was rejected as too old-fashioned, too expensive, and too limited. In its place, Stockton Rush and his team built a submersible out of layers of carbon fibre. It was a material that had never been used in a deep-sea crude submersible before. Many experts warned OceanGate against it. But Rush wasn't deterred. Here again is journalist Mark Harris. He's been reporting on OceanGate since 2015.
13:07 Speaker 02 That's one thing I heard from almost everyone I talked to, that once he had his goal set, once he, you know, once he thought he wanted to do something, he would really do everything he could to achieve that goal. And I think that was kind of wrapped up in his concept of himself as an innovator. He wants to be an innovator. He didn't want to do things the same way and just shave off 5% or 10% of the cost. He wanted to reinvent something and be acknowledged as somebody who had done that reinvention.
13:35 Lindsay Graham? But despite some successful deep sea trials, Ocean Gate's radical carbon fiber hull soon began showing signs of structural fatigue. By early 2021, it was clear the original hull would have to be replaced.
13:49 Speaker 02 Now, at that point, you might think, if you were someone who was really rigorous, you would say, let's just not build another hull the same. Let's, let's make sure we get it better this time and let's, let's make sure everything's spot on. Now, what Rush actually did was kind of fire most of his engineering team. He thought that was just a one-off problem with the hull. Everything else is fixed. Everything else is working. We just need a new hull and then we can get going.
14:10 Lindsay Graham? This second hull was built with the same materials and to the same design as the first. But Rush was so focused on pushing the envelope that he underestimated the risks of his innovative new approach. According to Safi Bakal, that's a common mistake. He's a former biotech CEO and the author of the book Loon Shots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.
14:35 Speaker 03 Most entrepreneurs get killed by the downside, not because they didn't spend enough time on the upside. They focus on the first thing, which is some wild innovations, someone really pushing boundaries, someone really taking risk. But they miss the fact that the really successful entrepreneurs, the ones who succeed over the long term, are doing something underneath the surface that you don't see, which is that they are doing a very good job of managing their downside risk.
15:04 Lindsay Graham? McCall cites the story of Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. These were two Australian doctors who won the Nobel Prize for proving bacteria-caused peptic ulcers. Their theory was widely dismissed at first. It went against prevailing wisdom that ulcers were caused by stress, or spicy food, or excess stomach acid. So to prove it, Marshall risked his own health and swallowed the bacteria himself.
15:28 Speaker 03 That's a famous story. They teach it to kids and has that ring, that sort of theme of, oh, here's a great innovator who just took some bacteria, swallowed it, boom, and won the Nobel Prize. Well, that's not exactly what happened. In fact, what he did was very carefully assess the risk. He took a very carefully controlled strain of bacteria. He analyzed which antibiotics he could take afterwards, made sure that it would kill that bacteria. He made sure that everything else was clean so that there weren't any other systemic infections he would get along with the first one. And then he was carefully monitored throughout the whole thing. So on the surface, it sounds like a great innovator taking risks and pushing boundaries. That's step number one.
16:13 Speaker 03 But step number two is he managed the downside. And in this Ocean Gate case, Stockton Rush did number one, and he made the classic mistake of not doing number two.
16:25 Lindsay Graham? There were plenty of warning signs for Ocean Gate, and not just from experts in deep sea exploration. Around the same time Stockton Rush and his company were first designing their carbon fiber hull, another self-styled innovator was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Elizabeth Holmes had skyrocketed into public consciousness with an extraordinary claim. She said that her company Theranos had invented a new technology that could run dozens of medical tests on a single drop of blood. If what she said was true, Theranos would redefine medical science and make Elizabeth Holmes one of the wealthiest people on the planet. Many believed her. Some of the wealthiest and most influential people on the planet gave their backing, including
17:10 Lindsay Graham? Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, and Henry Kissinger.
17:12 Speaker 03 People like stories. And in her case, it was like, here's a young female Steve Jobs. And that is a short story. It's an easy story, and it's a story that resonated. But she told a story that was a fraudulent story. She was saying she was getting these measurements from a drop of blood in a small machine, and she was lying.
17:34 Lindsay Graham? Tech journalist Kara Swisher followed the Theranos story from the beginning. And like many others, she couldn't help noticing that there was something artificial about Elizabeth Holmes.
17:44 Speaker 04 There's a lot of like flim flamery in terms of fake it to make it in Silicon Valley. That's not a new thing, but ultimately you gotta make it, right?
17:52 Lindsay Graham? For Swisher, Holmes seemed to be play acting, and that made her suspicious.
17:57 Speaker 04 The turtleneck drove me crazy because she was trying to be Steve Jobs, right? The whole turtleneck thing. She was in a lot of articles. There were too many articles. I remember being like, why is she doing so much press? That's interesting. Like, if you're so great, why do you need to be in the press all the time? She was way ahead of her skis.
18:13 Lindsay Graham? When confronted with criticism, though, Elizabeth Holmes was defiant. She said that she was an innovator and everyone else just didn't understand. Theranos would ultimately fall apart after its founders' lies were exposed. Holmes herself was convicted of fraud, and all her famous investors walked away with nothing. But if there was a lesson in that story for Stockton Rush, he ignored it. Like Elizabeth Holmes, his defiance toward Ocean Gate's external critics was matched by his intolerance of internal dissent. Here's Mark Harris again.
18:46 Speaker 02 There was nobody in the company to whom he would defer. The people who were maintaining it, he wouldn't defer to them. The people who had designed it, he wouldn't defer to them. He even felt that he knew better when he wasn't in the sub. He was the ultimate backseat driver.
18:59 Lindsay Graham? Ocean Gate's board of directors was theoretically meant to hold Rush to account, but they did little to rein him in either.
19:06 Speaker 02 They listened to what Rush said and rubber stamped it. One person said they'd been on the board for 10 years and they never saw anyone really, you know, stand up to Stockton. And that sounds, you know, pretty incredible in terms of oversight and operation of a company. And I don't think anyone would say it was a healthy situation.
19:24 Lindsay Graham? According to a former employee, at one point Rush even claimed he could pay off a congressman. He would go to any length. Progress and innovation trumped everything.
19:34 Speaker 02 There's no evidence of him actually doing that. But what there is evidence of him doing is deliberately stepping outside the rules-based organisation and kind of challenging it to come at him. If you operate out in international waters, you pretty much can do what you want if you're not registered and flagged in a country, if that country's not keeping an eye on you. And as it turns out, the Coast Guard thinks it did have jurisdiction over the vessel, but it never did anything about it at the time. He never really experienced any negative consequences of not following the rules, until they had the worst possible impact on him and his passengers.
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21:55 Lindsay Graham? Stories of individuals breaking the mold and creating something entirely new are exciting and alluring. Stock and rush certainly bought into them. But according to Sophie Bacall, the truly great innovators know that it takes more than one idea or one person to change the world.
22:12 Speaker 03 You can come up with an idea, you can come up with a thousand ideas, probably 999 of them will be bad, maybe one will be good. But an innovation requires people and support and a team in order to build it out into something that can scale and you can deliver to businesses, to customers consistently with quality, something that really demonstrates you have something new that can change the world. And Steve Jobs is actually a good example of that because that's the sort of mythos that grew up around Jobs is that he would stand on the mound and said, all right, the iPod, boom, part the water is done. All right, the iPhone, the iMac, part the water is done. And that
22:54 Speaker 03 makes for a nice story, but that's not the story at all because the true story is often much less glamorous.
23:03 Lindsay Graham? In the 1980s, Steve Jobs himself bought into the myth of the great genius innovator. In his mind, it was the idea that mattered most. Everything else was secondary. But when that philosophy led him into trouble, Jobs struggled to adapt. He clashed with others at Apple and eventually he was forced out of the company he had co-founded. And soon after, Apple almost went bankrupt. But when Jobs returned to the company 12 years later, he had gained some new perspective. He had bought the budding animation studio Pixar, which would go on to produce the first computer animated feature film. And through that achievement, he'd seen how to foster true and sustainable innovation.
23:44 Speaker 03 You have to balance creative, new, wacky ideas for films with budget and risk management. And there's no film if you don't do that. So he got that idea. And when he came back to Apple the second time, Jobs 2.0, one of the first things he did was promote a guy named Johnny Ives, who was this wonderful artist who created all these great things and all the designs for these Apple products. And he also hired a guy named the Attila de Huyne of inventory at Compaq Computer, whose name was Tim Cook. The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad are great products, but there would be no Apple today if, on the one hand, Johnny Ive didn't come up with this beautiful design for an iPad.
24:26 Speaker 03 On the other hand, Tim Cook didn't do a good job getting the cost down from $6,000 to $600. You need both. And that's how Jobs led Apple, is by managing both carefully.
24:38 Lindsay Graham? The greatest triumphs of Jobs' career came after he learned the shallowness of the lone genius approach. Ironically, of course, those successes only deepen the mythology around him. Tech journalist Kara Swisher interviewed Steve Jobs on multiple occasions.
24:54 Speaker 04 He was bothered by that, actually. And he said, "What do you think, I'm Willy Wonka and they're the Oompa Loompas?" He has a team that's been there, and they're still there, kicking ass with Apple for many, many years. This is a team, they're like the Rolling Stones, they keep going.
25:06 Lindsay Graham? But not every entrepreneur learns the lessons that Jobs did. And for Swisher, the expensive recent failures of ventures like Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse reinforced the dangers of buying into the great innovator myth.
25:19 Speaker 04 So I think one of the problems when you have these sort of charismatic leaders is, you can shove things through that you want. Elon Musk is a good example of this. A lot of his flaws have come because he's not listening to people, and he's frequently wrong but never endowed. And I think that's a bad quality. All great leaders look for pushback and where the problem is. And Lincoln is the most famous with his team of rivals. You want different opinions, because then you can anticipate consequences.
25:44 Lindsay Graham? Stockton Rush didn't want to hear different opinions. He dismissed questions as just another unnecessary barrier. He was too in love with the story he was writing about himself, a glorious risk taker who was pushing the boundaries of science. He was the exceptional leader with a vision for the future and the determination to make it a reality. But he was so caught up in his own myth-making that he overlooked the dangers until it was too late.
26:10 Speaker 04 I love innovation. I think it's great to think outside the box. At the same time, as I always quote Paul Verelio, the philosopher, "When you invent electricity, you invent the electric chair." So there's implications of every invention. And I think what we tend to spend a lot of time is on the positives of invention without understanding how to mitigate the negative parts. Everything invented, everything is a tool or a weapon, and every innovation will be both. And so what are you doing that is mitigating the negative aspects and understanding the consequences and protecting against it versus the excitement of moving humanity forward?
26:47 Speaker 02 I think that's the real dilemma with innovation. If the balance is too conservative, nothing ever happens. And if there's no balance at all, if there's no controls at all, then you end up with Ocean Gate. So I think his legacy is actually, you know, he's not going to end up democratizing access. And in fact, he'll end up setting back the exploration of the underwater world. He's going to be a watchword for hubris and folly for many years to come.
27:10 Speaker 03 And what happens to someone like Rush is that once they can sell their idea and the idea catches on, they have some power because they've got some followers, they've got some customers, they've got some organization behind them. And then the question is, what do they do with that power? What it revealed about Stockton Rush is that he was willing to chase his ambitions and not listen to others. And when someone builds a submarine and people are telling them it's too risky or taking shortcuts, and this myth of the innovator is that you ignore people around you, that is an incorrect myth.
27:51 Speaker 03 And if you believe that and you believe in your own hubris and you will take the shortcuts, you will neglect the risk management and you can end up dead.
28:04 Lindsay Graham? From Audible Originals and Airship, this is episode five of the Titan Submersible Disaster for American Scandal. In our next series, the political career of Senator Ted Kennedy is forever changed after a deadly late night car accident on a remote island in Massachusetts named Chappaquiddick.
28:29 Lindsay Graham? American Scandal is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American Scandal on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. And Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com.
29:03 Lindsay Graham? American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham, for Airship. Many thanks to our guests today: Safi Bakal, Mark Harris, and Kara Swisher. This episode was produced by John Reed, senior producer Andy Beckerman, managing producer Emily Burr, audio editing by Mohamed Shazim, music by Thrum, sound design by Gabriel Gould. Executive producer for Airship is William Simpson. Executive producer for Audible is Jenny Lauer Beckman. Head of creative development at Audible, Kate Navin. Head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Louis. Chief content officer, Rachel Giatson. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC.
29:45 Lindsay Graham? Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC.
29:55 Speaker 09 Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat and Fish are back for a whole lot of wonderfully whimsical fun. What happens when you switch bodies with your best friend? Discover a caveman frozen in ice? Or make an alien so angry he threatens to destroy the planet? Find out in season two of the Cat in the Hat podcast. The Cat and Fish are traveling the world in the great catastrophic cacophony cruiser, meeting genies, clown professors, cave trolls, and extraordinary characters along the way. With clever wordplay, imaginative rhymes, original songs, and stories celebrating curiosity, empathy, and creative problem solving, every adventure brings something new to discover.
30:37 Speaker 09 It's a world of wonderful words, big imaginations, and plenty of heart for the whole family. Listen to the Cat in the Hat podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all 20 episodes early and ad-free right now.
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