There's A LOT You DON'T Know About Oceangate & Stockton Rush

There are three words that are understood by every person in every country around the world. God, Coca-Cola, and Titanic.

The story of the Titanic, the unsinkable ship that sank on its maiden voyage, has been a source of fascination for over 100 years, with the story getting even bigger in 1997 after the biggest movie in the world came out, also called Titanic.

The Titanic film opens in darkness 4,000 m under the Atlantic Ocean in Titanic's resting place. And while many people who saw the Titanic movie would love to visit the famous shipwreck, only about 200 people have ever been able to do so. Like many things in this world, if you were rich enough, you could buy yourself a ticket. But what these billionaires and multi-millionaires didn't understand when purchasing their tickets was that they were playing Russian roulette as to whether this dive to the Titanic would be a one-way trip.

In June 2023, the company Oceangate launched its Titan submersible into the Atlantic. And Oceangate CEO Stockton Rush headed towards the Titanic wreck with four other souls on board. The submersible and its occupants were never seen again. And all that was ever found of the Titan submersible was the shattered remains of its exterior. And from the interior, all that survived was a jacket sleeve of Stockton Rush along with a completely undamaged pen and a few Titanic stickers.

The story of Ocean Gate and what happened to the Titan has become almost as famous as the Titanic itself. But there's a lot more to this story than most people know. So today, we'll be exploring the entire Ocean Gate story, including a lot of things not discussed by the media or any of the current Ocean Gate documentaries. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in to the story of the Titan Submersible, Stockton Rush, and the cult of Ocean Gate.

On June 18th, 2023, the Ocean Gate submersible Titan had been launching from its support ship, the Polar Prince. It entered the frigid waters of the Atlantic Ocean 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod. The Titan had five people on board and was being driven by the Ocean Gate CEO Stockton Rush. And everyone in the submersible and the Ocean Gate team on the support ship, the Polar Prince, were all really excited about this dive taking place that day, as they'd had several cancelled dives due to the terrible weather.

There was also a number of dives cancelled due to the weather before this, and they'd also had severe technical issues, some of which haven't really been talked about in the media. And I only found out the details of because I watched a lot of the depositions of some of the prior passengers who haven't been in the media.

Ocean Gate's support team have people both on the Polar Prince and on the launching pad of the Titan. On the Polar Prince, one of the support team members is Wendy Rush, Stockton Rush's wife, and she is the director of communications. And her main responsibility during the Titan dive was to literally communicate with the Titan sub. Wendy and the rest of the Oceangate team, all who had different responsibilities, would monitor the Titan during its 8-hour round trip to the Titanic from their stations on the Polar Prince.

Titan and the Polar Prince were supposed to be in constant communication because Titan doesn't actually have its own navigation system and it relies on the Oceangate team literally texting them directions in the pitch dark of the Atlantic Ocean. Titan sends the support ship everything that's happening during its journey, and they're supposed to be in contact every 5 to 10 seconds.

At 9:14 a.m. the entire process of getting everyone from the support ship to the sub and into the sub and the whole bolting everyone in all the checks, everything is done and the Titan is bolted shut from the outside, meaning that the passengers cannot get out unless someone literally removes the bolts. They're bolted in, but out of the over a dozen bolts, only four are used to seal the submersible.

The Titan takes off and begins its 2-hour descent to the Titanic. And for the next hour and 40 minutes, Titan descends as normal. The Titan pings the Ocean Gate support team every 5 to 10 seconds and Wendy Rush and the other two Oceangate employees that are sitting either side of her receive the messages back and forth as normal as any Titan descent is.

There is then one message that comes through at 10:47:27 a.m. that Titan has dropped two weights. At 10:47:33, Titan pings for the final time ever. There's been video footage recovered of when Wendy Rush and her team receive the final message and the final ping from Titan. And also captured on this footage is what we now know to be the sound of the implosion. This was also captured. Yeah. Yeah. Should be about 500 m 30. What was that?

Interestingly, the implosion is actually heard and then a second later, the Titan's final message is received. The Titan was at 3,346 m when it imploded. So, with the speed of sound moving at 15,000 m/s, that 2.5 second delay was what gave Wendy Rush and her team false reassurance that the sound that they heard had nothing to do with Titan. You can see when they hear the sound, they seem slightly worried, but then when they see the message, Titan has dropped two weights, they kind of relax a little bit. That's why when they lost communications and tracking 5 seconds later, they didn't immediately alert the authorities because it was very common for Titan to lose communication with the Ocean Gate topside team. So common, in fact, that a certain former Ocean Gate employee said that Titan would lose communications every single time it dove and attempted to dive to the Titanic.

It was only when Titan didn't return topside at its scheduled time that then they began to worry. At 3:00 p.m., Titan failed to surface. The topside team decided to give it a little more time. And we'll discuss exactly why they didn't want to contact the authorities a little bit later. But finally, at 5:40 p.m., 8 hours after the last communication with Titan, Coast Guard receives a report about an overdue 21 ft submersible with five souls on board that was attempting to dive to view the wreckage of the Titanic.

The Coast Guard rallies for a search and rescue operation and also puts out the call to all ships in the surrounding area. When at sea, there's a law that if a distress call is put out on the water and it's an extreme level, which means lives are at risk and search and rescue is needed, all surrounding ships must answer this call and must respond and lend assistance. This law also requires that all ships at all times have to monitor the radio 24/7 in case a distress call is sent out. This law is the first of many, many ironic callbacks to the Titanic in this situation. As the reason this law exists is because of the Titanic and when the Titanic sank, there was ships in the surrounding area that could have come to its aid.

On June 22nd, 2023, after 4 days of extensive search and rescue, a media firestorm, and everyone in the world watching, a discovery is made by the Horizon Arctic's ROV, Victor 6000. An ROV is a remote operated vehicle. They're the little unmanned vehicles that have the little robot arms. And in another weird element to the story, the Horizon Arctic, which is the ship that the ROV belongs to, that ship actually used to be the Titan support ship, and they'd only switched that year to the Polar Prince for financial reasons. The Horizon Arctic used to be the one that would carry, launch, and support the Titan and did so in 2021 and 2022. But the first time that the Horizon sees the Titan in 2023 is when it discovers its wreck.

On June 28th, the Horizon Arctic docks after bringing the Titan home one final time, or what is left of the Titan. Another ROV had come and assisted in bringing Titan's remains back up because the Horizon's ROV wasn't strong enough to do so. That ROV had placed Titan's wreckage on its former support ship after pulling its remains from the bottom of the Atlantic where it was found just 500 m from the Titanic's wreckage.

Titan's wreck was in pieces and many people had questions, mainly questions about how this was allowed to happen. All attention was turned to Stockton Rush, Ocean Gate CEO and founder, as he was well known in the small submersible industry for being someone who broke the rules and scoffed at the stringent safety measures the submersible industry maintained. In one day, the submersible industry had gone from an impeccable history with no fatalities to an implosion that lost five lives. And the only remains that were able to be recovered from Titan was Stockton Rush's sleeve of his jacket in which an intact pen, business cards, and Titan mission stickers were found.

As most people are now aware, this wasn't a tragic accident or some strange twist of fate that couldn't be helped. The Titan's implosion was something that others had literally been warning Ocean Gate and Stockton Rush about for years. All of these warnings, of course, fell on deaf ears. And Rush bit back at anyone who questioned his way of doing things, claiming that the US Vessel Safety Act of 1993 was needlessly prioritizing passenger safety over innovation.

To give a little bit of background on Stockton Rush, most people are aware by now that Rush was from a very privileged family and can trace his ancestry back to two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush. Stockton's wife Wendy was also from a privileged background and was a great-great granddaughter of the founders of Macy's, the Strausses, who actually perished on the Titanic.

Stockton was the youngest of five children, but there isn't a lot of information out there about his siblings. There is a birth announcement of when he was born, saying that his sisters, Deborah and Catherine, were welcoming him as a baby brother, but he's the youngest of five children. So, I'm guessing the other two are maybe half siblings. But yeah, there's not really any other information out there about them, not even their names. I did find one source that said another sibling was Jennifer. I'm guessing they're four elder sisters because he is Richard Stockton Rush III. So, I'm assuming any other boys would have got that name, but yeah, there's not a lot of clear information out there about that.

Stockton's family is immensely wealthy and like his other family members, he attended Princeton University in New Jersey after graduating from Philip Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. And Princeton is also where he met his wife Wendy, who he married in 1986 and had two children with. He graduated with a degree in engineering, but wasn't a particularly strong student, and a lot of people have questioned his skills as an engineer. Also, it's not unheard of of children of very rich and prominent people to kind of be accepted when maybe they shouldn't be. And so that's why their grades can't keep up. And a lot of them are kind of pushed through to just get the degree and get out because them failing isn't really an option when they're donating things like libraries. I don't know whether his family donated a library or anything like that, but given their amount of wealth and how all of them go to Princeton, I wouldn't be surprised if at minimum they were writing a donation check every year.

After Princeton, he did go on in 1989 to earn an MBA from the University of California in Berkeley. Growing up, he wanted to be an astronaut and was always very interested in space and flight. And from a very young age, he did a lot of traveling and exploring and adventuring with his family as his father, Richard Stockton Rush II, saw himself as a bit of an explorer. Rush became a pilot at 18 and tried to go into military aviation, but he was disqualified for his poor eyesight. And this kind of put an end to his dreams of space and being an astronaut. And that's when he turned his attention to the ocean. He does give a bit of a different spin whenever he's doing presentations and talking about this. As he says whenever he started to see the ocean, he then decided all the things he liked about space were actually in the ocean.

Hi guys, editing Ash here. I'm hoping to post this video in a minute actually, but I just wanted to add a possible theory or just something I was thinking about based on some information that I found out while I'm editing and that was Stockton Rush's arrest record. He was arrested a few times when he was at Princeton. A lot of the time it was for weed and obviously it's different now, but this was in the 80s so it was quite serious. But he was also arrested for drunk driving his car into a train and train tracks. So I don't know whether that record would preclude you from doing something like becoming an astronaut or certain parts of the military or military aviation. And then he's kind of spun it with, oh, it was to do with my eyesight because I know there are certain things now that they do allow you to use corrective lenses or glasses if you are still not like your eyesight isn't so so bad that you can't get up to 2020 with a a certain type of corrective lens. And I have scoured the internet and I have never ever seen a picture of him with glasses or anything. And I mean he obviously he could have contacts in. Maybe he doesn't wear them. Maybe there's a whole thing. But I would just think if you couldn't get in because you're you couldn't even get to 2020 with corrective lenses and you're on a boat and you're going down in a submersible and you're down there for hours and hours and I just would think there would be one picture of you with glasses on. But I mean, again, there could be a million reasons that there isn't. But I'm just throwing that out there about the arrest record because given how many other things that we found out that it was actually him saying, "Oh, I did this because X." And then it really was because of why and why was a bad thing, but he was just spinning it to make it all look like kittens and rainbows and sunshine. So, just wanted to put that in. And back to past me.

Given his enormous inherited wealth, Rush mainly worked as a venture capitalist. And in 2006, he took his first excursion in a submersible in British Columbia. Rush then attempted to buy his own submersible, but there's very few that can be bought. There's less than a hundred privately owned subs. So, he wasn't able to just purchase one outright and instead purchased parts for a miniature sub that he assembled with blueprints that apparently came from a Navy commander. He constructed a 4 m long sub capable of diving 10 m. And this sub obviously being very small and only being capable of going 10 m, he continued to try and purchase a bigger one and one that could go deeper. But he again was unsuccessful and he looked to start his own submersible company.

Then Rush believed that there was a significant market for underwater tourism and that's why in 2009 he founded Oceangate with his then business partner Gillmo Sonhei. Gillmo served as Ocean Gate's president for a number of years and Rush served as secretary, but Galliermo did leave Oceanate in 2013. Rush believed that there hadn't been a private market for underwater exploration yet because the public had a sense of danger when it came to submersibles and also because of the strict regulatory requirements which he saw as illogical. Rush decided to plow ahead with Ocean Gate and set his eyes on opening underwater tourism to the general public.

In the early days of Ocean Gate, they were much more reserved. And in December 2011, the company was incorporated in Washington State. But by February 2012, they'd moved the corporation to Miami, Florida. The following year in May 2013, Ocean Gate began a short-lived collaboration with the University of Washington for their project Cyclops 1. And this was then just carried on by Oceangate because they didn't have the financial means to carry on with the University of Washington. And the entire project was to build a five-person submersible that could descend to over 3,000 m. Originally, there was $5 million that was agreed between Ocean Gate and the University of Washington in collaboration for this submersible. But by the time the University of Washington departed the project, only about $650,000 had been put into the project, and this resulted in a steel vessel that could travel to 500 m.

Ocean Gate continued to work on Project Cyclops themselves, and between 2013 and November 2015, they did various dives and studies such as one that they did on Lionfish. During this time, Rush also began to court the public in any way he could, contacting journalists, TV shows, and even celebrities. One celebrity that took Rush up on his offer to do a dive was Macklemore. This collaboration between Macklemore and Ocean Gate took place in 2014 when Macklemore was winning Grammys and at the height of his fame. They dove the sub they had at the time that could go to 500 m in search of the rare sixgill shark and they did actually find one which there is footage of.

Ocean Gate was very costly to run and while it had a number of very wealthy investors, the goal was for the company to become profitable. Stockton seemed to realize around this time that the only thing people would one pay anything to see and two throw caution to the wind to see was the Titanic wreck. And so he set his eyes on making it to the Titanic in a submersible with passengers no matter what. While Rush and Ocean Gate were always trying to operate under the unofficial Silicon Valley mantra of move fast and break things, it really was the decision to go to the Titanic that saw Stockton begin to take riskier and riskier decisions. That would only escalate over time. Rush was also trying to draw more and more media attention, and he knew nothing would put more eyes on him and Ocean Gate than taking passengers to the Titanic.

We could go into a lot of detail and all the ins and outs of different dives and testing, but it's very technical and so we'll focus on the broad strokes so we can discuss our main focus, the Titanic dives and what happened to cause this implosion, all the nitty-gritty details on that because I don't want to sit here and read dive logs to you. But I will leave the full dive logs of all 87 dives linked in the sources and every other source I used to make this video down below.

I would say 87 dives Titan made, but that's not actually technically true. As one thing that Stockton did that was just absolute insanity. And there is many more of these decisions. He actually switched the hull at dive 47. And there was an original version one that dove 47 times. And when I say dive, I literally mean basically if the sub touched water, it seems that they counted as a dive. As you'll see in the logs and like a lot of other things we'll discuss that things went wrong every single time and they don't go anywhere a lot of the time. Sometimes even they don't go anywhere and passengers are trapped in there for hours and hours, but they still count that as a dive.

So, version one on the 47th dive, there was an extremely loud bang that was heard. And we'll talk more about these bangs in just a minute, but a bang like a gunshot was heard when diving. This took place in 2019. And despite the fact Ocean Gate had been taking deposits from passengers for trips to the Titanic, they still hadn't actually dove to the Titanic at this time. This extremely loud bang along with other bangs and cracks are heard during dive 47, which was only the second time ever that the sub had gone below 3,000 m. Dive 47 returned to the surface after going 3,760 m. The Titanic is located 3,810 m down.

Rush himself dove the sub one other time prior to this and went deeper than 3,000 meters. He dove the sub 3,939 meters because it was the 39th dive and that happened in December 2018. He later admitted to a reporter that during that dive, the only other dive that went below 3,000 m, there was loud cracking and bangs during that dive, too. But from that point, he started using earplugs to block out the sound.

After dive 47 and the loud bang in April 2019, there's only two more dives of this original hull. One is unmanned and only goes 4 m before they abandon it due to electrical issues and other issues. And then the second other dive, the last dive of that original hull is in July 2019, but it doesn't even dive. They try and they don't go anywhere. After this, the Oceangate team do not dive for an entire 2 years because they then inspected the sub to see, oh, maybe we should check what this loud bang was when we're putting a tiny submersible underwater under immense pressure and there's people in it. And they ended up finding a large crack in the hull and they completely had to scrap it and make an entirely new hull.

So, after just two dives to below 3,000 m, the sub has issues. And reading the dive logs, there were so many issues with the Titan. In fact, it seemed every system, every dive had an issue. There were no dives without issues. And there were not only many scrap missions, but there were also missions where passengers were trapped in the submersible. These issues happened every dive because the Titan basically went through no testing. These dives where everything was going on was the test. Testing an experimental sub for the first time with a material that has never been used for a submersible at that depth with human beings inside.

Not only do submersibles go through absolutely immense testing, but there's also tons of other safety factors. And prior to Titan's implosion, there had never been a death in the submersible industry because subs are really put through their paces. They're tested those 10,000 times. And there's just tons of other things that people go through to make sure that these subs are safe to go down to such a dangerous environment with extreme extreme pressure because there is no margin for error when it comes to that depth. There's a battery of tests that the subs all go through, but when they're carrying passengers, they're even more scrutinized and they have to be certified. But Titan went through none of this testing, never mind certification. The Titan was never certified.

And Rush devised many ways to skirt around certification and flagging. He called the Titan an experimental sub. He had passengers sign extensive release waivers. When he started doing the Titanic dives, he based the company in the Bahamas because they can't sue him when they're based in the Bahamas. He called passengers mission specialists and not passengers so that he could take passengers. And he had Titan support ships record the submersible as cargo because again he wasn't supposed to be taking passengers in a submersible. He wasn't even supposed to be launching the submersible because it wasn't certified.

He also hired a lot of newly graduated staff because one he could severely underpay them. Two, most of those people that they're new graduates, they're going to defer to their boss who has many more decades of experience than them and they're probably less likely to actually raise alarms because most people would think, "Oh, he knows what he's doing. He knows something I don't know." And they're also people that when he was hiring these new grads, they were people that didn't have any experience in the submersible industry because industry veterans would most likely object to what Ocean Gate was doing.

There were a few people involved with Ocean Gate who did speak up and all of them were fired. There was one David Lockridge who really tried to ring the alarm bells both when he was in Ocean Gate and after he was fired as he even tried to sue the company. And again, Stockton Rush was someone of immense means and pretty much limitless money. And Ocean Gate also when going through something like that has a lot of wealthy investors. Though they can draw lawsuits out with individuals who are having to fund them from their own pockets. We will talk a bit more about David Lockridge later, but he was a very experienced submersible pilot and he was someone in Ocean Gate, but there was a lot of other experienced submersible people who were speaking out about Stockton Rush because this is a very small community. And so pretty much anybody who knew about this and knew anything about submersibles was very concerned. And a lot of them warned Rush. A lot of them tried to tell him this was dangerous. There were letters written and even some of Rush's friends in the industry who were inside his submersible told him how dangerous this was and how this was going to cost people their lives. But Stockton Rush just batted it all away. And he told anyone who said that they had concerns that he saw anybody trying to counter what he was doing as a personal insult.

So, what were these cracks and bangs that were being heard when Titan descended? And why were people so concerned about what Ocean Gate was doing outside of the fact that they weren't following testing and regulations? As most people who know anything about Ocean Gate are aware, Ocean Gate was not following the standard design when it came to submersibles. Usually, submersibles are made out of steel and titanium. They're also usually designed as spheres, as this helps evenly distribute the enormous pressure that is bearing down on the sub. When the sub goes deeper and deeper into the ocean, more pressure is exerted on it as basically more water is above it and around it. So if you think about yourself laying down, say you have a plastic bin on you, if I pour a glass of water in, okay, you're fine. If I pour 20 glasses in, you feel a bit more. If I fill the entire plastic tub on top of you, it's going to be very heavy and you're going to start to struggle.

Most people who worked at Ocean Gate have spoken about how Stockton Rush was primarily concerned with becoming famous and well-known, and he apparently idolized people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. For a lot of reasons to do with wanting notoriety for doing something new and cool and for financial reasons, Stockton Rush decided not to use the traditional and expensive steel and titanium to build the submersible, but instead to use carbon fiber, which is traditionally used for airplanes because of its lightness. Carbon fiber is what it sounds like. It's fiber made out of carbon that close up it looks like little pieces of string the same way like a rope would be and they're all bundled together and wound together to make a strong structure. Carbon fiber is strong but it has its limits and it will break. This snapping and breaking that was being heard in the submersible. It's the carbon fiber that's breaking, aka the structure that you are in is breaking around you. And as the Titan is going down and back up and going down, every single time there's more fibers breaking and eventually there's just going to be too many that have broken. And at those depths and at that pressure, there is no margin for error. There is just going to be too many that have broken and spoiler alert cause an implosion.

After the loud bang in 2019, the Titan hull was examined and surprise, there was a large crack that was found in the hull because too many of these fibers had broken. So the Ocean Gate team did not dive for 2 years and a new hull was created. This new hull was again made out of carbon fiber, the exact same thing that had created a massive crack in only two dives to more than 3,000 m. Ocean Gate and Rush did not divulge to anyone about this crack, even to people like Carl Stanley, who was in the sub when the bang was heard. They also intentionally hid the fact that this was an entirely new hull because the original sub had gone through a bit of testing, not really like proper testing in the Bahamas. And they had done two dives past 3,000 m among like other dives that they then when they got this new hull, they just still counted the other dives. So the bang was heard at the 47th dive. They did two more dives. The 49th was the last in 2019. And then when they picked up with the new hull in 2021, they picked up at the 50th dive. So if you read the log, you would think, "Oh, this is the same one." Because they didn't tell anyone this was a different one. They didn't tell anyone about the crack. And they really didn't disclose this until everything started coming out in the media around the implosion.

Despite never having reached the Titanic, despite not diving this sub for 2 years, despite having to rebuild the hull due to a crack after two dives, Ocean Gate was still widely promoting its Titanic missions in November 2020. They were doing a massive amount of media and were seeking out any sort of TV interviews or articles that they could. Ocean Gate said that it was going to be starting its Titanic dives in 2021, and many people had put down deposits for this, some as far back as 2015.

Stockton was doing everything he could to gather press attention, contacting journalists, TV hosts, YouTubers to offer them spots on the Titanic expedition in exchange for promotion. The host of Discovery Expedition, Josh Gates, went for a dive with Rush. It wasn't to the Titanic or an attempt to the Titanic, but he was supposed to return for a second dive to go to the Titanic. And even this short first dive that Josh Gates did, there was nothing but problems. And for that reason, he didn't return to dive to the Titanic. Gates went to the head of Discovery after they had gone to Ocean Gate. They had filmed this whole thing. Obviously put a lot of money into it and it was supposed to be an episode and he told the head of Discovery, "I'm really sorry that you put all this money into this and green lit this, but we shouldn't do this." He said that he didn't feel safe that people would be watching the show and possibly seek out a ticket due to it. The host asked extensive questions from Stockton Rush and worked out that this was a new hull after Stockton told him, "Oh, we've rebuilt it." And he worked out they haven't actually tested this thing. And he also knew they hadn't actually made it to the Titanic. And that the first time they would be going would be with passengers on board.

In 2021, Oceangate was charging $105,000 for a seat on its submersible to the Titanic. This was actually the same cost adjusted for inflation of a ticket on the Titanic going first class in 1912. This was quickly raised and by 2023, people were paying $250,000 for a seat on the Titan submersible to go to the Titanic. And there was no guarantee that you would actually go to the Titanic and there was no refunds.

From when deposits were taken in 2015 to 2021, Ocean Gate was going through extreme financial pressures and investors were becoming frustrated. Foregoing testing, raising the ticket prices, cutting every possible corner and safety measure, and trying to get to the Titanic as fast as physically possible were all done to try and stop the financial hemorrhaging at Ocean Gate.

Despite everything that we've talked about so far, Rush and Ocean Gate decided to go ahead with the first ever dive to the Titanic in 2021. And I want to stress again, this was the very first time that they were going to the Titanic with passengers on board. Oceangate had never previously reached the Titanic.

On June 28, 2021, the first Ocean Gate Titanic expedition begins and the team departs Newfoundland, arriving at the Titanic coordinates on their support ship, the Horizon Arctic, 2 days later on June 30th. On June 30th and July 1st, Ocean Gate has issues launching Titan. And on July 2nd, a dive attempt occurs, but it's not successful due to technical issues, and the mission is scrapped. July 3rd, they try again and reach 17,000 m, about halfway to the Titanic. Again, there's an electrical problem encountered, and they scrap that mission. They arrive back in Newfoundland on July 6th and no successful mission to the Titanic occurs.

So on July 7th, 2021, the next mission heads out and again it's on the Horizon Arctic again reaching the Titanic site in 2 days. And on July 9th, after a few failed attempts due to electrical issues, Stockton Rush, PH Nalet, and an Oceangate staff member finally reached the Titanic debris field, not the actual Titanic. Pharlet is a French former Navy commander and is often referred to as Mr. Titanic. He has dove to the Titanic more than any other person. He's gone a total of 37 times and as I mentioned earlier, he was also on the sub that imploded. PH's expertise and credibility was a huge get and positive for Ocean Gate and his involvement with Ocean Gate gave a lot of Ocean Gate passengers faith in the Titan and Stockton Rush.

When we got to the surface, Scott was piloting. He heard a really loud bang. Um not a not a soothing sound. As Tim and PH will attest, almost every deep diving sub makes a noise at some point. Although they reached the Titanic debris site, they do have major issues getting back to the surface. This is the first time they've ever gone that far and there's many problems especially with the batteries and they're actually stuck on the bottom of the ocean for 2 hours. This actually happens on the next mission as well. And Stockton at this mission talks about just staying on the bottom of the ocean and waiting this 16 to 24 hours for the emergency weights to dissolve and release so that then the sub can go back to the surface. Some of the passengers were okay with doing that and some of them weren't. So again, 16 to 24 hours sitting on the bottom of the ocean in the Titan submersible.

After sitting at the bottom for 2 hours, they finally get the sub going again and begin to ascend. But it is almost sunset. So Rush enacts an emergency protocol for them to get to the surface faster. When they do finally reach the surface, something else goes wrong and they're actually stuck bobbing on the surface for eight more hours. Keep in mind, a trip usually takes around 8 hours. They were also stuck down there for 2 hours and then a further 8 on the surface. So, they've been in there a long, long time. They usually leave around 8:00 a.m. and they weren't let out of the sub until 4:00 a.m. Since the implosion, a lot of former staff members of Ocean Gate have spoken about Rush being mainly worried about being stuck in the sub at the surface and not at all being concerned about the carbon fiber or implosion. So, I'm guessing part of that fear may have come from the first ever successful dive to the bottom of the ocean and being stuck in the submersible. And there's many other times that they got stuck.

The plan was for Stockton Rush, PH, and the Oceangate employee to go on this first dive and then the next day take passengers with them because when they went out on the Horizon Arctic for the first ever dive, they had passengers with them on the support ship. They do decide to scrap the rest of the dives on this mission. They claim it's due to the weather, but given what we know about the batteries, I'll let you decide if you think that's the reason why. Another insane element is that on this very first dive when they have never been that far below, they actually had a YouTuber who was going to film. So, they're bringing someone who's going to film and put it out to an audience when they've never reached the Titanic. And technically, they still haven't. They've only reached the debris fields.

Ocean Gate put out a press release after they reached the debris field announcing that they had reached the Titanic successfully, leaving out the pertinent information that they hadn't actually reached the Titanic or that they'd been trapped in the sub for 10 hours more than they were supposed to be. And the press release obviously didn't include any photos. It only had a picture of the debris field and this little bit of information.

On the way back to Newfoundland, Alan Estrada, who was the YouTuber that I mentioned, and three other passengers are given a test dive at a depth of 100 m since they didn't really get to dive at all. And Estrada films this dive for YouTube. And you can actually see in the video where Rush gives him the game controller to steer the sub on the ocean floor. And in the video, the sub can be seen running over a rock as he's steering, and it's basically scratching the bottom of the sub. Alan Estrada does later come back and dive to the Titanic. And he does also put that up on his YouTube channel.

After the mission, where they reach the Titanic debris field, they have a two-day turnaround and then head out for mission four. They usually only have one to two days between missions and they do five missions a season and obviously as I've been mentioning there's multiple dives each mission usually five potential dives but a lot of the time none of them end up going to plan and a lot of them they end up just being completely cancelled and we will talk about one couple who none of their dives were successful. This wasn't something out of the ordinary, and it most of the time seemed to be due to issues with the sub or something that was going on with Ocean Gate.

On this mission four, Stockton takes four passengers down and they again make it to the debris field of the Titanic, but not the actual ship. There are issues with the sub weighing too much this time. So, the descent goes faster than they planned when they're coming up from the debris field. And according to passengers, this was the reason they ended up missing their landing destination and instead they land near the back of the ship. So when they're trying to resurface, they have problems with the weights and they're not able to release all of the weights, which means the sub takes longer than normal to resurface. So they went too fast down and they're too slow getting out.

They try again a few days later on July 27th, 2021. And while they do reach the Titanic depth, they don't reach the ship. They lose all communications during descent again and there's issues again releasing the weights. So Stockton tells the passengers to rock back and forth and spin the sub and knock the weights off. After 30 minutes of this, it works and the weights drop off and they float to the surface. Typically weight the sub very heavily to get down. If that system fails, so you had a complete electrical failure and you can't activate those things, this is a hydraulic cylinder that goes into the cabin and there's a hand pump, 10,000 PSI hand pump. So all you got to do is open a valve. You pump this and it pushes a pin and this whole system drops off.

The following day on July 28th, another dive takes place and this is when Ocean Gate and Stockton Rush finally reach the Titanic. They explore the ship's bow and after that, mission four returns. And again, a few days later, mission five sets off. On August 4th, a dive of mission five takes place and this time reaches the stern of the Titanic. The next day on August 5th, they dive again and they reach the bow again this time. But there's more problems and they're delayed 5 hours due to the issues once again with the batteries and they have to ascend in total darkness to conserve power so that they can get to the surface. This is the final dive of 2021.

And the following year in 2022, there's 12 attempted dives across the five missions. And again, they usually have five dive windows that are seen as chances or attempts or scheduled per mission. They end up reaching the Titanic or the debris field seven times. And it's much of the same pattern as 2021. Battery issues, resurfacing issues, passengers trapped in the sub, and many attempts that did not reach the Titanic.

There's a dive on June 20th, 2022 where they again have battery issues and other issues, and Stockton Rush and four passengers are stuck in the sub for over 27 hours. The dive before this, the platform was damaged. And the dive after this, the Titan was damaged. So the dive log is damaged the platform, stuck in the sub 27 hours, multiple system failures during that 27 hours that they're stuck, followed by damage to the Titan, and they still continue diving. No inspection, no changes, nothing.

It isn't as easy to follow the 2022 and attempted 2023 dives because Oceangate stopped updating their blog and social media the way that they did in 2021, which allowed me to get a lot of that information along with the dive vlogs, a host of articles and TV show appearances and media pieces that were all done in 2021. And obviously I use the Wayback Machine to access a lot of that. Of course, I always cross reference things and get multiple sources, but with Ocean Gate, it was even more important because in my opinion, they lied a lot about what was going on. And I didn't even want to take them at their word for pretty much anything, especially on the blog where it's the first year of these dives and they're trying to make it look as positive as possible. And they were doing the same on their social media and the dive logs seem to be leaving a lot of information out. Although they they do look bad as well. Like there is a lot of things like damage to the Titan, stuck on the sub 27 hours, but a lot of the real situation, the that information has come from finding actual passengers like social media and I've also found a lot of passengers' depositions from the Coast Guard investigation that really went through a lot of what was actually happening and not just the sort of PR media friendly stuff that Ocean Gate was putting out.

Although a lot of this stuff you really had to dig and then to line up the passengers with the times and what was going on and which dive and which mission. Obviously, there's the dive logs, but every actual passenger on the dive logs is redacted apart from Stockton Rush and PH. So you kind of have to go through the social media, find pictures, find articles and things where they're talking about this and match the people up. And then also a lot of this stuff has been removed and privated. A lot of the passengers have privated their stuff, especially people that had any sort of association with Stockton Rush because he invited a lot of people on the sub too. Though using the Wayback Machine was the only way to access a lot of this stuff.

An example of them in my opinion lying is that the Titanic expeditions were supposed to start in 2018. They even had shirts printed, but then they pushed it to 2019 and not only was their merch made with 2019 Titanic Expedition, they hyped it up big time to the press. There were dozens of articles made that year talking about how they had 54 people signed up and who'd put down deposits to go to the Titanic that year and beyond. Yet, they didn't even have a sub that was capable of diving, never mind capable of diving to the Titanic. They had to scrap the original sub and rebuild it as we talked about. And they didn't dive at all in 2019 or 2020. It wasn't ready until 2021. Oceangate claimed to the media that the Titanic dives in 2019 were cancelled due to not being able to secure a support ship. And that's what's quoted in all of these articles and and a lot of them that were promoting the 2019 dives have edits saying, "Oh, the support ship caused the cancellation of these things." When we know that that's not true.

Now, the entire three years that dives took place, there were also constant claims about weather cancelling the dives, which may have been true some of the time, but looking into everything I did, I think actually, in my opinion, again, over half the claimed weather cancellation dives were cancelled for very different reasons. One of the best sources of information was a deposition by a couple named Dan and Courtney Cudden. They had a deposition that was almost 2 hours long with the US Coast Guard. And this only came out a few months ago. So, it's not been really talked about anywhere else in the media. I haven't seen anybody talk about it really. It's not in any of the documentaries or anything, the HBO Discovery one or the Netflix one because again it just like very recently came out. And this couple Dan and Courtney are from very close to Everett in Canada where Ocean Gate was based. Dan has a video game company and Courtney actually has a degree in oceanography and she her dream was to see the bottom of the ocean. She wasn't too bothered, but the Titanic wasn't her motivation. She just wanted to go in a sub to the bottom of the ocean. And they actually put their deposits down and reserved their places very far in advance. So, they had first.

pick of the dates and they ended up picking the mission before the implosion. And their mission, as I'm sure anybody who knows about this, 2023, the only mission that did dive was the one that imploded. And so the Cudens were literally the mission before. And their mission, because it was aborted, they were then offered spots on the mission that imploded. But because they had young kids, they turned it down and ended up going back home.

In their deposition, they detailed how there was an accident during their one attempted dive. And there is speculation that this contributed to the implosion as well. They talked a lot about the Titan being towed behind. There was issues with that, too. There was a net, a fishing net that got caught when they were tugging the Titan behind, and they had to stop the Polar Prince for a day and go and try and sort it out. And there was all these other issues with it. And the only way that they could resolve getting the net untangled was getting a kitchen knife and having a diver go underneath with this kitchen knife and cut the net out. There was so many other issues and I will sprinkle in other bits of the conversation that their deposition generated because there's just some really unbelievable things that they say and that hadn't been disclosed anywhere else before.

Courtney and Dan actually talk about how just before their one failed attempt to dive, Stockton Rush was sitting talking to another Oceangate employee and told the other employee, "I'm going to get a dive in this year, even if it kills me." Stockton was getting very, very frustrated that he had not been able to get a successful dive in season. The entire season and Dan and I were sitting in the We were in the lunch room, weren't we? Yeah. Um, and Stockton said, "I'm going to get a dive in this year, even if it kills me." To which a person next to him who worked for Ocean Gate said, "Only if you do it safely." And he was like, "Haha, yeah, only if I do it safely." But I could tell that Stockton was really frustrated. And then you could also see it on Dive87 when we were inside the Titan and we had our accident. He was not happy. Yeah. The the comic was made in justest, but you could there there was the emotion behind it. It was it you could you could tell like the fact that there had not been a single successful mission that had had a dive the entire year uh was really starting to weigh on him and he just really wanted to get a dive and it was successful.

It wasn't just the failed dive that the Cudons were disappointed by. They seemed disappointed by the entire Ocean Gate package. And it's not surprising given how much money they spent for their two seats on the Titan. They talk a lot about the accident that they have too and how basically the the Titan hits the Lars and just seems to not just hit it once. There's like lots of banging of the Titan into the launch station and they end up also being like thrown around in the Titan. And there's just tons of other issues that they talk about. There's issues that prevent them from diving any other time. Basically, they end up not even going to the Titanic site because the weather is bad over the site. But then all the other dives that they try and attempt don't happen because of something that is either human error or ocean gate haven't maintained the sub or there's some sort of electrical issue. though they only have this one attempted dive where a few meters down the Titan crashes into the launch pad and the launch pad the Lars and there's all just a catastrophe. Stockton Rush starts losing it and there's just issues. And Courtney Cordon actually says at one stage she said that she felt okay in the Titan, but when they were trying to to get it back up that she thought that the Titan was going to crush the workers that were on the platform. I was very worried that somebody was going to get crushed by the sub cuz they were trying to get on the platform. It's at an angle. It's slippery. The waves are causing it to go up and down and the sub is periodically lifting off and and slamming back onto it. It was pretty terrifying. I wasn't scared for myself because I felt safe inside the Titan. But the people outside on the platform, it you know, it was a small space. There was water. They're trying to use these straps to get us under control. Um it was it was it was very scary uh for for me. I I was really worried we were going to like crush someone.

And another crazy thing that Stockton Rush said during their mission was when they finally got in the Titan and they were bolted in, and this was before the accident, and they're all sitting there ready to go. Stockton Rush turned to the four passengers and said, "You are now the four safest people on Earth. A nuclear bomb could go off and you would all be okay, but we couldn't get out because we're bolted in." So, I just slowly turn the oxygen off and we'd all go to sleep and die. What a thing to tell people. And then Stockton, they did the pressure. Oh, right. And at that point, Stockton told us we were the five safest people in the entire planet that a um nuclear bomb could go off and we would survive. Then we would not be able to get out. So, he would slowly turn off.

Honestly, that their deposition, it's long. It's it's almost two hours, but if you are really interested in this, I highly recommend it because so many obviously like a lot of the big depositions that we've seen from David Lockidge and Tony Nissen, the head of engineering, David Lockidge was the director of operations that was trying to sound the alarm and sued Ocean Gate and also Carl Stanley who was Stockton Russia's 's friend, former friend that is a subpilot himself. Those depositions like have been in the media a lot. They're all in the documentaries. But the Cuden's deposition was a huge huge amount of new information, new stories, and also the fact that Courtney Cudon has obviously a degree in oceanography was very interested in it. They're both very well spoken and they have like a a good recall too. highly recommend listening to it. Obviously, I'll put clips in here as well, though.

The amount of force that would be imparted by that large of an object decelerating instantly when it hits another large object, like that's a a lot of force. It seemed concerning to me. Uh I I definitely after the accident often thought about whether what we went through caused some kind of stress fracture in the hole or something. I've wondered that every day since.

There was another YouTuber, Scuba Jake, who went on one of the failed 2023 missions, and I can't say this 100%, but I'm pretty sure he was on the same mission with the Cuddens. It seems to line up. Again, the passenger names are all redacted on the the log, but they basically allude to having somebody who was significant in the media. And Jake talks in the Netflix documentary about being on one of the missions in 2023 before the implosion. So, it does seem to line up, but I'm not 100% on that.

Hi guys, editing Ash and editing G. Just here briefly to say Scuba Jake was actually on mission three, the mission before the Cromans. I think he might have been offered a spot on mission 4, but because they knew before they even left the port that they weren't going to go to the Titanic on the Corman's mission because of the weather, then he wouldn't have gone. But people if they didn't make it to the Titanic, they were always offered like another opportunity to go because it's quarter of a million dollars and like the Cromans paid half a million dollars. And they actually were offered tickets or seats on the next mission, which was the mission that imploded, but they didn't go on that one because they have very young kids and they they had to get back to their kids. So just crazy how a decision like that, you know, in the moment it's probably not like a lifealtering decision, but it is. And they had that a lot. You'll you'll see that there are a lot more people that went on the sub or had the opportunity to go on the sub than the four people, five missions over 2021, 22, 23. So that should be 60 people, but there's a lot more people because obviously when they they go out and there has been say mission one, they're going out on mission two, they might have four people that are supposed to be on mission two, but they could have two people from mission one that have decided to go because they didn't get to go. There was so many missions and dives, but so few actually made it to the Titanic. It just got even worse as time went on. like fewer and fewer and fewer dives actually made it to what we know obviously in 2023 that I've mentioned no dives made it. So that was also a big factor in Stockton and Rush kind of having that financial pressure and also you know all these people that have paid all this crazy money to go and you have to think like over 2023 all of those people are going to want to come at another stage because these mission specialists are the vast majority of what is funding Ocean Gate. Like yes, there are some investors, but the company stuff seemed like I I don't really think they had many many investors. The the most seemed to be Stockton Russia's brother-in-law because Wendy Rush, his wife, was from a family that were way way more wealthy than the Russ. And obviously they were wealthy as well, but her family was like another level. And I just think that that financial pressure thinking all those people from 2023, none of them have gone out and next year in 2024, yes, I'm going to have income from those 2024 mission specialists, but think about all the expense of like the support ship and paying all the staff and like feeding them all, everything like that. And so you're just adding more and more like free tickets now because you've already had to pay for all the people going out on these failed missions. So just wanted to add that in. And back to past me.

Jake also has a video showing his whole going on the ship and talking a lot and talking to Stockton and you get a lot of good look at not only the support ship but him getting in and everything like that. So, that's another video I really recommend if you're interested in Ocean Gate.

So, not only was there this accident at dive 87, the dive before the implosion, there was also a massive situation that happened at dive 80 in 2022. And this situation is thought to seriously seriously have contributed to the implosion one year later. This dive 80 did actually reach the Titanic and when they were resurfacing there was a massive loud bang like a gunshot according to passengers. Something that sounds familiar like the loud bang that sounded like a gunshot that happened back when they had the original hole and that resulted in a massive crack that caused them to have to scrap the hole and make a new one. Despite knowing that the last time they heard something like this, there was a massive crack and they had to replace the hole. Ocean Gate did nothing. They didn't inspect it. They didn't replace it. They didn't do anything at all apart from make the situation a lot worse. They also have this system that was supposed to be a monitor about the carbon fiber snapping and it was called the acoustic monitoring system and when the carbon fibers would snap this system was basically listening and when it would snap that you can see there's like a little graph that I'll put on the screen that you can see oh snap snap snap and then at dive 80 I mean even Miss G who doesn't know tons about submersibles could look at this graph and think, "Wow, there's a huge difference here that maybe I should check this out." But no, again, they didn't do anything apart from make the situation worse by this happened in 2022. So the following year when for financial reasons they couldn't get the Horizon to be the ship that took them out to the Titanic wreck, they actually had the Polar Prince, which was much smaller and didn't have space to put the Titan on the actual ship. So they had to drag it behind. And there's just all the other things that they continued to do. And then the accident that the Cudons had as well.

And then, as if there wasn't enough things on this long, long list of issues, they do something else that most people seem to think contributed to the implosion. There's no other word for it than insane and negligent. Because again, I think that Miss G, who again doesn't know tons about submersibles, would be able to tell you that this is insane. They had the 2022 missions during the summer because they only go out in the summer due to the weather and you know the water can be crazy in the summer, never mind in the winter. So, when they are putting the Titan away to wait until the summer in 2023 to take people out on missions, they don't put the Titan in storage or think, "Let's put it somewhere that's safe and warm and is just a good place to store something that you're going to put humans in and put them to the bottom of the ocean in extreme pressure. Instead, they leave it in a parking lot in Canada in the freezing cold winter where obviously things are going to freeze and then water is going to be able to seep into parts of the submersible.

So, to summarize, they have had an original hole that there was a loud gunshot bang and then they had to replace it only after two dives to the depth similar to the Titanic. They then replace the hole, do no testing, finally reach the Titanic, but at dive 80, they have this again massive gunshot bang. They've had countless battery issues. They've been stuck in the sub for hours and hours. They've had issues with the weights. They've had issues with literally everything. There's an issue with the propellers. There's been issues with the platform. There's been issues with them having accidents with the platform and accidents with the sub. And then after they hear this bang, they leave it in a car park for an entire Canadian winter, then they start dragging it behind the ship because Stockton Rush apparently said, "Oh, leaving it in a car park, dragging it behind a ship, that's nothing compared to what it's going through when it goes down at depth." Also, you need 12 bolts. Eh, just throw four on. And then they also have the accident when the Cudons are on board, the dive attempt before the implosion.

So we're back to where we were at the beginning, June 18th, 2023. Stockton Rush and four other passengers are boarding the Titan. The four other passengers are PH Narallet, British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani billionaire Shaza Darwood, and his 19year-old son Sulamon Darwood. Sulleon, there was a lot of discussion in the press whenever the Titan went missing, that he obviously was only 19 years old, but also that he didn't want to go and he was doing it for Father's Day. But his mother actually said that he did want to go and that he was very interested in the Titanic. He became interested after doing like the really big Titanic Lego set. And he actually asked her for her seat because she was originally supposed to go with her husband. And he wanted to do so because he was interested in the Titanic, but also because he wanted to solve a Rubik's cube that he could solve usually in 12 seconds. and he wanted to break the record for the deepest solve.

When the sub went missing, there was a huge amount of media attention and there was a lot of attention put on the fact that they were missing and that they had 96 hours of oxygen on board. But most people in the submersible industry knew that they were gone. James Cameron definitely thought that this was the case and he's spoken about it in interviews. He is not only an Academy Award-winning director of the movie Titanic, but he's also an extremely experienced submersible pilot and an expert in submersibles. He actually wrote a note when he was staying at a hotel saying implosion confirmed days before the wreck was actually found. The US Navy had actually heard an implosion like sound that they reported to the Coast Guard. And James Cameron heard about this through a source that he had. And the Coast Guard still considered this mission a search and rescue even with that information. But they didn't release that information to the press until the wreck was found. They continued to classify this as a search and rescue.

When the original call was made about the missing submersible, the Coast Guard didn't actually have any way of searching where the sub was thought to be deep in the ocean because the sub went missing an hour and 40 minutes into the descent. So obviously it was pretty far down when they lost communication. So, it was much more likely that as well, given the information that we know now about the batteries and them being stuck so many times before, it's much more likely that if they haven't imploded that they're stuck either somewhere near the bottom or at the bottom. It was very, very, very unlikely that they were on or near the surface. James Cameron and others in the industry have said that there was a lot of attention given to this story and the 96 hours of oxygen and then being stuck on the surface was completely ridiculous as the Coast Guard didn't have the ability to search depth. So, they were just searching the surface.

Some people have spoken about the fact that the classification of it being search and rescue still even after hearing this implosion sound could have been because when it's considered search and rescue it means that lives are in the balance and by that the law that I spoke about earlier where if there's lives in immediate danger and a distress call sent out all ships have to go and assist And so because it was still classified as search and rescue, it meant that the Horizon Arctic had to go and lend their ROV to the search efforts and their ROV was the only one in the vicinity that had the ability to go to depth. So they had to lend it to them. Not that maybe they wouldn't have if the situation wasn't search and rescue, but you know, they're legally obligated to if it's still considered a search and rescue. And while other ROVs did come and assist, it took them days to get there. There was also a lot of surface searching, despite the insanely large area that they were searching because so much time had passed since contact was lost. Though the potential search area was huge, which was a situation that didn't need to happen if they would have phoned earlier and told the Coast Guard about the missing sub, but it took a lot of planes a long time to actually get to the area to search. And then they burned a lot of fuel to get there, too. So, they only had so much time to search each area. So, the search went very slow when they were doing it by air. and and searching just over the surface. It's also very mentally taxing for humans to do those type of searches like over just the the ocean and it there's no landmarks, nothing because when there's just like a monotonous area, you can't distinct like different anything. So, it is just the exact same thing and it's really hard on the human brain to to search that way. If you think about if if you were around in like the 90s or very very early 2000s and you remember like those patterns or like really really busy kind of kind of like a where's Waldto I guess but even when it's a very similar pattern and you're supposed to find like the little cats in a sea of people. It's very hard when they're all the same because your brain just it's it's hard just because that's the way our brains work. it can't register. Okay, I'm looking and this light and then it's the the camera and then it's the stand. That's the way your brain kind of like breaks things up. But when it's the exact same thing that you're searching through, your brain is just going to work a lot harder in looking for an anomaly. And it's also the fact that that area, it's not still. It's waves and rough sea and the movement of the water puts our brains on alert because of like evolutionary traits and that's how you know the human brain is just set up to notice movement that way. So it's not only the fact that you're searching the same area, you're searching this area with like constant movement and so it's just very taxing on a human's brain. There's also, as I said, like the fuel supply issues and it just being a massive area to surge. So, they have to change the people out, they have to change the planes out, go and refuel, and it just was a a slowgoings of searching that way.

Also, even though there was all this discussion about 96 hours of oxygen, I don't think that there was ever any sort of testing when it comes to that being true because I've looked through all those logs and there is no log where they have gone with five people and tried to be in there for 96 hours and use the oxygen that way. And you know, you you have to like tape out the carbon dioxide and all that stuff. And then when you are down there at depth and it just even if they were trapped that way, who knows whether what the situation was with the 96 hours and with it being Ocean Gay, it could have been possible that I don't know they they missed a bottle or there was a leak or anything could have happened when it comes to them.

In my opinion, there were so many other things that they tried. There was 341 sonar buoys deployed to try and use sonar to pick up the Titan. Obviously, subs in that area, like submarines were trying to use sonar, too, but the Titan is so small and it's close to the gigantic Titanic. So even using sonar, it'd be very hard to detect the Titan because there's a Titanic that it's it's pinging off and then there's also undercurrens and god knows what else down there. So that also was something that they tried. But just obviously there was nothing to search for. But even but even if there was, who knows if that would have worked with it being people trapped in a sub and billionaires being involved. Of course, it got a lot of attention, but it really was the Titanic element that made this into a massive story all over the world.

The element of Titanic is just a fascinating story and it happened over a hundred years ago, but the story did get even bigger and even more wellknown with the 1997 movie that James Cameron directed with Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslett. Titanic. The movie even starts with a scene where the characters are in a submersible at the Titanic wreck. Titanic was actually built in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which is where I am actually from originally. That is my original accent before I moved on to my next accent of being in Dublin when I was five. And then I was on to my next and my next to my next. My greatgrandfather actually built the ship. Obviously, he was one of like hundreds and hundreds of people. There are still the giant H&W cranes in Belfast that were erected in 1969 and 1974 and stand on the same shipyard where Titanic was built. And they're visible all over the city. One of the only things that hasn't been bombed to death in Belfast. Titanic, of course, famously hit an iceberg on April 14th, 1912 and sank on the morning of the 15th. The Titanic disaster happened in large part because of the Titanic captain not listening to everyone around him, warning him of dangers that he was putting the ship and everyone on it in. Everyone warned him not to speed through the freezing Atlantic at night when visibility was poor due to icebergs, but he thought he knew better. And over 1,500 people lost their lives.

And it's not too hard to draw comparisons between the captain of the Titanic and Stockton Rush and Titan. Many people in the submersible community warned Rush, but he insisted he knew better. And a large part of his motivation was fame and notoriety. The same way that the Titanic captain wanted to reach New York sooner to make the morning papers. And in a very twisted way, Stockton Rush did get what he wanted, fame and notoriety. But it's probably more accurate to say infamy. Many people tried to warn Rush, including David Lockidge, who, as I mentioned, was fired from Ocean Gate for speaking up and warning of the dangers of the submersible. David Lockidge even became a whistleblower and filed a report with OSHA in hopes that the authorities would do something about Rush, and Ocean Gate, taking passengers to the Titanic in a very dangerous submersible. Stockton Rush was extremely wealthy and made Dave Lockidge's life hell, suing him. And then Lockidge counters sued him. But Lockidge and his wife had to withdraw and move back to Scotland. They withdrew their complaint and the lawsuit was kaput because they were financially and emotionally depleted over this whole fiasco.

When you think about everything we've discussed, all the warnings from everyone, but also the fact that every dive nearly, Ocean Gate had serious issues. Of the few dives that did reach the wreck, the vast majority of those dives had people trapped in the sub, people thrown around in it, or just failed to come back up the way they were supposed to. And comms was lost nearly every time, too. Reckless doesn't even begin to cover the decision to continue to dive, especially considering that every single time they could literally hear the carbon fiber cracking around them, including a gigantic gunshotike bang during dive 80, seven dives before the implosion. But five of those dives didn't really go anywhere because there was a failure of some kind.

As I like to do with my Theronos sciency type videos, I have a little not experiment, but a little demonstration to to kind of illustrate the carbon fiber. So, imagine that you're in a submersible that this is the material. This is the carbon fiber and it's holding the outside of the sub. So, as more and more stress is put on it, you can hear I don't know if you can hear on my mic the little bits cracking and it's still holding. It's still holding. Even though these are cracking, it's still holding. And eventually it just completely snaps. So, imagine your Stockton done rush. You know what carbon fiber is doing. You know what that snapping is and you are still one going down in that sub. Picture those spaghetti things snapping. You're hearing it and you're also taking other people down. I mean, you cannot say that he in any way did not know what was happening. Even just looking at that and the acoustic monitoring and the carbon fiber, never mind the plethora of other issues and accidents and batteries and weights that was happening. It just was in my opinion absolutely not even negligent. It it just was unbelievable that someone would do this to people that you have put on your best sales pitch to try and get them inside of this submersible.

Obviously, I don't know Stockton Rush, but from his behavior, from what people who used to work for him at Ocean Gate have said and the little bit of seeing him in interviews and presentations and how he put out a sales pitch to try and bring these people in. He does remind me of some former bosses of mine and also a textbook person who was born into extreme privilege and wealth but also had a chip on their shoulder. I've spent a lot of time around a lot of people with a lot of money and one a lot of the time when you grow up with insane money, it can lead people to develop a massive case of arrogance and they just do not live in the real world. And many think that they're smarter, better, and more skilled than any other person. So, of course, his use of carbon fiber was possible. And he was right. and everyone else was wrong.

The search and rescue for Titan cost the US $1.6 million and Canada $3 million. That was the sixth most expensive search and rescue operation in US history. The US Coast Guard should be releasing their findings from their inquiries into Ocean Gate in the next few weeks, and we'll see what the results are. As I've been looking into this, I knew the story of course and I'd asked one of my doctors that I worked with who actually used to be a doctor in a submarine. And a quick difference between submarines and submersibles, submarines are self- sustaining and you know can go themselves whereas submersibles need a support ship. So I asked and got little bits of information from him and I again knew like the general story. I followed it in the press when it was happening and I had a ADHD a titanic obsession in my teens like a lot of ADHD women. But looking into all of this more, watching everything, reading everything, looking through old articles, going into the Wayback Machine, I watched many of his presentations and all his interviews and talks with the media and he just continued continued to say how safe this was and how safety was stopping his innovation and he knew better and especially when you listen to some of the non-media stuff, some of the phone calls, some of the things he said to employees, he basically was just saying everyone else is dumb and I am a genius that knows better than people who are experts in this, people who've been doing this for years, and even people who have spent their lives researching this.

There was a quote in an article and I'm not sure if it's still up but I will put it in the sources and there was a quote in it from a journalist who did a dive with Titan but none of his dives were successful or made it to the Titanic. They all had issues but in this article he talks about speaking to PH and how that completely reassured him about the dive because PH was so experienced. When the journalist asked PH about the safety of Titan, PH said that he wasn't worried because if something did happen, he'd be dead before he even knew there was a problem, which is technically true because Titan collapsed into itself in two milliseconds. The human brain needs about 25 milliseconds to detect a threat. So, you pretty much just cease to exist in 2 milliseconds. The journalist also talks about having Cuban cigars with Rush on the support ship the night before the attempted dive that didn't go anywhere and how Rush reassured him.

There were also other people that came out and spoke about how StockX and Rush had tried to not pressure them, but tried to lure them into going on the Titan. It seemed as though Rush was desperate for money and under immense financial pressure with Ocean Gate. He was always seeking out wealthy businessmen to go on Titan. There was a businessman named Jay Bloom who went on a couple of interviews with his son who was around college age and they actually were invited on the mission that imploded and they ended up giving up their seats because his son looked into Ocean Gate and Titan and became very alarmed and didn't want to go and told his dad we shouldn't do this and so they gave up their seats and that And those are the seats that the Darwoods had on the imploded submersible.

The only conclusion that I can come to is that it seems as though the Titan implosion was a result of financial pressure, arrogance, delusion, and a want for fame and notoriety, which as I said earlier is something that in the end Stockton Rush did get. I'm going to be very interested to see the Coast Guard's findings. And I know this was a bit more in line with my Theronos, we work murder rich people being horrendous and doing crimes than celebrity stuff, but I know I have a lot of especially ADHD girlies in my audience who I'm guessing also had a Titanic phase in like their adolescence because nearly everyone I know talks about having a Titanic obsession. So, let me know down below if you had a ton. So, let me know down below if you had a Titanic obsession and if you made it to the end. Thank you so much for watching. Leave MVP below so I can personally thank you. I can't wait for you to see I can't wait for you to see some of the videos that G and I are working on. I'm really excited about them and hopefully they will start coming out a bit quicker. I'm hoping to be getting to three videos a month by the end of summer. My Patreon social media and all of G's social media along with my second channel that I'm hoping to start posting on this summer, too. They're all linked down below along with the sources. Thank you so much for watching and as always, make sure to stay safe, take care of yourselves, and G and I hope to see you in the next one. Bye, guys.