My Experience On The OceanGate Sub — With David Pogue

David Pogue is a correspondent on CBS Sunday Morning and host of the Unsung Science Podcast. In November 2022, he boarded the OceanGate sub for a voyage just months before it imploded. Pogue joins Big Technology Podcast to share his story. In this interview, he offers a nuanced view of the sub, OceanGate, and its CEO Stockton Rush. We discuss his experience aboard the Titan submersible, his confidence in the safety of the sub at the time, the lessons learned, the merits of risk in the name of exploration, and the media's coverage of the disaster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:03Speaker 01

  LinkedIn presents.

• 1:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Our guest today is David Pogue. He's the host of the Unsung Science Podcast. It's a great podcast. You should check it out. And he's also a correspondent on CBS Sunday Morning. And in his role as a correspondent there, he was aboard the Ocean Gate Titan in November 2022. Yes, the sub that was going to explore the wreckage of the Titanic and itself imploded last week. So today we're going to get into his experience aboard the sub, of course, what happened to it. And then we're going to go deeper into our discussion, the merits of risk and exploration. David, so great to have you here. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. So just to start off, how did you first hear about this sub?

• 2:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Because, you know, it does strike me that so many people have. You know, heard about it, but it was news to most of the world. So where did you first encounter it?

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Stockton Rush, the now familiar name, the CEO of Ocean Gate and the designer of the sub, was a fan of our show. And he sent over an invitation to our producers that said we could accommodate three of you on our support ship for one of our nine day expeditions. And there's room for two of you on an actual dive to the Titanic. Somehow the producers thought of me, maybe because my science background, science explaining background. And I was so excited. I see a lot of stuff online about like, his, his boss is probably forced him to do that or risk firing. I'm like, it wasn't like that. I was, it was

• 2:51Speaker 02

  my answer was in all caps, let me at it. So I was, I mean, I could not imagine a more thrilling assignment.

• 2:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  But you're going 12,000 feet under the sea and you're going way deep. And there must have been, we're obviously going to get into some of the safety stuff, but what sort of goes through your mind in terms of safety? Is it just like, oh, well, this guy is going down there anyway. So we should probably be okay. Or what are the calculations that run through your head when you get an invite like that?

• 3:18Speaker 02

  I mean, one thing that's been missing from all the discussion about me, not that this is about me, but I have been lynched on Twitter. One, one of the things that I don't think most people understand is that I've been, I've hosted 20 specials for Nova on PBS. These are science specials and the team I work with there has a philosophy of really telegenic experiments. And so to illustrate various scientific points, they've had me ride in a demolition derby car. They've had me hang gliding. They've had me swimming with sharks. They've, you know, tried to freeze me in a chamber. It's all in the name of,

• 3:59Speaker 02

  you know, making interesting, memorable television. And I always agree because I just don't think anyone would want to kill me on camera. I don't think that would be a good look, especially Ocean Gate, whose purpose of this is obviously to draw attention to their outfit.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  I just took that as a given that they want to look as good as possible. As it turns out, they were very unhappy with the story, but.

• 4:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, really? Well, because so there is this moment in the story where you talk about how it's a great story. By the way, if you're listening, I recommend folks check it out, but there's a moment where you highlight how so much of it has been jerry-rigged effectively where there's a light from, I don't know, something like a home, a camping store and it's now, this is apparently standard with subs, but it's controlled by a retrofitted PlayStation controller. And there's this amazing scene in your report where you're like on the sub descending and he shows you the PlayStation controller and you kind of lose your mind. I mean, what's going through your mind? So you'd obviously trusted the safety. You're not going to get, you don't think you're going to get killed on camera. Yeah, I don't know. Like, I would imagine you'd want to do a little bit more planning than that. But then you see that the way that this thing has been built and there's like, the only way

• 5:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  to open it is from the outside. Are you starting to question your decision to go on that when you see that stuff? Like, what is going through your mind then?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  No, there were so many reasons to believe in the safety of this sub. First of all, he told us it had been designed in collaboration with NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington. We should talk about that at some point. Secondly, it had made 20 uneventful dives to the Titanic depths and back without a blink. Thirdly, probably the most famous, one of the most famous living Titanic explorers in the world, P. H. Nargelet, was on board as an Ocean Gate employee. He had been looking over the design, construction, and testing

• 6:00Speaker 02

  of the Titan submersible and fully approved. And this guy has been on every Titan submersible, every Titanic submersible there ever was. He was on the Mir from Russia. He was on the Nautilus from France. So he's seen them all and he approved the design and went down on it every trip.

• 6:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  And he ended up being there when it did implode, so he lost his life.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  He died as well, that's right.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  There is a very obvious culture of safety among the crew. I mean, this thing is run like a rocket launch with long countdowns and checklists and inspections and mandatory twice daily briefings, even if you're not diving, you have to be there. Where they go through every single line of every single spreadsheet about every single component and confirm that it's been recharged and refreshed and ready and polished. They cancel these dives on the least, with the least provocation, you know, the tiniest thing. Our CBS dive was canceled at 37 feet down because the way they, the way they do this is they have a big floating platform, maybe

• 7:14Speaker 02

  five feet high and 20 feet square. The sub is bolted on top. They sink the platform with the air out till it's 35 feet underwater because the water is calmer under the sea. So that's why they do it that way. It's, it's much more dangerous to try to launch in bobbing waves. And then they send scuba divers to detach the sub from the platform and the sub drives away. So on our dive, there are these black four foot oval floats at the corners of the platform that just keep it facing right, keep it upright. And on this dive, two of them came untied and started floating away on the sea.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Well, that has nothing to do with the sub. The sub was fine. We were done with the platform part. I just thought it was a stupid reason to cancel the dive and I was annoyed. But again, now it looks different as I look back on it and part of their culture. Was we don't even tolerate little things. So there are many reasons to think that this was okay. I didn't sleep the night before just because, well, the ship was rocking badly. And I had a lot to process and I had a one shot chance at this. This is our only chance to go down. And maybe there was some lizard brain screaming for survival in my subconscious.

• 8:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  In some way. So one of the things I've wondered about this the whole way through is, is this sub like, was this sub something that was pushing forward exploration? Or was it simply a very expensive Disney ride for people who wanted to go see the Titanic?

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Well, this is something else that not a single news report has mentioned. It was a combination science expedition and it's extreme adventure tourism opportunity. So what I mean by that is there's five seats on the sub. There's always a pilot. There's three paying passengers. And then there's a scientist onboard every dive. There is a scientist. He is there to show you what you're looking at. This is, there's a marine biologist, there's an undersea archaeologist. And if you think about it, Stockton Rush could have sold that seat to another passenger. He could have made another quarter of a million dollars per dive, but he didn't.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  He, in effect, the passengers are subsidizing science. And there was a long interview I did with two of these scientists. And I mean, they are doing publishable, actual research. One of the things they were doing that no one else can do is longitudinal studies of the wreck. And what that means is over time. So this outfit goes down five times a summer. And this was its third summer. So for the first time in history, these scientists can observe the Titanic. Over time, not just the deterioration of the hull, but also what's growing on it. On our dive, they were doing eDNA,

• 10:24Speaker 02

  which is this really cool technology where they grab water from around the sub, from around the wreck. And then they bring it back in the surface and analyze the DNA. They can tell every critter that's been near the Titanic in the last 24 hours. Amazing. And every time they do that, they see new critters, including species that have never been seen before. So this was very much a scientific endeavor as well as a consumer one. And Alex, have you ever heard that in any of the news reports?

• 10:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  I have not. So it's good that we're here talking about it. One thing that I also wonder about going down to the Titanic is that it feels almost a bit acob, like the fact that people like, people who came up on the sub that you were on seemed overjoyed about the photos they had gotten and the views they had gotten of this wreck. But effectively, what they just did was visit one of the world's largest underground graveyards, right? Where so many people lost their lives in one of the most tragic ways possible. So can you help like, explain a little bit about like, the thrill of seeing something so historic balanced with the fact that it's really a tragic place to visit, not an exciting place to visit, or maybe it is.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  But we do that, though. We visit Gettysburg. We visit the Taj Mahal. These are graveyards. We do that to honor the people who died in those events. So I had a long conversation with Stockton Rush about this. And he said, I think that the people who object are, are wrong. Because first of all, this wreck won't be there in 50 years. It's going to be a lump of rust. And if we're not there filming it, shooting it, making models of it, then it'll be gone and no one will be able to learn anything from it. And he did joke, we don't have a gift shop, but we are.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  We are no different from any other famous grave site that people go to show their respects.

• 12:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Absolutely, and it is just pretty wild. I mean, how the Titanic has been just this thing that's stuck in the globe's consciousness. I mean, it is, there's something about it, right? That just captures people's imagination. Maybe they put themselves in the place there. I'm curious what you think it is. That, is it the, maybe it's nature pushing back? I mean, it's kind of ironic, right? But it is nature pushing back about humans, you know, belief that they can control the world and impose their will on it.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  I mean, I think, I think that's most of it. I mean, there have been many shipwrecks, some much more dramatic, some much more cool looking underwater. But it's this one, because it was the ship that couldn't sink, and it was its first maiden voyage. And, and of course, the movie, the James Cameron movie, kind of made it a popular, pop cultural icon. So I think all those things continue to make it a singular icon.

• 13:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. So what was your first thought when you heard that it had gone missing?

• 13:35Speaker 02

  The first thing I thought was, oh, my God, these media making a big deal out of nothing. You know, I'm sorry to say, but I mean, I knew I had been with this thing long enough to know that it glitches all the time, all the time. They all do. The Mir, the Alvin, the Nautilus, all of these submersibles glitch all the time. And through all this, through this whole conversation, let's keep in mind what PH and Arjale told me. All submersibles are prototypes. These are not mass produced. There was not a 1.0, and this is 2.0. They are all one offs. And that means there are no

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Sparrows, there's no mass-produced parts to swap in. So things go wrong all the time. James Cameron had to cancel dives. The Alvin had to cancel dives. The Nottila had to cancel dives. There's a Chinese one and a Japanese one. All of them glitch all the time. On our week over the Titanic, you may remember that there was a team of paying passengers who went down and got lost. I don't mean they were out of contact with the surface ship. I mean, they were lost. They didn't know where they were. They couldn't find the ship. There's no such thing as GPS underwater. So what they do is, in the control room on the surface ship, they can see both the sub and the pieces of the wreck.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  And they direct the ship using text messages sent as acoustic pulses through the water. Radio waves don't travel through water either, by the way. So only acoustic pulses. And I have this great picture of the codes that they use. The text messages are like, are like three characters long. You know, like, you know, X, X, Y means we've reached the bottom and so on. So the control room on deck has to direct the sub which way to go to find the Titanic. And on this occasion, for some reason, the Ocean Gate GPS system

• 15:36Speaker 02

  and the ship's own GPS system were disagreeing with each other. So they kept sending instructions down to Stockton in the sub and giving him bad directions. And we had a GoPro in there. And we recorded all this. And you can just hear them going, "You just said we're 100 feet off it to the right, and now we're 500 feet off it to the left." You know, what's going on? And they came up. They came up after four hours. They never saw anything. They saw a boiler, but they didn't see the ship. And so when I heard that the thing was missing, I thought, oh, okay, so it's a, it's a comms glitch.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Then I heard a couple hours later that this news was coming out 24 hours after it lost comms. That's a different matter. Then, you know, my stomach dropped out of my body.

• 16:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And so, okay, you were initially like, pretty hopeful after hearing that it had gone missing. It had been 24 hours, but the scenario is that you were thinking about was that like, they had potentially just lost communication?

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Right. So, so once I'd, once they'd been gone for 24 hours, I mean, I didn't, I didn't like to think about this, but there are really only three things that could have happened. And so much of the speculation online was so uninformed. The only things that could possibly explain a loss of communication are, number one, it imploded. Number two, it got to the bot, it lost power, so therefore couldn't communicate. Because remember, it wasn't yet to the bottom when they lost communication. It was only an hour and 45 minutes in. So, the second possibility is they lost power and they got snagged on something on the bottom, either embedded in

• 17:30Speaker 02

  the silt or caught on the Titanic. There was a submersible a few years ago that got hooked on the Titanic's propeller and they had to wiggle free. That seemed like a stretch. And the third possibility is they lost power, but they, and that, so they were on the surface somewhere bobbing. Um, one, another thing that nobody else reported is that this thing had so many redundant life support systems. It had seven different ways of returning to the surface. You know, they could dump construction pipes, they could dump sandbags, they could, they had an air bladder that make a balloon, they could dump their legs and so on. Some of these were designed to work even if the electricity went out. It was a manual mechanical

• 18:13Speaker 02

  lever. Some of them were designed to work even if the hydraulics went out. And one of these backup systems would work even if everyone inside was unconscious or dead. It was a time-release 16-hour dissolving sandbag hook. So, if they were floating on the surface there without power, that would be a really horrific way to go, because you'd be looking out the porthole at the air you need, but you can't reach it because you were bolted in. So, I was hoping that if they had to die, that it was implosion, because they, they would not have seen that coming. It would have been...

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Just cessation of consciousness.

• 18:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and James Cameron, when he was asked about it, basically said that he knew that it was it was an implosion from the beginning.

• 19:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's a tremendous amount of pressure, we can talk about that, that ends up, you know, being pushed on the sub. And what he pointed to is that carbon fiber was actually like, it's very good for keeping gas in, keeping pressure in, but very bad for repelling pressure outward. I'm curious what you think about that.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  I mean, you gotta remember, this was, this was not a science experiment. This, this thing had been designed with experts, it had been tested many times. Stockton first made a one-third scale model, nobody talks about this, took it to the University of Washington, subjected it to pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, until it imploded to see what the level of pressure was that it could handle. The carbon fiber also had an acoustic monitoring system. Carbon fibers are actual fibers, they're like hairs. And when they break, they make a little crackle. And he had eight microphones embedded that could pick up on the crackling. And he said, you know, in testing, they'd take it down to a thousand feet

• 20:05Speaker 02

  and they'd hear it crackling, and so they'd come back up. Then they'd go back down a week later to a thousand feet, no crackling. This time they'd go down to 2,000 feet, until it started to crackle, then they'd go back up. In other words, the weak fibers had already died. So each, so they, they tested it and tested it until there were no more fibers to pop.

• 20:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  So CBS News posted on the CBS News website, the complete transcripts of the four interviews I did with Stockton, and if anybody actually cares about the science of it, or the background, or the testing they did, they should, they should go read the transcript. I'm not, you know, of course, I'm not a Stockton Rush apologist, but my God, the things people are saying, you know, they, they, they make it sound like he built this thing out of Lego and threw it in the water. It's, it was tested and it was inspected by some of the greatest minds in submersibles. So it's, it's not as simple as the guy was shooting blind.

• 21:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  So how did this thing implode then?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  I believe that I interviewed a veteran Navy pilot for CBS and I I believe that he's correct, meaning submarine pilot, that it's not the carbon fiber. It's the dissimilar materials connected to it. So titanium end caps and the plexiglass porthole seven inch thick. What happens is each of them has a different coefficient of compression and expansion. In other words, under pressure, under temperature change, they each expand and contract a little bit differently. And I keep saying, wow, he'd been down 20 times without an incident. That gave me reassurance.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  But but this theory says, no, no, that shouldn't have given you reassurance. That's what should have terrified you because that's called cyclical fatigue. Every time the thing goes down and back up again, you're weakening it. So I believe that the carbon fiber did not give way. I think that his acoustic monitoring system never went off. But what happened was all it takes is a, you know, a couple of molecules of water in the seam between the carbon fiber and the titanium or the titanium and the plexiglass and it's over.

• 22:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  David, I mean, you were like a couple of months away. Like if you had been there a few months later, you'd be dead. How do you feel about that?

• 22:36Speaker 02

  It's it's worse than that. After our aborted dive, they made two more that week. The one that got lost and then the one that was successful. And then we we came back to shore and they brought in the last group of the of the summer and they made it down once. And so if you think about it, the only thing that separated the CBS crew and the fatal dive was three dives. I was it's it was like it's like Russian roulette. So it's honestly been a lot to process. This has been a really rough week. You know, there's there's anger, there's little survivor's guilt, there's unbelievable

• 23:19Speaker 02

  gratitude, you know, at the luck and yeah, I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

• 23:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  David Pogue is here with us. He's a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning and also the host of the Unsung Science Podcast, which you can get of your podcast on your podcast app of choice. On the other side, we're going to talk a little bit more about merits of risk and exploration and a little bit more about David's experience on the sub. Back after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25

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• 24:51Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 25:33Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 25:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here with David Pogue. He is the host of the Unsung Science Podcast. He's a correspondent on CBS Sunday Morning and also the author of many books. You can go check them out on Amazon or with your local bookstore. David, actually, this is like the second time we're talking on a podcast. I don't know if you remember, but you were on my, my first podcast, which I started like 10 years ago, I probably should have kept it going. It was called On The Program and it was kind of jerry rigged, like the, well, anyway, I won't make a comparison. But we talked about your very creative proposal video. And, you know, we didn't really have sound. We didn't really have an audience. And so I appreciate it. I guess things have changed since then, but it's good to be back on with you.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Thank you. You too.

• 26:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let's talk a little bit more about the merits of risk in exploration. There was a line, we talked about it on the show Friday when we were going over what happened, but there's a line that Stockton Rush used where he said, at some point, safety is just a waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed, don't get in your car, don't do anything. You know, in retrospect, I'm curious what you think about that line. People are saying, I mean, this is kind of what we spoke about when we were on Friday. We do a show on Friday, talking a little bit about the week's news, but basically like there's a difference between like being open to risk and preparing for every possible outcome, and then also just taking reckless risk. So actually, like actually hearing you now, I'm thinking, okay, maybe this wasn't as reckless as I thought in the beginning, but to hear that line about safety, it does, I think

• 27:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  that's kind of what set off a lot of people about Stockton saying, well, come on, come on, man, what were you doing?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  I mean, he did a lot of sort of swashbuckling for the camera and it did not age well. I mean, he said all kinds of things and on our follow-up story for CBS Sunday Morning that appeared on Sunday, you can find it on YouTube. You see more of that kind of stuff where, you know, he, I mean, his other line is when you, when you think outside the box, all the people still in the box think you're crazy. And.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  He says it when you'll see on camera, he's saying it with a smirk. He's trying to be a little provocative. He fancies himself with a little bit of Elon Musk, a little bit of Steve Jobs, to whom he compared himself often.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  And I have to say-

• 28:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's not a red flag.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  No, because you don't know. I mean, it seemed like he'd done it, he'd done it 20 times.

• 28:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  He built a sub that nobody said could work and done it to the Titanic depths 20 times. I should also say, there's another part of this story that nobody's talking about. And that is that he started out as an aerospace engineer, and he built and flew his own airplanes. He made his first plane out of fiberglass, composite material. And all the experts said exactly the same stuff. You can't do that, it won't work, you're gonna kill yourself. Today, guess what? Every airliner in the world is made of composites. He's very proud of that. And I think that had a big effect on his psyche. I think that made him feel like, I do know what I'm doing with these unusual materials.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  And when people started saying you can't use carbon fiber for the sub, of course he's gonna say, oh my God, I've seen this movie before. Everybody says you can't do it a new way. And trust me, you know, 20 years from now, everybody will be doing it this way. And he said that, he said that. I asked him, if carbon fiber is so great, and the reason he loved it is its strength to buoyancy ratio. In other words, most of these subs are made of titanium, they're very heavy. If you put them in water, they sink. This thing, if you put it in water, it floats. So that's a good thing for a sub to have, and that's why he loved it. But he said, I asked him, if it's so great, why isn't everybody building the submersibles this way?

• 29:57Speaker 02

  And he said, they will.

• 29:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Would you get in another sub built out of carbon fiber after seeing what happened?

• 30:03Speaker 02

  I mean, I would, I would need to know if it's tested and stuff, but, but yeah, I, I don't think the carbon fiber failed. I don't think. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll turn out to be wrong and, and I'm, I will be sorry I appeared on your podcast, but it seems to me at this moment that the most likely thing that happened is something in the seams between the different materials.

• 30:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, you've referenced it a couple of times that there's like a national narrative or international narrative and then your belief of what happened. And it's kind of interesting for a journalist because typically we're on one side, like we're telling the story and the subject is like, come on, like you got some parts wrong. You kind of are in this really interesting position where you're both, you know, you are a journalist telling the story, but you're also someone who's experienced this and in some part subject. And even though in your, your report, they complained about, but I'm curious what your perspective is having been so deep inside the story and then seeing the way that the story's been told nationally. Like, can you reflect on that for a minute? What's that been like?

• 31:03Speaker 02

  It's, it's been like nothing I can possibly describe. You and I both know how social media works. We both know how misinformation propagates, but this thing was nuts. I, I was on one show at one point, one TV show and I'm waiting to go on and they are, they're reporting on the, on the disaster and they put up a graphic. This is a national network. It's a, it's a schematic of how you sit in the sub and it shows the five people sitting like a conga line, like with my feet on either side of your butt and your feet on either side of the next person's butt, all facing forward. And I'm like, what? That is the, and then on the side are four bullet points,

• 31:49Speaker 02

  all four of which are wrong. The first one says only one person can stand up at a time.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  What? That doesn't make any sense for like multiple reasons. No one can stand up. And if they could, why would it only be one person? It's a cylinder. Anyway, um, yeah, it's been really distressing. And, you know, the, the hate that I've had to endure, much of it was based on this information. On the fourth of our five days above the wreck, uh, there was this dive. As I mentioned, they could not find the Titanic and they spent four hours tooling around in the dark and then had to come up. Um, and so everyone's like, why didn't you report that? You lying sack of... I'm like, I did. Would you look at the video?

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Would you listen to the podcast? That, of course I reported that. Of course. I was the one who broke the story of the jerry rigged parts. I was the one who reported how often they canceled the dives. It, it just, it's, anyway.

• 32:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, you know, people on Twitter. Of course. Yeah. That one of the things that I think have made people skeptical. Well, not, not of you. I'm talking about of these Ocean Gate people is that they work so hard on message control, right? And that's kind of something that you did bring out in your reporting. Or maybe more recently that they had actually shut off the internet when they couldn't connect with the sub. And that prevented anybody from tweeting about it, including people who might have widely followed Twitter accounts. So talk a little bit about it. I mean, I feel like if you're there in the name of science, you allow whatever, you know, the transparency, you know, to flourish. But that was not the case with Ocean Gate.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  You know, I've, I've spent a lot of time focusing on that moment. So during the time that the sub was lost on the seafloor, the CBS crew, and actually everybody else, was on the, the bridge of the ship with the control room people, uh, which is primarily Wendy Rush, Stockton's wife, ran the comms and the various experts and, and scientists. And they shut off the ship's wifi. So we couldn't tweet, we couldn't get email. And on Sunday, just after, just after the news broke, I tweeted about, you know, this isn't the first time they've had a disaster, you know, a problem with the sub.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  On my week, the sub got lost on the bottom. And in fact, they shut off the wifi. So I couldn't tweet about it. And...

• 34:22Speaker 02

  What so what actually happened was I went up to one of the Ocean Gate staffers and said, dude, what's with the wifi? And his answer was, we if this is an emergency, we're going to need the bandwidth. We're going to need, you know, to call coast guard, we're going to need communications and we can't have a bunch of people tweeting and uploading pictures. It's a plausible answer. I don't know if he was lying. Maybe they were just trying to prevent bad news from sneaking out to the public. There's no way to know. I was being a little bit cynical that day and I said it was to stop us from tweeting. We'll never know.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  There's also, if you want to draw a line between the data points, you know, a similar question is, why did it take them so long to notify the coast guard that the sub had gone missing? I think it was a number of hours. But again, there's also a plausible explanation, which is these things glitch all the time and usually it comes back.

• 35:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  So do you launch a very expensive taxpayer funded manhunt if it turns out that it was just a fluke that comes back?

• 35:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  We did, yeah, I did get a question about this on Twitter from someone, this person Joran, who was asking why taxpayers have to pay millions to rescue the people who took this huge risk aboard an unlicensed vessel. Like for instance, if you want to climb Mount Everest, you need to get a permit. So do you think it's like, this is a big point in the story that people have talked about, you know, it's very big government rescues that were basically were sent out to people who did take a risk. And, you know, we have, and this, the other thing that's been talked about is there was this, you know, boat of migrants that went down off the coast of Greece, 800 people died and you didn't see half of the government resources marshaled there. So talk about that.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  I mean, it just, it just makes my blood boil. I mean, it's the white girl in danger scenario. I don't know if you've heard this term, but when there's a white girl in danger, it's national headlines or pictures on the front page of our newspaper. If it's an identical black girl, you just don't hear about it. It's, it's the same thing. It's billionaires in a submersible to the Titanic. That's news. That's exciting. That we care about. But that hundreds of migrants in that ship went down in Greece. And I mean, honestly, I, of course, I was up to my neck in hell last week, but my son comes in and goes, did you know that the ship went down at the same time as the sub? And no one's talking about it.

• 37:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  It's, it's a conversation we need to have.

• 37:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  When you think about government resources, do you, do you believe that government resources should go? I mean, if you're like, let's say you're the allocator of government resources. Do you go to do the search and rescue on the sub? Or do you send it towards migrants in distress? What do you think the?

• 37:23Speaker 02

  I mean, it's.

• 37:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, it seems like an obvious answer.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't seem right. It does not seem right. I mean, the Coast Guard was asked this question and their answer was, we are here to serve. Doesn't matter the situation. That's what we do. But, I mean, I, I remember one time I, um, I, on my honeymoon, I went to Australia and we got to climb Uluru, that big bizarre rock, Ayers Rock. It's also called in the middle of, of the desert. And everybody gets heat stroke, everybody passes out, everybody has problems. They have to do daily rescues of dumb tourists who bite off more than they can chew.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  And so I read that a few years ago, they just said, that's it. Nobody else climbs Uluru.

• 38:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  And, I mean, that's, what, I mean, but besides like saying you can't do this and the government forces will save you, is there another option?

• 38:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's hard to say. I mean, it's more of like, where do you want to allocate resources versus like, because ultimately, they have to, governments always make choices. That's sort of like the, the whole idea of governing. So where do you decide to deploy?

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's interesting that, that, I mean, one of the things this really highlights, like actually your story about that rock, stories of Everest, even in New Zealand, there was this white island that has this volcano that was another big story where lots of tourists got caught in this volcano. There's Everest, of course, and now we're starting to see even more space tourism. What is it about humanity's desire or the condition of people that makes them want to go explore despite the dangers?

• 39:13Speaker 02

  I mean, I think that's it. I think you just said it is, is there's a romance to it. There's an achievement factor when you do something dangerous and survive. I mean, you've, you've outsmarted death, you know, on the, on the follow-up story on Sunday morning, I said, you know, is this, is this going to be the end of adventure tourism? Are they going to shut all these things down? No, I don't think so, because like, you can't stop people from having that itch. For some people, and I think Stockton Rush is one of them, you know, cheating danger, cheating death gives meaning to life.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  And I, I'm not really one of them. I've never been skydiving or, you know, visiting a volcano. But, but I certainly know people who are like that. And they are driven, they are driven to these extremes.

• 40:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  After this, yeah, go ahead.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  I mean, just like, in the end, if they know the danger and they are aware, I think people should be allowed to do what they want.

• 40:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  After this experience, do you think, I mean, you're a big space guy, like a lot of your coverage is about space. Do you think you'd, you would get on one of those ships and go to space?

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Probably not.

• 40:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh huh. Has something changed within you?

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. I, I think rockets still.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Had too poor a record. To me, this sub was far safer than a Blue Origin or a SpaceX. I mean, obviously, that looks insane now, but it imploded. Yeah, I know. But there was before and then there's now. I had different set of information then.

• 41:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  But then what about your rule that if someone wants to take you on, you know, take you on something, they're, they don't want to kill you? So that's altered a bit.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it has. It has. I mean, I, I'm not sure I would be able to do any more of these extreme television stunts anyway, just because my wife says it's not, it's not happening. I mean, when I saw her after this news broke, she just rushed in and she just, she just held me so tight and she was crying and, you know, that the fact that we were three dives away from the end. Yeah, it's a lot to process.

• 41:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, last question for you. I mean, I think this is the first story that you've reported on where like the subjects of your story died doing the thing that you were reporting on. So what, what is that? Yeah, just reflect on that for a bit as we end here.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  You know, when I watch the footage of these interviews we did with Stockton and P H Narzalay, I mean, it was so recently there, you know, usually when we see footage of older people who died, you can sort of tell by the medium, you know, it's V H S quality if it was the eighties, it's black and white and jerky if it was the 1920s. You could tell by the medium that this happened a long time ago and something inside you says, you know, that they're dead, of course they're dead because they lived a long time and then they died. This is different. It's, it's 4K, it's high, it was 11 months ago and it just, it just doesn't seem right

• 42:44Speaker 02

  that those, there's a mismatch to think that those people. I was just talking to have died. Yeah, I haven't gotten used to it at all.

• 42:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. David Pogue, thank you so much for joining. Really appreciate it.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  Thanks a lot.

• 42:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks, everybody, for listening. We will see you on Friday. Want to say thank you, Nick Watney, for handling our audio. LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. And yes, we'll be up again on Friday with our news breakdown. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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