Speaker 1: Oh, what's at the bottom of the ocean? Right? You
Speaker 1: all know what we're doing. You all know what we're doing. Look, no, exactly.
Speaker 1: This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst
Speaker 1: people in all of history. We're all going to feel
Speaker 1: like the worst people in all of history. A little
Speaker 1: bit making jokes adjacent to this week's topic. Andrew T
Speaker 1: my guest today. How are you doing, Andrew? Hi, I'm alive,
Speaker 1: you know, just striking, but a lot fighting fighting against
Speaker 1: the man. Andrew. You are a writer in the in
Speaker 1: in in the entertainment industry and are on strike like
Speaker 1: all of the all of the god fearing writers out there,
Speaker 1: which means you have time to be on a podcast. So, uh,
Speaker 1: it's really working out good for me, this old strike.
Speaker 2: I mean, here's the other secret of TV writers. We
Speaker 2: always kind of have time to be on a podcast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, anything that can count as procrastination is always always.
Speaker 3: Around whole hole.
Speaker 1: Uh oh, but you're getting a hell of a lot
Speaker 1: of cleaning.
Speaker 2: Done instead of yeah, instead of try to try to
Speaker 2: do anything productive.
Speaker 1: Now, Andrew, it's my understanding. Correct me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: because I come from a slightly different world. But while
Speaker 1: you can't we can't. You can't be doing any writing
Speaker 1: for like TV or whatever. We can make a reality
Speaker 1: show together, right, That doesn't violate anything, right, I.
Speaker 3: Mean that that is what we're doing now, essentially.
Speaker 1: Because I I I'd love to get you involved in
Speaker 1: a project that I've I've had passion for for quite
Speaker 1: a while. Basically, basically, I fill a super soaker with
Speaker 1: my own piss, and you and I drive around in
Speaker 1: a van and whenever we see anybody who looks like
Speaker 1: they might be famous, like around Rodeo Drive or wherever,
Speaker 1: we just we squirt them with the super soaker full
Speaker 1: of piss and then we get it on camera and
Speaker 1: then well it's a show called super Soaker full of Piss.
Speaker 1: It's a good idea.
Speaker 2: I think this is not materially worse than anything else.
Speaker 3: Fair Well on reality TV.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I've been looking to get into politics, and I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about how Donald Trump's career got started by the
Speaker 1: last writers strike, and I feel like this could be
Speaker 1: my opportunity. You know, this could be my celebrity apprentice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, all the all the like the Wall Street
Speaker 2: Journal is like this is the super Soaker full of Piss.
Speaker 2: Guy's never Gonnam out to anything, and then it's like, well,
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously he's making he has a lot of
Speaker 2: groundswallow support, a lot a lot of good points.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I run once in twenty twenty eight and everybody laughs,
Speaker 1: and then in twenty thirty two everybody's like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: the piss super soaker guy's kind of making a lot
Speaker 1: of sense, really passionate fans, and it's it's what you know.
Speaker 1: In a normal time, I think people would would consider
Speaker 1: the idea of squirting famous people with a pristoker full
Speaker 1: of human urine to be silly. But given our topic today,
Speaker 1: it's downright responsible, Andrew, Because today, I mean I feel
Speaker 1: like normally we comment on like, so, what have you
Speaker 1: heard about you know, X person potentially obscure or whatever.
Speaker 1: We're all aware of the death sub right that that
Speaker 1: imploded on its way down to the Titanic.
Speaker 2: This is like so tricky because normally, as far as
Speaker 2: the audience goes like like the service behind the Bastards
Speaker 2: provises informing and not that you won't be informing people
Speaker 2: of stuff, but this is probably we're at nearly the
Speaker 2: apex of broad knowledge about this human being that's only
Speaker 2: going to diminish over time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting. I there's like so much that's wrapped
Speaker 1: up in this and it's it's such a there's a
Speaker 1: lot that's kind of fascinating about what the the interest
Speaker 1: in this and the way people are talking about it
Speaker 1: says about kind of like our current moment in media.
Speaker 1: I've chosen for the episodes to kind of rather than
Speaker 1: well focus specifically on the accident, to focus on stocked
Speaker 1: and Rush and like his background and kind of where
Speaker 1: he comes from and how this all got together, but
Speaker 1: we will kind of be talking about the stuff around it,
Speaker 1: including you know, it's interesting, there's this like a lot
Speaker 1: of so the kind of the two big arguments over
Speaker 1: this thing that have that have been filling the internet
Speaker 1: so far, or like should we laugh when a bunch
Speaker 1: of billionaires die in an easily predictable accident and that's
Speaker 1: between you and your god people like I can't. And
Speaker 1: also it's one of those things where it's like if
Speaker 1: you think it's bad to laugh when like people you
Speaker 1: don't know die, that's a perfectly ethically consistent point. Also,
Speaker 1: if you think that it's fine, I don't really that's
Speaker 1: that's that's what it's whatever. It's like if we're gonna
Speaker 1: flip out about people laughing at this, Like the Internet
Speaker 1: has been like full of shit like this from the
Speaker 1: very if you can remember the early days, the Darwin
Speaker 1: Awards were one of like the biggest things on the Internet,
Speaker 1: which was just laughing at people dying in stupid ways.
Speaker 3: This really is the ultimate like Darwin Award. I think I.
Speaker 2: Finally come down to the thing I think I wrote
Speaker 2: on Twitter. It was some version of like, look, yes,
Speaker 2: I get it, it's probably not healthy to like hate
Speaker 2: these people, but I'm just gonna I think I triangulated
Speaker 2: to I just love them less than anyone else who
Speaker 2: was victimized in any way this week. And I also
Speaker 2: love them less than any penny that was spent trying
Speaker 2: to rescue them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's that's more or less where I am on this.
Speaker 1: And like there's the other thing that people are pointing
Speaker 1: out is like there was just this horrific hundreds of
Speaker 1: people you drowned and another one of those boats. That's yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, I actually have kind of like
Speaker 1: a slightly off the mainstream take about that, which is
Speaker 1: like the thing people are saying is, well, it's fucked
Speaker 1: up that this's got so much more attention than that. Yes,
Speaker 1: it definitely is, but it's also like not particularly surprising.
Speaker 1: Like if you think back, because I started, I started
Speaker 1: covering like refugees moving from kind of northern Africa to
Speaker 1: through Europe back in twenty fifteen, I was on the
Speaker 1: refugee trail for a while and it was a huge story.
Speaker 1: People paid a lot of attention. There was a lot
Speaker 1: of aid coming in. You know, when that little boy
Speaker 1: I believe his name's parents Island Curdie drowned a few
Speaker 1: years back, like that was there was a massive amount
Speaker 1: of attention, and then it, because it happens so often,
Speaker 1: kind of just became normalized. Which is the thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: it happens with mash It's not just a thing that happens.
Speaker 1: It happens with fucking mass shootings, right Like it's this
Speaker 1: is a thing that happens because people can only sort
Speaker 1: of like be outraged or horrified about a thing they
Speaker 1: can't directly affect, you know, which is not to say
Speaker 1: that like more shouldn't be done, or that the fucking
Speaker 1: coastguards and some of these like Italy and whatnot are
Speaker 1: not doing nightmarish things, Yeah, stopping rescuers from coming in.
Speaker 1: But it's not surprising or really a mark that, like
Speaker 1: people are much worse than they've ever been. That like
Speaker 1: this unique story of a bunch of rich people dying
Speaker 1: in a sub visiting the Titanic got so much attention.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 1: That's just not a surprise. If like a thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: a bunch of wealthy merchants had disappeared on a sea
Speaker 1: voyage from like Venice to the coast of Spain, this
Speaker 1: would also be like there would be stories being sung
Speaker 1: in the market square about this shit. That's just how
Speaker 1: people are.
Speaker 2: But I guess it is a little bit why if
Speaker 2: given all that as true, which it is I believe
Speaker 2: as well, Like that is why I feel like derision
Speaker 2: is actually kind of an important part of this marketplace
Speaker 2: of ideas.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, I don't think that's wrong, but that's up
Speaker 1: to you know, people can make their own decisions. My
Speaker 1: job here is to let you know about the specific
Speaker 1: guy who was absolutely the worst in all of this,
Speaker 1: Because whatever you think about the other people on their boat,
Speaker 1: there is a villain of this story. There is a
Speaker 1: monster who who is directly and who would have gotten
Speaker 1: more people killed if he had the chance. And his
Speaker 1: name is fucking stocked In Rush.
Speaker 4: Really yeah, just I was just gonna say, just for
Speaker 4: context listeners, Robert, I've been doing this show for five
Speaker 4: years and this is the only topic where it's like, oh, Robert,
Speaker 4: do we have to and Robert's like, yeah, we fucking
Speaker 4: do so, Okay.
Speaker 1: It would be irresponsible for us not to try and
Speaker 1: do this.
Speaker 2: Just it's it truly is like, if you're gonna have
Speaker 2: this like Ann Rand ass name, you got to go
Speaker 2: out in an Ann Rand style.
Speaker 1: This is the vandis death ever Yeah, it's so it's
Speaker 1: so appropriate for like the guy that he is, that
Speaker 1: this that this happened. So let's talk about Stockton Rush. Now.
Speaker 1: The first thing you will have noticed is that, yeah,
Speaker 1: he sounds like he's got He sounds like a guy
Speaker 1: who would be in Galt's gulch, right, Like he's got
Speaker 1: a very yeah, an Atlas shrugged ass name. It's a
Speaker 1: dumb name. And the name like he has this dumb
Speaker 1: name because our special dead boy was named for two
Speaker 1: of his ancestors, Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush, both of
Speaker 1: whom signed the Declaration of Independence, which for rich white people.
Speaker 1: Was kind of like owning a foil charizard in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine, Like it was real special, you know. So yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's a twofer. He has a twofer. And speaking
Speaker 1: of owning Andrew, when you hear signed the Declaration of Independence,
Speaker 1: the first thing you should probably ask yourself is like,
Speaker 1: did this guy own people?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Right?
Speaker 1: I like, did this guy own human beings? Yeah? He
Speaker 1: sure did. Well, these guys, these guys both did right,
Speaker 1: that's so yeah, yeah, this shouldn't be surprising. I'm going
Speaker 1: to read you first some fun information about Richard Stockton,
Speaker 1: who is who Stockton University is named after, by the way,
Speaker 1: so that's cool. Quote. In Stockton's case, enslaved people worked
Speaker 1: in his family home, a property he called Morven, built
Speaker 1: after he inherited near Princeton, New Jersey in the seventeen fifties.
Speaker 1: When he died in seventeen eighty one, and despite assertions
Speaker 1: during his lifetime, Stockton did not free the people that
Speaker 1: he owned. They appear in his will when he bequeathed
Speaker 1: them along with his other property, to his wife, Annie Stockton.
Speaker 1: And whereas I have heretofore mentioned to some of my
Speaker 1: Negro slaves that upon condition of their good behavior and fidelity,
Speaker 1: I would, in some convenient period grant them their freedom.
Speaker 1: This I must leave to the discretion of my wife
Speaker 1: and whose judgment and prudence I can fully confide. So
Speaker 1: he's like, I promise these people I can free him,
Speaker 1: but I'm passing that buck down to my wife.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a prudent time for your freedom?
Speaker 1: Like is it piecesh?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Sorry, when's convenient for me for you to be free?
Speaker 1: Let me pencil that indie for you. Yeah, And it's
Speaker 1: like that's shitty. It's pretty normal shitty for the day,
Speaker 1: which doesn't make it less bad, but like, yeah, he's
Speaker 1: a pretty normal, rich, slave owning asshole, Richard Stockton. It's also,
Speaker 1: interestingly enough, there's a pretty good chance that he turned
Speaker 1: trader against the United States. He was like arrested by
Speaker 1: the British. No one knows quite. It doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: there's like conclusive evidence about what he did, but he
Speaker 1: got kind of led off, and there were rumors that
Speaker 1: maybe he'd like given up information and stuff. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: don't seem to have. Yeah, he's a snitch, right, He's
Speaker 1: a slave owning switch.
Speaker 3: Finally got him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he decided finally got took care of that snitch.
Speaker 1: Put an end to that family line. Benedict Arnold's descendancer. Next, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Tom Arnold, better watch the fuck out, They're coming for him.
Speaker 3: Stay out of the water, homing, Stay out of the water.
Speaker 1: So, uh, let's talk next about his other ancestor, Benjamin Rush.
Speaker 1: This is a somewhat more complex story, and as Rush
Speaker 1: authored one of the first major pieces of abolition writing
Speaker 1: in the colonies, a seventeen seventy three pamphlet titled and
Speaker 1: Addressed to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America
Speaker 1: upon slave Keeping. Now that sounds pretty good. Benjamin Rush
Speaker 1: was an ardent and active abolitionist. He helped organize the
Speaker 1: first anti slavery group, and he eventually named the Pencil,
Speaker 1: which was eventually named the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Interestingly, you know,
Speaker 1: we talk a lot on the show about how many
Speaker 1: abolitionists were still real racist, right, like you could be
Speaker 1: an abolitionist and super racist. Benjamin Rush was, interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: one of the guys who argued ardently that black people
Speaker 1: were as smart and capable as anyone else. He authored
Speaker 1: a seventeen eighty nine article about the first free black
Speaker 1: physician named James Durham, and he also wrote about an
Speaker 1: enslaved black mathematician named Thomas Fuller. He was like kind
Speaker 1: of writing anti racism tracts back in the seventeen eighties,
Speaker 1: which is pretty cool. Here's here's where it stops being
Speaker 1: cool because he was publicly an anti racist, but privately
Speaker 1: he bought an enslaved black man named William Gruber and
Speaker 1: held him in bondage as his cook for more than
Speaker 1: a decade.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I mean I think that's that, Like, that's
Speaker 2: obviously there's all kinds of you know, any combination of
Speaker 2: politics can exist, as we all see obviously in rarer
Speaker 2: rare proportions. But it does sound like also there's some
Speaker 2: version of like, you know, oh, black people are an inferior.
Speaker 2: We're just lucky that we could enslave though, like what
Speaker 2: a what a boon?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's it's really it's it's kind of fascinating,
Speaker 1: like the like, what's going on with this guy because
Speaker 1: like he buys William Grueber, He like he doesn't just
Speaker 1: keep him as a cook, but he hires him out
Speaker 1: for profit to other families. Now he files manumission papers
Speaker 1: for William in seventeen eighty eight, but that doesn't actually
Speaker 1: free Gruber until seventeen ninety three, when he kind of
Speaker 1: lets him go with the equivalent of a letter of
Speaker 1: recommendation and a write up I found on the University
Speaker 1: of Pennsylvania Library's website seems to argue that Rush was
Speaker 1: probably probably kept it a secret that he'd owned Gruber
Speaker 1: because he's this public anti racist, so he would like
Speaker 1: hide the fact that he was keeping a man enslaved
Speaker 1: in his home because he's like a public intellectual who
Speaker 1: argued with racists in like these tracts at essays and
Speaker 1: stuff that he was printing, and it wouldn't have looked good.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to read a quote from the University
Speaker 1: of Pennsylvania Library here. When Gruber died in seventeen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: Rush wrote a remembrance of him in his Commonplace book.
Speaker 1: It appears in the Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. In it,
Speaker 1: he described Gruber as a Native African whom I bought
Speaker 1: and liberated after he had served me for ten years.
Speaker 1: The period is not likely accurate. He described Gruber's change
Speaker 1: from a drunkard who swore frequently to a sober, moral
Speaker 1: man and faithful and affectionate servant. He remembered especially a
Speaker 1: night in seventeen eighty seven when Rush gravely ill was
Speaker 1: expected to die and Williams stayed up with him all night.
Speaker 1: So he wrote manumission papers for this guy, like the
Speaker 1: year after this dude helped like carry him through a
Speaker 1: deadly illness, but still didn't free him for half a decade.
Speaker 1: Like that's that's so weird. I guess it's not. You know,
Speaker 1: at least he did free him. I don't know where
Speaker 1: you want to put that, Like, I mean, I think it.
Speaker 2: Is like very hard to like, no matter, Yeah, I mean, look,
Speaker 2: this is at all levels. I mean obviously, when Chattle
Speaker 2: slavery was around, hypocrisy is probably a lot bigger deal.
Speaker 2: But obviously we all participated some level of capitalistic hypocrisy,
Speaker 2: you know, and this is a fucking insane version of that.
Speaker 2: But it is like, you know, sub version of like
Speaker 2: everyone else is doing it, and like, oh, at least
Speaker 2: I wrote these papers. He's like the uh, the Lena
Speaker 2: Dunmer of his day.
Speaker 1: Like fu, yeah, he's like he's Lena Dunnaming. He's done
Speaker 1: himing pretty hard, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's I think where we're gonna leave this guy.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's interesting. I don't claim to be an
Speaker 1: expert about either of these men, but the fact that
Speaker 1: Benjamin Rush publicly portrayed himself as an abolitionist and a
Speaker 1: crusader against racism while owning an enslaved black man could
Speaker 1: be seen as evidence of what seems to be a
Speaker 1: long running family trait that gets passed down to our
Speaker 1: boys Stocked and Rush, which is the ability to act
Speaker 1: like one kind of dude while being the opposite kind
Speaker 1: of dude.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I god, I mean it's obviously so fucked up.
Speaker 2: But if you signed the Declaration of Independence and you
Speaker 2: only have one slave, you're probably for your peer group
Speaker 2: on the better side of things.
Speaker 1: Right Yeah. I Like, I don't know how you want
Speaker 1: to like mark that out, because also I don't know
Speaker 1: is it better or worse to just be like, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I own slaves because I think it's fine, or to
Speaker 1: be like I think it. I know it's wrong to
Speaker 1: own slaves, and I know it's wrong, Like I know
Speaker 1: racism is bad, but also I'm going to do it,
Speaker 1: you know, Like, where do we land on that. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, this isn't Pepe. You should think
Speaker 1: about that, all of you. But like I, behind the
Speaker 1: bastards is not where we'll make that moral deciding line
Speaker 1: or anyway. They're all bastards. It's fine, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: So that that is beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Speaker 1: So both the Stockton and Rush families continue to be
Speaker 1: very wealthy and powerful throughout the life of the new
Speaker 1: United States. Gradually the two families get intertwined through marriage.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a pretty incestuous breed rich people in
Speaker 1: the Northeast. In eighteen ninety seven, their descendant, Ralph K.
Speaker 1: Davies was born. Dave's got a job working as an
Speaker 1: office boy for a company called Standard Oil. When he
Speaker 1: was fifteen. He rose through the ranks and became the
Speaker 1: youngest director in company history. In World War Two, he
Speaker 1: was FDR's petroleum administrator, which is maybe the least directly
Speaker 1: evil job a member of the oil and gas industry
Speaker 1: ever held. It's like the one job where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, it was World War Two, we probably needed
Speaker 1: somebody doing that.
Speaker 3: I don't know, right, yeah, I guess.
Speaker 2: Look, it's like we're going to go through Stockton, Russia's
Speaker 2: ancestry grading on a curve. He's okay, but that curve is.
Speaker 1: He is the member of this guy's family. You're gonna
Speaker 1: hate the least for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So after the war, Davies moved to San Francisco and
Speaker 1: his wife became a major patron of the art scene.
Speaker 1: She basically paid for the San Francisco Symphonies Music Hall,
Speaker 1: or they donated like four million dollars to it. Her
Speaker 1: name is still on the venue. And I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote from an article in SFGate dot com. Here at
Speaker 1: a high society ball in nineteen fifty seven, Ralph UIs
Speaker 1: Davies's daughter Ellen met Richard Stockton Rush Junior. A month later,
Speaker 1: the pair were engaged coverage of their wedding, accompanied by
Speaker 1: a huge photo in the San Francisco Examiners said they
Speaker 1: were settling down in Berkeley talk Rush, as he was known,
Speaker 1: also settled into the Davies family's line of work, serving
Speaker 1: as the chairman for Peregrine Oil and Gas Company in
Speaker 1: Burlingham and the Natomis Company in San Francisco. His two
Speaker 1: thousand Princeton Alumni Weekly obituary noted that He even served
Speaker 1: as the president elect of the city's infamous Bohemian club,
Speaker 1: which is the Bohemian Grove Group, Right, like, that's who
Speaker 1: runs that. So wait, I don't even know what that
Speaker 1: is Bohemian Groves. That it's in the Redwoods, kind of
Speaker 1: near the Bay area, and it's where it's where like
Speaker 1: Henry Kissinger and all, like Dick Cheney all go to
Speaker 1: party once a yeares Alex Jones snuck in once.
Speaker 4: And I think all your least favorite people's favorite.
Speaker 1: Hang everyone who sucks loves the Bohemian Growth and there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of It's like in conspiracy world. It's like
Speaker 1: where the secret Masters of the world all meet to plot.
Speaker 1: And it also is kind of where the secret masters
Speaker 1: of the world all meet to plot.
Speaker 2: So right, well, it's the the conspiracy is it's secret masters,
Speaker 2: as the reality is, it's the masters.
Speaker 3: Everyone does.
Speaker 1: It's Hank Kissinger and fucking Cheney and stuff. Yeah, of course,
Speaker 1: And it's it's interesting. I haven't seen this breakout widely
Speaker 1: onto the internet yet, but there, I'm we've already started
Speaker 1: to see conspiracy theories flowing like water through a crack
Speaker 1: in a submersibles hole. Here David Concannon, who's a legal advisor.
Speaker 1: He's like the lawyer guy for Oceangate, the company that
Speaker 1: Stockton founds is a hiss R we name. Yeah. He
Speaker 1: like within hours of this going missing, he was kind
Speaker 1: of trying to drum up conspiracy theories, posting stuff like,
Speaker 1: you know, we're working on this hard, but like the
Speaker 1: US government isn't helping us, you know, if they don't
Speaker 1: fix this and come to our a and I'm going
Speaker 1: to make sure the world knows the names of the
Speaker 1: people who didn't do their jobs. And that's led to
Speaker 1: like I found a fucking like Donald Trump Junior has
Speaker 1: been posting shit about how like everything about this is sketchy.
Speaker 1: You know, why are they doing this? I'm seeing people
Speaker 1: talk about how like, oh, you know, how would billionaires
Speaker 1: have made a decision so dumb is to go down?
Speaker 2: If I don't know, I mean, there's no way billionaires
Speaker 2: would would do something less stupid.
Speaker 3: And it's like, first of all, also like putting that on.
Speaker 2: Twitter is remarkably like like particularly bonkers. It's like, this
Speaker 2: is Twitter is to the extent that it serves any
Speaker 2: function now is it's such a direct demonstration that not
Speaker 2: only are billionaires not better than you, they are actively
Speaker 2: stupider than you in any conceivable way. Well, yeah, in
Speaker 2: every conceivable way except for the one thing they made
Speaker 2: their billions in modulus luck.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's it's like, I, I there's so I
Speaker 1: when I think about like what probably conspiracy culture is
Speaker 1: going to take of this. There's a conspiracy that's existed
Speaker 1: for a while. It's never been like kind of top
Speaker 1: of the world. But like, uh, there's a theory that
Speaker 1: you that I came across started coming across I don't know,
Speaker 1: years ago, that like the Iceper, the Titanic was blown
Speaker 1: up by a bomb because a number of the rich
Speaker 1: guys on it, like John jacob Astor were against, uh,
Speaker 1: moving away from the gold standard and establishing the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 1: It's one of those kind of things, right, right, right,
Speaker 1: And so part of like what people are pointing out
Speaker 1: is that Stockton Rush's wife is like she had relatives
Speaker 1: who are on the Titanic. They're actually in James Cameron's movie.
Speaker 1: They're the two old people who are like cuddling on
Speaker 1: that bed as it goes down. And so there's I
Speaker 1: suspect I've already seen some of this. I suspect we're
Speaker 1: going to see more like, oh, this is like a conspiracy.
Speaker 1: These guys we're gonna, you know, had some dirt on
Speaker 1: Biden or whatever and in what the Fed's doing with
Speaker 1: interest rates or some shit. It's silly, I will tell
Speaker 1: you right now. The fact that Stockton had relatives in
Speaker 1: the Bohemian Club is definitely you're gonna wind up seeing
Speaker 1: this on some YouTube videos that the algorithm serves you
Speaker 1: at some point. Right, Just be ready for it, folks,
Speaker 1: It's a coming. So that's Stockton's family background. He is
Speaker 1: the scion of two very wealthy families who got wealthy
Speaker 1: through a mix of slavery and exploiting the Earth's resources
Speaker 1: in the most poisonous way possible. Right, this guy, he
Speaker 1: grows up his family's worth probably hundreds of millions of dollars,
Speaker 1: at least tens of millions of dollars, and he grows
Speaker 1: up with that amount of money. In a twenty seventeen
Speaker 1: Bloomberg profile, he described his family wealth this way. Rush
Speaker 1: earned his money the old fashioned way. He says, I
Speaker 1: was born into it and then grew it. I don't know,
Speaker 1: that's not really the old faction I guess it is
Speaker 1: it is.
Speaker 2: I don't know, man in reality, unfortunately, that is the
Speaker 2: most I guess that's not right.
Speaker 3: The way to be rich is by rich.
Speaker 1: I got it the old fashioned way. My grand parrots yeah,
Speaker 1: and he notes that like his grandpa made his fortune
Speaker 1: in oil and gas in Indonesia, which I'm sure makes
Speaker 1: it sketchier because like boy howdy, there's not a great
Speaker 1: history of extractive industries in Indonesia, So I don't know
Speaker 1: when Stockton was born. Actually that maybe out by the
Speaker 1: time you hear this. It's interesting, I kind of when
Speaker 1: I was started looking into him, I was surprised to
Speaker 1: see that despite how high profile his clientele is and
Speaker 1: the fact that like he'd been in a number of
Speaker 1: prominent news articles prior to this. When I started working
Speaker 1: on this, at least Stockton had no Wikipedia page. There
Speaker 1: was no like single Stockton Rush entry on Wikipedia. Oh wild,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't able to find an exact reference to
Speaker 1: his birth date. One article that I read notes that
Speaker 1: he was eighteen when he got his pilot's license in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty, which would mean he was born in sixty
Speaker 1: two thereabouts. Be beat motherfuckers, Hey, Robert here from the future.
Speaker 1: Since we recorded this, a number of official obituaries have
Speaker 1: come out for Old Stockton, and we now have an
Speaker 1: actual birth date for him. The New York Times gives
Speaker 1: it as March thirty first, nineteen sixty two, in the
Speaker 1: place as San Francisco. I'm leaving in the conversation we
Speaker 1: had around it before we knew that, because it gives
Speaker 1: good context as to how actually, like relatively unknown this
Speaker 1: guy was prior to the disaster, which I find interesting
Speaker 1: considering how connected he is to so many like rich
Speaker 1: and super famous people that like very little about this
Speaker 1: dude before he became very suddenly famous. One of the
Speaker 1: things that I use sometimes for research is an AI
Speaker 1: powered search engine called find Phi n D, which is
Speaker 1: basically like it's nice because you can kind of ask
Speaker 1: it direct questions and it'll scrape the internet trying to
Speaker 1: answer it. And so I asked it when was he?
Speaker 1: After I couldn't find a birth date. I was like,
Speaker 1: for shits and giggles, hey, when was this guy born?
Speaker 1: And Find was also like, there doesn't appear to be
Speaker 1: a clear exact birth date for it. There's not a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there also doesn't appear to be a clear exact answer
Speaker 1: as to where he was born. Some articles suggest he
Speaker 1: was born in the UK, other say California. Given how
Speaker 1: Rich's family is, that it's possible, like it's not weird
Speaker 1: for like Rich people don't care.
Speaker 2: He was probably born born on the private plane, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 2: exactly between those two points.
Speaker 1: He's a child of the sky.
Speaker 2: He was born and super positioned in Schroer's box somewhere.
Speaker 3: I mean it's.
Speaker 2: Also I was, you know, not not to go down
Speaker 2: the AI route, which is not remotely what we're talking
Speaker 2: about today, but.
Speaker 3: It is like this this guy will be given that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was so little apparently like like reliable stuff
Speaker 2: written about him. It does feel like this is he's
Speaker 2: going to be one of those examples of like almost
Speaker 2: every word generated about him will have AI in it already.
Speaker 2: He's just like he's like corrupt data for the data
Speaker 2: set already.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Like most of my sources for this, I
Speaker 1: tried to stick to stuff that was written three, four
Speaker 1: or five years ago before all this happened, just because like,
Speaker 1: well that it wasn't tainted by what happened later you
Speaker 1: get more information about how the media was kind of
Speaker 1: covering him and stuff. But I think you are right
Speaker 1: about this because, like he wasn't really a major figure
Speaker 1: until he got all those people guilt.
Speaker 2: The bulk of shit, the bulk of shit written about
Speaker 2: him is gonna be lies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really Yeah. I think you're actually exactly correct
Speaker 1: about that, Andrew. And you know who else loves to lie,
Speaker 1: the sponsors of this podcast. You cannot trust a fucking
Speaker 1: word that they say, So please give them your credit
Speaker 1: card information. How is that, Sophie? Is that a good
Speaker 1: Is that a good ad plug?
Speaker 4: I think the Regan coin ad people would like it
Speaker 4: very much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, buy a Reagan coin.
Speaker 3: Fucking moral that's so wild.
Speaker 1: I love the Reagan the coin, and I love our listeners.
Speaker 3: Here's a.
Speaker 1: Ah good times. So we're back. Andrews got his Reagan coins. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this.
Speaker 3: Is real money.
Speaker 2: This is company script on my private plot of lands.
Speaker 1: Yeah. As soon as his Reagan coin arrived, David Zaslov
Speaker 1: sent him a letter saying like, now you're now you're
Speaker 1: one of us, You're one of the secret masters of
Speaker 1: the world. I want to go to Bohemian grove, Andrew te.
Speaker 3: I mean again, what's it not to take a diversion.
Speaker 2: But Zaslav really feels like like all the billionaires got
Speaker 2: together just before this writer strike and had like a
Speaker 2: dinner for schmucks kind of thing to ye, like who's
Speaker 2: the most repellent.
Speaker 3: Of us, Who's going to take the heat from everyone else?
Speaker 3: And he won? Slash lost. I was gonna doesn't realize
Speaker 3: he lost.
Speaker 1: I was gonna make like Nerdier reference about it, but
Speaker 1: but I don't know. We'll keep it. Nobody wants to
Speaker 1: hear my warhammer forty thousand jokes. So stocked and Rush
Speaker 1: probably born in nineteen sixty two. It's yeah, he hard
Speaker 1: to say exactly. Was probably very likely born in California.
Speaker 1: Certainly grew up in the Bay Area. As a we lad.
Speaker 1: He was obsessed with space travel, and he wanted nothing
Speaker 1: more than to be an astronaut. His parents assumed he'd
Speaker 1: grow out of that, as most kids do, but since
Speaker 1: they were super wealthy oligarchs, they were able to humor
Speaker 1: him by introducing him to a real astronaut, Pete Conrad,
Speaker 1: the commander of Apollo twelve and the First Man's Skylabih
Speaker 1: just like, well, he wants to be an astronaut, let's
Speaker 1: go find a nag go find an astronaut dotting it
Speaker 1: really bring him in bias an Apollo twelve man, like
Speaker 1: he's a Gi Joe.
Speaker 2: It really. We're also at the point where it's like
Speaker 2: that now that like some individuals, these billionaires start to
Speaker 2: have resources of countries. Yeah, like nothing is off the table,
Speaker 2: especially if you want to do it on the cheap
Speaker 2: for incredibly you know, shitty and unethically.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. I'm thinking about when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: I wanted to be a paleontologist for a while, like
Speaker 1: every kid who grew up in the era of Jurassic Park. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And we went to like I think it was the
Speaker 1: Saint Louis Natural History Museum one day and there was
Speaker 1: like they had an exhibit where there was like an
Speaker 1: actual paleontologist and a bunch of like things that they
Speaker 1: had brought out of a dig site and were actively
Speaker 1: like cleaning off. And I got to like like shake
Speaker 1: that guy's hand and he like walked us around. It
Speaker 1: was like part of a thing like a bunch of
Speaker 1: other like families and stuff where they're It was like
Speaker 1: one of the best single moments of my childhood. And
Speaker 1: for Stockton, the equivalent of that is like, bring the
Speaker 1: skylamb man over to the house, have him talk to
Speaker 1: the boy, right, I mean, he's.
Speaker 3: They're at the level of wealth.
Speaker 2: Like if he'd liked dinosaurs, they would simply have had
Speaker 2: to get him eight din yessor.
Speaker 1: They would have sponsored a dig and had him just
Speaker 1: like go, you know. Yeah. Anyway, So Stockton claims that
Speaker 1: Pete told him, you know, if you want to be
Speaker 1: a spaceman one day, you should get your pilot's license asap,
Speaker 1: which is, to be fair, probably pretty good astronaut advice.
Speaker 1: I don't know, not an astronaut, but that does seem
Speaker 1: like step one in that Bloomberg article, which is, as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, I think the first detailed
Speaker 1: article about Stockton Rush's life and ambitions. Stockton claims to
Speaker 1: have started work as a professional pilot when he was nineteen. Quote.
Speaker 1: Rush has been investing in startup companies most of his
Speaker 1: adult life, while also working at aviation. He was a
Speaker 1: commercial jet transport pilot at nineteen and later a flight
Speaker 1: test engineer for McDonald Douglas. Now that's not the most
Speaker 1: detailed version of his early life that I found. In
Speaker 1: a Smithsonian magazine profile from twenty nineteen, he gives a
Speaker 1: little more detail and some of its contradictory because in
Speaker 1: that he says that at age eighteen, he became one
Speaker 1: of the youngest commercial pilots in the world. From what
Speaker 1: I could done, what I think happened is he got
Speaker 1: his license at eighteen. He started working a year or
Speaker 1: two later. But like once he started to get more famous,
Speaker 1: he started lying and saying that like, oh no, I
Speaker 1: was the youngest commercial pilot ever. You know, just a
Speaker 1: little bit of that fluff cycle, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's also there's also like you when your parents are
Speaker 3: rich enough, you know what? You know what?
Speaker 2: By what definition are you saying commercial pilot like someone
Speaker 2: who is compensated to move cargo from one place to another.
Speaker 2: Like that's also daddy giving you you you're allowances, say,
Speaker 2: take my luggage to wear out.
Speaker 1: That's interesting, Andrew, because the first article about him just
Speaker 1: says he was a commercial dreatshit transport pilot. You want
Speaker 1: to guess where he was working when he started his
Speaker 1: pilot career, You want to guess who his employer was.
Speaker 1: So yeah, remember his parents, both sides of his his
Speaker 1: mom and his dad's family are both huge oil and
Speaker 1: gas families helping to run major oil and gas companies.
Speaker 1: And Stockton's first flying job is taking chartered planes into
Speaker 1: and out of Saudi Arabia. He's working for the Saudis
Speaker 1: he as a teenage boy.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, Yeah that is I mean, that's but
Speaker 2: that's also the billionaire version of I drove my friend's kids,
Speaker 2: my parents' friends kids around.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a babysitter essentially a babysitter.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, Like my mom would help me,
Speaker 1: like talk to you know, when I first started mowing lawn.
Speaker 1: She'd be like, well, let's go over to the neighbors
Speaker 1: and see if they need like their lawn mode and stuff.
Speaker 1: And for his equivalent is like, well, the king of
Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia needs like a pilot to take I don't know,
Speaker 1: probably torture supplies or whatever to fucking re odd.
Speaker 3: Like this is this is this is a very very
Speaker 3: dumb tangent.
Speaker 2: But for some reason, the algorithm on Instagram has decided
Speaker 2: I want to see Saudi fast food reviews.
Speaker 1: Oh shit, I bet they got I bet they're good
Speaker 1: fast food in Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 2: It looks wonderful, it looks it's I mean, it's It's
Speaker 2: so funny the way culture works. It's like they're all
Speaker 2: like speaking Arabic in the exact same like TikTok cadence
Speaker 2: as like English language TikTokers. I don't I don't speak,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't. I don't know what they're saying.
Speaker 2: But I'm like, okay, this is amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm able to pick up a lot more than
Speaker 1: I otherwise would because you're like using the same patterns
Speaker 1: as talkers all the way in the world.
Speaker 3: The fast food looks great.
Speaker 2: Burger King in Riod looks quite good.
Speaker 1: I will say, the best fucking Popeyes I've ever eaten
Speaker 1: at was in the the airport and Aman Jordan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fucking incredible Popeyes. I think they've changed their standards.
Speaker 2: But KFC and Beijing, when I went a kid was
Speaker 2: they apparently still used lard to fry everything, and it
Speaker 2: was hell.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so good.
Speaker 1: I'll bet I'll bet. Yeah, not at all surprised here.
Speaker 1: The KFC in Beijing slaps so yeah. He while he's
Speaker 1: while he's working for the Saudi Royal family as a pilot,
Speaker 1: he's studying aerospace engineering at Princeton And yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: it's interesting you know that's that's that's a fun career.
Speaker 1: So he uh, he's he's called like his description of
Speaker 1: this is that it was the coolest summer job. Interesting
Speaker 1: way to phrase that.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: So he goes to school. He's doing aerospace engineering for
Speaker 1: his thesis. He builds his own plane from a kit, which,
Speaker 1: like that is like impressive. That sounds difficult. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It feels weird as a thesis because you are just
Speaker 1: kind of like following a kit. But why no, I'm
Speaker 1: not an engineer, you know.
Speaker 2: That's that's like putting in a little like ticking a
Speaker 2: lego set to your to your thesis.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't know that it would have been possible
Speaker 1: for him to not get his thesis, given the amount
Speaker 1: of money his parents probably gave to that school. But whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, I've never built a plane, so what do
Speaker 1: I know. I've also never built a death sub, so
Speaker 1: I guess I have that on him. So anyway, guys,
Speaker 1: that Smithsonian article continues. The astronaut dream was dashed when
Speaker 1: Rush learned that his eyesight wasn't good enough for him
Speaker 1: to become a military pilot in the nineteen eighty Still,
Speaker 1: the astronaut fast track so he kind of has the
Speaker 1: background of that kid from Little Miss Sunshine. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the that's the continuation of that dude's life. Instead, he
Speaker 1: moved to Seattle to work for McDonald douglas as a
Speaker 1: flight test engineer for F fifteen fighter jets, then went
Speaker 1: on to business school. Building on inherited money, he invested
Speaker 1: in a string of esoteric tech companies, wireless remote control devices,
Speaker 1: sonar systems. Still, he dreamed of going to space, perhaps
Speaker 1: as a passenger on one of the private rockets being
Speaker 1: developed in the early two thousands by the likes of
Speaker 1: Richard Branson. In fact, Rush traveled to the Mohave Desert
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four to watch the launch of
Speaker 1: Spaceship Ie, the first commercial craft sent into space. When
Speaker 1: Branson stood on its wing and declared that a new
Speaker 1: era space tourism had arrived, Rush says he abruptly lost interest.
Speaker 1: I had this epiphany that this was not at all
Speaker 1: what I wanted to do. I didn't want to go
Speaker 1: up in space as a tourist. I wanted to be
Speaker 1: Captain Kirk on the Enterprise. I wanted to explore.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot in that paragraph Jesus. First of
Speaker 1: all the articles I found, and again, no one's really
Speaker 1: done a super deep dive on this guy. They all
Speaker 1: kind of take his red from what he said, like
Speaker 1: he did he did one, he did one, but they
Speaker 1: all kind of take his red that like he built
Speaker 1: on his family wealth through smart investments and made a
Speaker 1: bunch more money. We don't actually know that, Like his
Speaker 1: family might just have been super rich. He may have
Speaker 1: been terrible at investing. We have no evidence actually that
Speaker 1: he was good at it that I've seen.
Speaker 2: Well, or with that amount of money, like he can
Speaker 2: he can even have made money and still like index
Speaker 2: funt yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh but yeah, even like with.
Speaker 2: His little like you know, investing shit, know, given the
Speaker 2: way the market is, the real question is like did
Speaker 2: he do better than yeah, like an index fund or
Speaker 2: like yeah, yeah, so who actually knew what the fuck
Speaker 2: they were doing. It's the same way like you know,
Speaker 2: Donald Trump has kind of made money at some point,
Speaker 2: but it's like, yeah, yeah, but did he do did
Speaker 2: he make enough money given how much he started with?
Speaker 1: Exactly? Yeah. It's I think that's like a fair way
Speaker 1: to look at it. It's also really interesting to me,
Speaker 1: super interesting to me. I think kind of is the
Speaker 1: key to understanding this dude that he loved the idea
Speaker 1: of spaceship one until he realized it was just someone
Speaker 1: else's spaceship for tourists, right yeah, because it's Branson's ship.
Speaker 1: If he gets on it, all he's going to be
Speaker 1: is a tourist. And he didn't want to be a
Speaker 1: paying customer, like visiting space is a casual, rich visitor.
Speaker 1: Now he describes as like, well, I wanted to explore.
Speaker 1: I wanted to be Captain Kirk. I don't think that's
Speaker 1: actually accurate either. I think he wanted to be Richard
Speaker 1: Branson selling tickets to rich, old white dudes who would
Speaker 1: worship him as a badass billionaire adventurer. Right yeah, like
Speaker 1: that's that's what this guy actually wanted. Now, the startup
Speaker 1: costs for this guy's rich. His family's rich. But like
Speaker 1: there's rich, and then there's being able to start your
Speaker 1: own space company rich. And this guy is not that rich.
Speaker 1: You know, his family doesn't have that kind of money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if he was looking, if he was actually that
Speaker 2: good an investor, he would have that kind of life.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, why didn't you Why didn't you get you
Speaker 1: make yourself a billionaire. First, pull yourself up by your
Speaker 1: boots stocked.
Speaker 3: Very very stupid people have accomplished that.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's it's not a high bar, you know,
Speaker 1: like Elon Musk has a rocket company and that dude, yeah,
Speaker 1: what a mess.
Speaker 2: Like the most patently stupid person. It's amazing.
Speaker 1: But you know, Musk is evidence that, like the market's
Speaker 1: starting to get crowded by kind of the the early
Speaker 1: to mid aught. So Stockton decides he's got to go
Speaker 1: somewhere else, somewhere where there's less billionaires getting involved, which
Speaker 1: at this point is the ocean right now. Stockton has
Speaker 1: always liked the ocean. He'd been a dedicated scuba diver
Speaker 1: most of his life. You know, he's rich, his family's
Speaker 1: going to all these exotic places on a regular basis
Speaker 1: for vacations. So he's done a bunch of diving all
Speaker 1: over the world. And he specifically he gets into because
Speaker 1: he moves up to Seattle as an adult and he
Speaker 1: does a lot of cold water diving off the coast
Speaker 1: of Seattle. Now, as he notes, the diving off of
Speaker 1: the Puget Sound is gorgeous, but it's like cold water
Speaker 1: diving is like a whole different beast from like regular
Speaker 1: open water or regular diving, right, like where you're in
Speaker 1: I don't know, like fucking I learned to dive in Okinawa,
Speaker 1: where the water is kind of a perfect comfortable temperature. Right,
Speaker 1: it's one of the best places in the world for diving.
Speaker 1: The Puget sound as cold as hell. So if you're
Speaker 1: going to dive there, you've got like special suits, you're
Speaker 1: carrying extra tanks. It's like more of a pain in
Speaker 1: the ass. And that's kind of how he describes it quote,
Speaker 1: I loved what I saw, but I thought there's got
Speaker 1: to be a better way. And being in a sub
Speaker 1: and being nice and cozy and having a hot chocolate
Speaker 1: with you beats the heck out of freezing and going
Speaker 1: through a two hour decompression hanging in deep water. Now
Speaker 1: that's funny for a couple of reasons, Like I don't know,
Speaker 1: Subs are fine, subs are cool, Like I think what
Speaker 1: James Cameron has done with his submersibles is like neat,
Speaker 1: But it is funny that this guy's like I wanted
Speaker 1: to be an explorer, but also I want my hot cocoa. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, Like read about what astronauts go through.
Speaker 1: It's not a comfortable process.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's you know, that's exactly the diletant that
Speaker 2: yeah winds up exactly.
Speaker 3: His path is like more perfect than it probably should
Speaker 3: have been, honestly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, he should have died a lot faster. Like
Speaker 1: if he'd gone to space, he wouldn't hacked it as well,
Speaker 1: because it's space is a whole mess. Like everybody's nasty
Speaker 1: up in space. They don't talk about that enough, but
Speaker 1: like the space stations smell terrible. If you read through
Speaker 1: the old Apollo transcripts, they're like regularly poop will get
Speaker 1: out and it'll just be like floating around the space ship.
Speaker 1: They'll be arguing about whose shits fly around. It's very funny. God, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't want to You wouldn't want to be drinking
Speaker 1: coco in that environment, I'll tell you that much. So
Speaker 1: since he was a very rich kid, he had the
Speaker 1: power to just kind of go out and spend money
Speaker 1: to make this expensive whim happen. But alas Stockton was
Speaker 1: stymied because there aren't a lot of private submarines. It's
Speaker 1: actually pretty uncommon for like just a dude to own
Speaker 1: a sub which is a shame because I did grow
Speaker 1: up reading the Illuminatus trilogy. I would like to, you know,
Speaker 1: it'd be cool to have a golden submarine that you
Speaker 1: run a global conspiracy from, but it's apparently a real
Speaker 1: pain in the ass to upkeep them.
Speaker 2: I think we were, you know, if you ever needed
Speaker 2: an illustration of why there's not a bunch of private subs, yeah, we.
Speaker 1: Did all get a reminder in twenty nineteen when that
Speaker 1: Smithsonian article came out, they said they are about one
Speaker 1: hundred private submarines across the entire world. Chartering them is
Speaker 1: extremely expensive. But Stockton kept digging until he found a
Speaker 1: company in London that had was like, we can sell
Speaker 1: you the parts and a kit to build a mini
Speaker 1: sub that was designed by a retired Navy sub commander.
Speaker 1: And like a kit, you love a kit, you love
Speaker 1: putting together your own submarine.
Speaker 2: But that is also like just this perfect example of
Speaker 2: these like rich kid billionaires like building a kit and
Speaker 2: presenting it as something you made.
Speaker 1: It is It is interesting. It's both because like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is fat like that it like as you said,
Speaker 1: but it also like I will say, if I'm going
Speaker 1: to trust someone to like take me in a submarine.
Speaker 4: It.
Speaker 1: I would prefer it be someone who knows what it's
Speaker 1: like to build a submarine from the ground up. Like
Speaker 1: I will say that that is probably where you'd start.
Speaker 1: So so far he's doing he's taking the right first step,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well the problem is there's two lessons, two pretty divergent
Speaker 2: lessons you could learn from that. One is like, wow,
Speaker 2: look at the care look at the difficulty. Building a
Speaker 2: submarine is no joke. And the other lesson that it
Speaker 2: looks like Stockton Moore took to heart.
Speaker 3: Is yeah, see it's easy.
Speaker 1: I have mastered the submarine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, building, building and designing a submarine is easy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And the sub he builds is a twelve foot
Speaker 1: one man sub So he's like lying flat in this
Speaker 1: thing with like his face directly over a porthole, and
Speaker 1: like that's the way this works. So when we say
Speaker 1: sub this is like almost more of like a diving suit,
Speaker 1: like a legit diving suit. Probably is would be like
Speaker 1: closer to what this is as opposed to like, you know,
Speaker 1: the red October right, Yeah, Sam Neil isn't fitting in
Speaker 1: this thing, you know. Quote while I was building the
Speaker 1: sub I was thinking, this is stupid. I should have
Speaker 1: just bought a robot and explored with that. But the
Speaker 1: moment I went underwater, I was like, oh, you can't
Speaker 1: describe this. When you go in a sub things sound different,
Speaker 1: they look different. It's like you've gone to a different planet.
Speaker 1: Rush was hooked. His entrepreneurial instincts were peaked. I had
Speaker 1: come across this business anomaly. I couldn't explain if three
Speaker 1: quarters of the planet is water, how come you can't
Speaker 1: access it? Now? Yeah, that's a fascinating thing to think.
Speaker 1: Where like he's underwater, alone in a submarine, looking at
Speaker 1: like the majesty of reef systems and underwater life that
Speaker 1: very few people get to see, and his immediate thought
Speaker 1: is like, why isn't this owned? Why haven't we enclosed
Speaker 1: this and turned this into like corporate property.
Speaker 2: Well and also though like clearly his like going further
Speaker 2: train of thought was not just like, Wow, this is
Speaker 2: amazing and beautiful.
Speaker 3: Why doesn't everyone do this?
Speaker 2: And instead of coming to the conclusion because it's very
Speaker 2: difficult and dangerous, he came to the conclusion because everyone
Speaker 2: else is stupid. I'm the only one that thought this
Speaker 2: is amazing and people should see this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, everyone is stupid. And he's not saying people shoul
Speaker 1: see this as much as he calls it a business anomaly,
Speaker 1: He's like, why aren't Why don't more businesses own the sea?
Speaker 1: Is his first thought? Right, he is an exploiter, He's
Speaker 1: not an explorer, right, that's his primary motivation, right, So
Speaker 1: his immediate goal is to start a business to build small,
Speaker 1: cheap submersible vehicles, which he thought could be lucrative for
Speaker 1: a variety of reasons. And when you read about the guy,
Speaker 1: you get the feeling more than anything. He sees this
Speaker 1: as his opportunity to become a self made billionaire and
Speaker 1: put himself on an even footing with guys like Branson
Speaker 1: and Musk. But the private submarine world, you know, it's
Speaker 1: never been huge. It's never been a big business to
Speaker 1: be a submarine owner, and it had pretty much collapsed
Speaker 1: by the early aughts. In his interview with the Smithsonian,
Speaker 1: Stockton Rush claims that there were two reasons for this.
Speaker 1: One of the big markets for private subs had been
Speaker 1: carrying what are called saturation divers to work underneath. So
Speaker 1: you've got oil rigs right in the ocean. They go
Speaker 1: down very deep and they need repair work done on
Speaker 1: them intense depths, and these are the kind of depths
Speaker 1: where you don't just like throw on an oxygen tank
Speaker 1: and go diving. Right. Number one, it's too deep. So
Speaker 1: when you're diving, you can go down pretty quickly, but
Speaker 1: going up you have to be extremely careful about how
Speaker 1: quickly you go up right otherwise you're gonna fucking die.
Speaker 1: So when you're going to intense depths like this, and
Speaker 1: you have to work, so you have to be able
Speaker 1: to spend a decent amount of time down there to
Speaker 1: do stuff. What they would do is they would put divers,
Speaker 1: and these divers don't have oxygen tanks. They have like
Speaker 1: special formulations of different kind of like chemicals that allow
Speaker 1: them to breathe in the specific like it's I don't know,
Speaker 1: we're not going to go into like how diving works.
Speaker 1: There's different stuff like nitrox. I'm not sure exactly what
Speaker 1: these guys were on, but they're wearing special suits, they've
Speaker 1: got special you know, mixtures in their tanks, and a
Speaker 1: submarine takes them down and takes them back up so
Speaker 1: that they can get on the sub and be in
Speaker 1: decompression without kind of running through all that way. They
Speaker 1: don't have to carry as much as many tanks and stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: this is was for a while kind of the only
Speaker 1: way to do repair work on this stuff, but it
Speaker 1: was extremely dangerous, Like this was one of the most
Speaker 1: dangerous jobs in the world. These guys died all the time,
Speaker 1: not because like the subs weren't safe, but because diving
Speaker 1: at that depth isn't like people just die for like
Speaker 1: no reason while diving. You know, like sometimes it's it's
Speaker 1: just like a you know, your heart stops or whatever.
Speaker 1: You get the wrong, you know, mix a shit in
Speaker 1: your blood. It's like it's very dangerous to dive, especially
Speaker 1: this kind of shit. So once oil and gas companies,
Speaker 1: once drones and stuff started being good enough, they moved
Speaker 1: away from having divers do this as much as possible
Speaker 1: and started having robots do it, which is like, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna give the oil and gas company a lot
Speaker 1: of credit, but I'm sure it was both more cost
Speaker 1: efficient and like, yeah, people, it's like a lot safer.
Speaker 1: So the other reason he claims was that or the
Speaker 1: other like business for private submarines was tourist subs, which
Speaker 1: could be skippered by anyone with a coastguard captain's license
Speaker 1: and were regular by the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three, which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection
Speaker 1: requirements and prohibited dives below one hundred and fifty feet.
Speaker 1: The law was well meaning, Rush says, but he believes
Speaker 1: it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation. So he's like,
Speaker 1: it sucks that they stopped having divers fixed oil rigs
Speaker 1: because they were all dive dying, and it sucks that
Speaker 1: they stopped. They wouldn't they won't let us take people
Speaker 1: below one hundred and fifty feet in subs because it
Speaker 1: keeps killing them.
Speaker 2: I mean, look, as far as money where your mouth is,
Speaker 2: he is the most like, like, you know, true believer, libertarian,
Speaker 2: bullshit guy. He was a you gotta handed to him.
Speaker 2: You have to hand it to him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you gotta hat. He did put his money where
Speaker 1: his mouth was. It is funny where you can there's
Speaker 1: just all these quotes where he's like, they're pointlessly focusing
Speaker 1: on safety over innovating. Maybe there's a reason for some
Speaker 1: of those SA dear regulations stocked it it truly.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, when all this was happening, the
Speaker 2: one of my like more fucked up thoughts was like,
Speaker 2: you know, obviously it wasn't likely that these guys were
Speaker 2: going to get rescued, but I was like the cost
Speaker 2: in the world where they are rescued, it will cost
Speaker 2: so many more lives in a lot of them.
Speaker 1: Like well, and it's you know, honestly, like this this
Speaker 1: will not be news to most people or a lot
Speaker 1: of people probably, but like you know, if you pay
Speaker 1: attention to like the world of people who do this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, and I have I have a buddy
Speaker 1: who there's a book called blind Man's Bluff if you
Speaker 1: want to read about kind of the shit that US
Speaker 1: and Russian subs got up to in the late Cold
Speaker 1: War era. It's a really good book. But like, basically,
Speaker 1: we used to have these fights between our submarines where
Speaker 1: they would try to force each other to surface, and
Speaker 1: it was insanely it's like chicken with nuclear submarines. It
Speaker 1: was insanely dangerous shit. But like talking to him and
Speaker 1: talking to like other people who were in that industry,
Speaker 1: anyone who has done this kind of like four there
Speaker 1: have been four submarine rescues that have been successful in
Speaker 1: the history of submarines, and none of them were very
Speaker 1: deep compared to where this thing was. There was never
Speaker 1: any chance of saving these people, I don't think. But anyway, whatever,
Speaker 1: that's not that's not what we've got to talk about.
Speaker 1: So we got to talk about. Yeah, one in a million.
Speaker 1: So Rush calls these these needless passenger safety prioritizations understandable
Speaker 1: butt a logical, which is very, very funny. But what
Speaker 1: we are what is interesting to me is that like
Speaker 1: the sub market falls apart. The real reason is that,
Speaker 1: number one, it's insanely dangerous the jobs that it was
Speaker 1: being used for, and we found better uses than submarines,
Speaker 1: better ways to fill those needs. And number two, once
Speaker 1: we started replacing, like the subs that were being used
Speaker 1: to transport divers and shit, the only real industry for
Speaker 1: private subs was private trips for rich people to see
Speaker 1: shit underwater. And the thing that people most wanted to
Speaker 1: see was the Titanic. And we're going to talk about that,
Speaker 1: but first, you know what's also Titanic The savings that
Speaker 1: you're gonna get if you purchase these products. And we're back,
Speaker 1: so we're talking about tourist trips to see the Titanic.
Speaker 1: So spoiler alert for those of you who haven't seen
Speaker 1: the movie, The Titanic went down on April fourteenth, nineteen twelve,
Speaker 1: with a shitload of people on it. Now, despite the
Speaker 1: fact that this is the most famous nautical disaster in history,
Speaker 1: when it happened, and for like decades after it happened,
Speaker 1: very basic details of what had actually gone down were
Speaker 1: seriously in doubt, which is weird because eyewitnesses saw the
Speaker 1: ship break in half the way that it does in
Speaker 1: the James Cameron movie, right, But when that happened, like
Speaker 1: scientists at the time, an awful lot of the kind
Speaker 1: of people who were building boats and were experts on
Speaker 1: this didn't think a ship could go down that way.
Speaker 1: I think the belief was that like it would basically
Speaker 1: get overwhelmed and like just kind of all sink at once.
Speaker 1: But they didn't think it could break that way. And
Speaker 1: because a lot of the eyewitnesses were like women, there
Speaker 1: was this like a lot of these people got like
Speaker 1: mocked and stuff by the like. Anyway, it was a
Speaker 1: whole It was a whole deal, which is to say that,
Speaker 1: like when people started going after the Titanic, there was
Speaker 1: a real reason to want to find it because, among
Speaker 1: other things, you might actually like give some closure to
Speaker 1: some of these people who had spent their lives being
Speaker 1: called crazy. I don't know whatever, there was a good
Speaker 1: scientific reason to want to find this thing, and the
Speaker 1: shit the cruise ship's resting place remained a mystery until
Speaker 1: a very cool dude named Bob Ballard got a secret
Speaker 1: contract from the US Navy in nineteen eighty five. Ballard
Speaker 1: Ballard is an oceanographer, and like Stockton, he'd always loved
Speaker 1: the sea. Unlike Rush, he turned this love into a
Speaker 1: lligent appreciation for the science of oceanography. And he gets
Speaker 1: brought in. He's basically been pitching I think I can
Speaker 1: find the Titanic, and the Department of Defense is like, well,
Speaker 1: we got these two US subs that went missing in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties and we don't really know what happened,
Speaker 1: but we'd like you to find them, and this Titanic thing,
Speaker 1: like will basically pretend that we're having you do that,
Speaker 1: and if you find our subs like that, you know
Speaker 1: this will work out for everybody. And I think he
Speaker 1: does find He finds those subs, and he also he
Speaker 1: finds the Titanic. Because Bob Ballard is very good at
Speaker 1: what he does. You know this is he's also the
Speaker 1: guy who finds the fucking Bismarck. And because he's the
Speaker 1: guy who finds the big dead boat, he could have
Speaker 1: claimed salvage rights to the wreck, which is like potitionally
Speaker 1: quite a bit of money and salvaging the Titanic. But
Speaker 1: because he's like a basically decent guy, Ballard was like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to mine the graveyard of several thousand
Speaker 1: people for profit. That seems that seems ghoulish. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: actually was like, I think that's grave robbing, so I
Speaker 1: don't really want to do that. But other people had
Speaker 1: no compunctions against renting deep sea vehicles and grabbing shit
Speaker 1: near the wreck to sell back on surface. And we're
Speaker 1: actually going to talk about those people because one of
Speaker 1: them winds up on Stockton. Russia's death sub kind of
Speaker 1: the biggest of them. But over the next year, some
Speaker 1: fifty five hundred artifacts from the titan Over the next
Speaker 1: eighteen years, some fifty five hundred artifacts from the Titanic
Speaker 1: are sold or put in the Titanic Museum. Bob later
Speaker 1: wrote it had turned into an ugly carnival and a
Speaker 1: front to the fate of the Titanic. And all those
Speaker 1: who had lost their lives in her final hours. Now,
Speaker 1: this grave robbing is done by mere subs which are
Speaker 1: leased by the from the Russian government during a period
Speaker 1: in which like this is kind of the late eighties
Speaker 1: early nineties, like right after the Soviet Union fall, so
Speaker 1: like the Russians, Yeah, they're kind of needing money, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So my analogous.
Speaker 2: Biggest regret is when I did a semester in Beijing.
Speaker 2: One of the things that this is this will show
Speaker 2: my age a little bit, but the Chinese, the Red
Speaker 2: Arvy was enough up for sale that apparently you could
Speaker 2: drive out to the desert and for one hundred dollars
Speaker 2: shoot a rocket propelled grenade into a car.
Speaker 1: Absolutely worth it. That's a good price. That's a solid price. Andrew,
Speaker 1: I didn't. I was too I take that deal every
Speaker 1: day of the week. It was very, very sketchy. So
Speaker 1: I didn't end up doing it, but I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: now I wish.
Speaker 4: I had it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is you know, you got to be careful
Speaker 1: anytime people are offering you rocket propelled grenade launchers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: But it is like you know, the and it's one
Speaker 1: of those things we're talking about how insane this Titanic,
Speaker 1: you know, tourism thing was. I actually chatted on fucking
Speaker 1: Twitter with some guy who said he went to see
Speaker 1: the Titanic on one of these mere subs. This is
Speaker 1: pretty safe. These are actual submarines, right, like with actual
Speaker 1: cruise and stuff, like, they're rated to be doing this.
Speaker 1: Nothing bad happens.
Speaker 3: Do this right.
Speaker 1: We can talk about like the grave robbing and the
Speaker 1: ethics of that, but like James Cameron phil films the
Speaker 1: opening scenes of Titanic, those like opening underwater scenes on
Speaker 1: one of these mere submarines, you know, and for a while,
Speaker 1: this is a pretty good way to get down there.
Speaker 1: The runaway success of Cameron's movie of the same name
Speaker 1: ignites a new Titanic fever in the hearts of people
Speaker 1: around the globe. And suddenly there's this kind of burgeoning
Speaker 1: fan And there had always been since the Titanic went down,
Speaker 1: people have been obsessed with this, but obviously the movie
Speaker 1: takes that to another fucking level. There's all these people
Speaker 1: who kind of make the ship and its story the
Speaker 1: center of there. It becomes a fandom, you know.
Speaker 2: Ye.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and five, a company called Deep Ocean Expeditions,
Speaker 1: decides to offer very wealthy clientele trips down to the
Speaker 1: most famous grave in history, and over the next few
Speaker 1: years they take one hundred and ninety seven tourists there
Speaker 1: and back again. From that Bloomberg article quote, the last
Speaker 1: of those trips took place in twenty twelve, the one
Speaker 1: hundredth anniversary of the Titanic sinking. Russia assumed that mint
Speaker 1: the market was exhausted. Then he talked to Rob McCallum,
Speaker 1: the British born adventurer who led the trips. McCallum told
Speaker 1: Rush that the only reason the trips had stopped was
Speaker 1: that the Russians quit renting out the mears, which have
Speaker 1: since been mothballed. There was never an end in sight
Speaker 1: to our market, McCallum says, we just didn't have the machines.
Speaker 1: So now he's like, oh, well, there's a market, and like,
Speaker 1: nobody's serving this shit as a capitalist, you know nature
Speaker 1: capitalism abhors a vacuum. This is this is how I'm
Speaker 1: gonna make my fucking fortune. So he feels like he
Speaker 1: stumbled upon a great idea and the way he puts
Speaker 1: it in that interview with Bloomberg, which lists some of
Speaker 1: his earlier ideas for how to monetize submercivals, and a
Speaker 1: paragraph that is extremely fucking noteworthy. This keys you into
Speaker 1: kind of the most important stuff about what he was
Speaker 1: really planning to do here. Up to that point, Rush
Speaker 1: had been thinking about unexplored rex hydrothermal vents and bizarro
Speaker 1: sea creatures, not to mention the many ways a capable
Speaker 1: sub could be leased out to an oil and gas
Speaker 1: company to service under sea wells and oil plats, or
Speaker 1: do were research institution to do surveys of sea cucumbers,
Speaker 1: or to the CIA, NSA, d i A to do
Speaker 1: whatever it is that spooks do on the floor of
Speaker 1: the ocean. So that that's this guy's ethical basis. He's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, raping the world for the oil and gas industry,
Speaker 1: discovering sea creatures, spying on people for the CIA, all
Speaker 1: equally valid. It's so funny, like he is. This man
Speaker 1: has the moral center of like a fucking donut. It's
Speaker 1: so funny. We did not lose a paragon of virtue here.
Speaker 1: I am truly grateful that Bloomberg profile exists because it
Speaker 1: makes very clear the fact that this guy never cared
Speaker 1: about exploration or expanding the frontiers of human knowledge. He
Speaker 1: was an adrenaline junkie who liked planes and subs and
Speaker 1: wanted to become a billionaire doing something that he thought
Speaker 1: was cool. He'd have been happy helping Exon frack the
Speaker 1: Marianna's trench if that had worked out for him, But
Speaker 1: it just so happens that there was a bigger mar
Speaker 1: for the initially at least in catering to Titanic weirdos.
Speaker 1: So he started pouring money into building a new deep
Speaker 1: sea submersible, the Cyclops, and then the Cyclops too. You know,
Speaker 1: he takes these guys down, he tests them out, he
Speaker 1: starts getting seed capital from fins and family. He's putting
Speaker 1: a shitload of his own money into this, to the
Speaker 1: tune of maybe tens of millions of dollars, and at
Speaker 1: first he can't really get any big investors involved. For
Speaker 1: pretty good reasons, Stockton cannot get to the Titanic, right,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people are like, well, he probably
Speaker 1: is never going to get to the Titanic. At present,
Speaker 1: I think there are four other vehicles on Earth capable
Speaker 1: of reaching that thing with people in them, and they're
Speaker 1: all owned by various governments. The Chinese Jhaolong submersible is
Speaker 1: capable of going down the furthest For a while. Famously,
Speaker 1: James Cameron had the deep Sea Challenger, which had proved
Speaker 1: that a rich maniac could have a submersible constructed for
Speaker 1: this kind of feet. But the Deep Sea Challenger, it's
Speaker 1: not the sort of thing, and I don't think of
Speaker 1: these are that you can fit a bunch of customers in, right, ye,
Speaker 1: Like the deep the way it works, You've got like
Speaker 1: this kind of superstructure that's this sort of weird almost
Speaker 1: cylindrical shape right around it. But the actual thing that
Speaker 1: a dude is in and that like the cameras and
Speaker 1: stuff are, as far as I can tell, is like
Speaker 1: a sphere, because a sphere is the is good for pressure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's also like by the time that that a
Speaker 1: Stockton's working on this, the Deep Sea Challenger is not
Speaker 1: operational anymore. There was like it took some damage just
Speaker 1: like because it's this is tough on a vehicle, and
Speaker 1: then there's like a car accident while it's being transported
Speaker 1: and they're like, well it's kind of been compromised, you know,
Speaker 1: we have to kind of retire it, which is what
Speaker 1: responsible people do when their deep sea vessel has been damaged.
Speaker 1: Like you know, now, it's interesting. When he's talking to Bloomberg,
Speaker 1: Stockton presents both the Geolong and the Deep Sea Challenger
Speaker 1: as kind of like this is what he saw as
Speaker 1: the proof that his dream was achievable. Quote. People used
Speaker 1: to ask me, how do you think you can do
Speaker 1: this if nobody else can. I like to point out
Speaker 1: that the two deepest diving subs on the planet are
Speaker 1: the Chinese Joolong and James Cameron sub the DSV Deep
Speaker 1: Sea Challenger, which in twenty twelve carried the Titanic Director
Speaker 1: to Challenger Deep, the ocean's deepest point, and is now retired.
Speaker 1: They were both built by amateurs who had never built
Speaker 1: subs before. The sub is not the challenge. The challenge
Speaker 1: is the business model and logistics. Now, that is an
Speaker 1: insane thing to say, Andrew, and if.
Speaker 2: You have you have a hammer, if you're an idiot capitalist, who.
Speaker 1: Yeah, fucking tech bro. No, the problem is monetizing it.
Speaker 1: Building a sub that can go down the depth of
Speaker 1: Mount Ever is to say, what do you want to get?
Speaker 1: James Carmeron sketched it on a napkin. He just knows
Speaker 1: how to make terminator movies.
Speaker 2: It really is also though like some that is some
Speaker 2: because because you know, his goal was not to do
Speaker 2: what they did. His goal was to do what they
Speaker 2: did with the cocoa that you were talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, with the fucking and passengers multiple And it's also
Speaker 1: he's everything he says is wrong, So he's like they're
Speaker 1: all built by amateurs. So the Jhoolong, which is that
Speaker 1: Chinese submersible which can read it reach as far as
Speaker 1: seven thousand meters down, was developed by a desired a
Speaker 1: designer named zou Zin Jaques sorry zoo quinin q I
Speaker 1: n A N. And he is not I wouldn't. I
Speaker 1: don't think he's designed as submersible before. So I guess
Speaker 1: that's what he means by like amateur. But he's the
Speaker 1: professor at the School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil
Speaker 1: Engineering of Shanghai Jiaotong University. That's not an amateur. He's
Speaker 1: a professor of naval architecture. He seems like an expert,
Speaker 1: and like there's there's a whole team of experts who
Speaker 1: are like people who build things under this four underwater shit, right, yes,
Speaker 1: so you're not, yeah, just just in a like you know,
Speaker 1: you can't walk down the street in La without hitting
Speaker 1: a professor of naval architecture, right, that's like, that's like
Speaker 1: running in a guy with a fucking podcast. It's so
Speaker 1: it's such a funny way to be like they're amateurs.
Speaker 1: It's also like a Chinese government ministry are the people
Speaker 1: like handling the like the actual construction, and like it's
Speaker 1: it's a serious project by serious people. That's why it works,
Speaker 1: right And likewise he's being like, well, James Cameron's just
Speaker 1: this director and he got to make this thing. It's
Speaker 1: you know, an amateur. Well no, Cameron. Cameron says that
Speaker 1: like he contributed, he was one of the designers. He
Speaker 1: helped do some of the engineering. I don't know exactly
Speaker 1: what that means, but he did not just design a
Speaker 1: ship and have it built. He is working with a company,
Speaker 1: an Australian R and D company called Acheron Project, and
Speaker 1: the construction is headed primarily by the co designer, a
Speaker 1: guy named Ron Allam, who is a professional engineer. If
Speaker 1: you want to know how serious an engineer, Ron Allam is.
Speaker 1: When they're working on this thing that Cameron takes down
Speaker 1: to the Challenger Deep. There's like this kind of foam
Speaker 1: that they are using is part of like the pressure
Speaker 1: system that keeps it safe, and it's based on like
Speaker 1: the initial thing they tried is there was this kind
Speaker 1: of like nautical foam for pressure pressure vessels that were
Speaker 1: meant to go down less depth, you know, I think
Speaker 1: just a couple of thousand meters as opposed to how
Speaker 1: far the Challenger Deep is. And they test out this
Speaker 1: foam that's already in use, and they find out that
Speaker 1: it can't handle the pressure, and so ron Allam invins
Speaker 1: an entirely new kind of foam for this thing, right
Speaker 1: new phone, Yeah, so yeah, Yeah. In two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: Stockton Rush founds ocean Gate Ink with the promise to
Speaker 1: deliver Mann's submersible solutions to the private market. And that
Speaker 1: is where we're going to end our story for today,
Speaker 1: because we have now gotten up to the point where
Speaker 1: the death sub is about to be made. So yeah,
Speaker 1: how we feel in today, Andrew, how we feel in
Speaker 1: about this whole tale?
Speaker 3: So fine?
Speaker 2: I mean I think it is it's just like exactly
Speaker 2: the the only reason this guy is an outlier is
Speaker 2: because most of these like again like tech pro libertarian
Speaker 2: weirdos like know on some level that what they're saying
Speaker 2: is bullshit, and like yeah, do not often put their
Speaker 2: like again, go all in on their like half baked
Speaker 2: or wrong ideas the same way, Like like the real
Speaker 2: thing that you're supposed to do as a tech bro
Speaker 2: is use other people's money to like and use other
Speaker 2: people's money over and over and over again until you,
Speaker 2: you know, hit the right lottery ticket and then say
Speaker 2: it's your money.
Speaker 1: And take other people like Musk, you know, they just
Speaker 1: had a fucking rocket blow up, right, Musk wasn't on
Speaker 1: that thing, you know, like that he doesn't even there's
Speaker 1: this like we're talking, there's this whole like thing going
Speaker 1: on right now where like Muskin Zuckerberg are talking about
Speaker 1: like fighting in a ring, and it's like, that's not
Speaker 1: gonna I don't think that's really gonna happen. It'd be
Speaker 1: funny if it did, but I don't think it's really
Speaker 1: going to happen. Like that's the Those are the kind
Speaker 1: of things that the tech bros who are a little
Speaker 1: bit less dumb than Stockton do where they'll talk about
Speaker 1: like doing bold and crazy shit, But if there's actually
Speaker 1: any risk in it, they don't because they they don't
Speaker 1: want to die, you know. Yeah, we're getting hurt or embarrassed,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And on some level I think they like, yes,
Speaker 2: they are over over over over confident, but again the
Speaker 2: grift is to be overcught to like overconfident with someone
Speaker 2: else's resources whatever. That yes, yes, and like him not
Speaker 2: understanding that is the fundamental Like he's the dumb rich
Speaker 2: boy that like these guys exploit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's like to a degree, I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe you could say that makes Stockton slightly more in
Speaker 1: some ways more respectable because one thing you can't say
Speaker 1: about him, like he did put his money where his
Speaker 1: mouth was, you know that that is really undeniable. I
Speaker 1: think that's because he was just even more unhinged than
Speaker 1: a lot of the people, maybe because he grew up
Speaker 1: even richer than them, Like he's not as rich as
Speaker 1: like Bezos or Branson or Musk, now, but I think
Speaker 1: he was as ex gunned. He had money. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: maybe he just like never had any kind of grounding
Speaker 1: as a person. I don't know, though, I think it's.
Speaker 2: Pretty pretty clear there's a level of money that completely
Speaker 2: rots your brain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this guy had it for sure. Yeah, no denying that.
Speaker 1: So Andrew, you got anything to plug?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, you knows. As I'm on strike. My podcast,
Speaker 3: Yo Is This Racist?
Speaker 2: Is continuing, but we also have a premium show you
Speaker 2: can subscribe to at suboptimalpods dot com. We just did
Speaker 2: a very fun watch along of Big Trouble in Little
Speaker 2: China where I get dogged on relentlessly. So if you
Speaker 2: found me irritating, I believe eight bucks a month and
Speaker 2: you have access to this thing.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, hell yeah, so yeah, Yo is This Racist?
Speaker 1: Check it out? And uh yeah, check out. You know,
Speaker 1: threaten your television with a lighter. Let it know you
Speaker 1: have the ability to take it out. If this strike
Speaker 1: doesn't be right, don't do anything yet, but yeah, be vigilant,
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