Summary

Most people think the OceanGate Titan disaster was a tragic accident, it wasn’t. It was the predictable outcome of an egomaniacal mindset.

In this episode, Zach and his brother Dave break down the OceanGate disaster through the lens of the Netflix documentary 'Titan: The OceanGate Disaster,' unpacking how Stockton Rush’s obsession with proving carbon fiber could work at Titanic depth slowly turned engineering into ideology.

The film reveals that multiple experts warned the sub was unsafe long before the implosion, yet those warnings were repeatedly dismissed. From a monitoring system that couldn’t actually detect failure to whistleblowers who were pushed out for raising concerns, the red flags were everywhere. Engineers described the hull as impossible to properly inspect and capable of failing without warning, but the mission continued anyway.

We also explore how startup-style thinking, move fast and break things, collides with safety-critical industries, and what happens when a founder starts believing he alone understands the technology. Because the Titan didn’t just fail underwater. It failed years earlier, when doubt stopped being allowed inside the company, and Stockton Rush's ego reigned supreme.

Guest bio: David Grossfeld is a med student at Touro University, a content creator, and Zach's younger brother.

Top Takeaways

Stockton Rush and the Danger of Confusing Confidence With Competence

One of the episode’s central arguments is that confidence can persuade people before evidence does. We discuss how a founder’s certainty can reassure employees and customers, even when the questions they’re asking haven’t actually been answered. The ability to explain why something will work is not the same as demonstrating that it does.

OceanGate’s Carbon Fiber Hull: When a Design Becomes an Identity

The discussion examines what happens when a leader becomes personally invested in proving a particular technology works. My interpretation is that carbon fiber became more than an engineering choice for Rush: it became part of the future he wanted to represent. Once abandoning a design feels like admitting personal defeat, changing course becomes much harder.

The Titan Disaster Shows Why Previous Dives Don’t Prove Long-Term Safety

A recurring theme is the difference between surviving a trip and establishing that a vehicle can safely repeat it. Previous successful dives can create reassurance while leaving unresolved questions about damage, durability, and inspection. The episode challenges the assumption that “nothing happened last time” means the underlying decision was sound.

Titan’s Acoustic Monitoring System: A Warning Is Only Useful If You Can Act on It

We question the reassurance offered by listening for signs of structural damage. The broader takeaway is that having sensors is not enough: their readings must be understood, validated, and connected to meaningful safety decisions. Our discussion uses dark analogies to explore the difference between detecting danger and having a dependable way to prevent it.

David Lochridge and the Cost of Speaking Up at OceanGate

The discussion of whistleblower David Lochridge raises a crucial workplace question: what happens when the person identifying a danger becomes the person management wants gone? We examine how a company’s response to dissent can influence everyone else’s willingness to speak. Safety depends on whether concerns can change decisions, not merely whether employees are allowed to voice them.

Was OceanGate Cult-Like? When Belief Replaces Scrutiny

We explore OceanGate through the metaphor of a belief system organized around a technology and its champion. This is our interpretation, not a diagnosis or formal classification. The warning sign we identify is a culture where questioning the project starts to look like disloyalty, and defending it becomes more important than evaluating it.

Startup Culture and OceanGate: The Limits of “Move Fast and Break Things”

The episode questions whether the habits celebrated in technology startups belong in industries where failures can immediately kill people. We support experimentation while arguing that its pace and safeguards must reflect the consequences. A deadline, competitive advantage, or exciting vision cannot substitute for establishing safety.

Medical Ethics and OceanGate: Confidence Needs Boundaries

Dave’s medical training brings another perspective to the conversation: professionals need confidence, but they also need evidence, established procedures, and the judgment to recognize their limits. We discuss the danger of treating a person as an opportunity to prove an unvalidated idea. Responsibility includes knowing when to stop.

Big Tech and Social Media: Who Bears the Cost of Experimentation?

The conversation extends beyond submersibles to the incentives behind social platforms. We ask whether optimizing for attention can overlook users’ well-being, using damage to a hull as a metaphor for less visible psychological effects. It’s an analogy about accountability, not a claim that social media and Titan involve identical mechanisms or harms.

Titanic Tourism and Extreme Adventure: Is the Story Worth the Experience?

From Titanic expeditions to Everest, skydiving, and even MRI machines, we explore the appeal of doing something extraordinary—and telling people afterward. The closing discussion asks whether an impressive story justifies an experience you don’t actually want to have. Curiosity is understandable; declining an adventure doesn’t require an apology.

Top 10 Quotes

OceanGate’s Titan Disaster: Confidence Treated Like Evidence

“This was a slow motion collision between ego and physics, where confidence was treated like evidence and warnings were treated like noise.”
— Zach Grossfeld

Stockton Rush and the Psychology of Doubling Down

“Because once an idea becomes your identity, you stop testing it and you dig in your heels to do whatever you have to do to defend it.”
— Zach Grossfeld

OceanGate’s Warning Signs: Who Could Have Stopped It?

“It's how many people saw this coming and why no one was able to stop it.”
— Zach Grossfeld

The OceanGate Cult Analogy: Carbon Fiber as a Belief System

“I think it was a cult of carbon fiber and Stockton Rush was the high priest.”
— Zach Grossfeld

When Engineering Evidence Becomes a Threat

“Evidence became blasphemy.”
— Zach Grossfeld

Why Employees Might Stay Despite Safety Concerns

“I think it's money. It's status. It's a feeling of importance.”
— Dave, discussing possible reasons employees might stay

Startup Ambition: Sometimes the Best Decision Is to Stop

“It's sometimes it's healthy to just sink into life and like you have a crazy idea and then you turn on Mad Men.”
— Zach Grossfeld

Social Media Algorithms and the Attention Economy

“You're more worried about how we can get someone to watch this for five more seconds, disregarding the effect it's having on humans.”
— Zach Grossfeld

Cult Psychology: Why Nobody Should Assume They’re Immune

“Thinking that I'm immune to getting persuaded by a cult probably makes me more vulnerable.”
— Zach Grossfeld

Would You Visit the Titanic? Dave’s Answer

“Based on knowing that I barely even want to get in an MRI machine, I would say no.”
— Dave

Full transcript

Zach: One of the craziest parts of the documentary—Stockton Rush, I don't know if you remember, he's talking to one of the other engineers inside the sub and kind of giving them a breakdown of the warning system. Stockton Rush says there's nothing that happens that requires an immediate response. If you hear an alarm, don't worry about it. The best thing you can do is don't do anything. I wouldn't even say that to an employee in an ice cream shop.

Zach: What do you think of when you think of OceanGate? Innovation, exploration, the Titanic? Or do you think of five people sealed inside a machine that should have never existed?

Because this wasn't just a tragic accident. This was a slow-motion collision between ego and physics, where confidence was treated like evidence and warnings were treated like noise. At the center of it all was a man who didn't just want to explore the ocean. He wanted to redefine it. A founder chasing legacy, convinced he could outthink decades of engineering by sheer belief.

Dave: I feel like he wanted to be the Elon Musk of the ocean. He forgot that Elon sent shuttles without people first and made sure they worked, but he just wanted to be the guy where he was like, “All right, I got down to the Titanic. I'm going to do it as fast as possible.”

Zach: Stockton Rush literally says in the documentary, he's like, “I'm a big swinging dick. I want to be a big swinging dick. I want to be the Elon Musk of the ocean.”

The deeper this sub went, the more it became clear that this wasn't just about reaching the Titanic. It was about proving a point. A point that was built on carbon fiber, a material that works beautifully in the sky and performs catastrophically under pressure. A material that doesn't warn you when it fails. It holds and it holds until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, it's instant.

And yet, every test, every crack, every concern became something to rationalize away. Engineers raised alarms. Whistleblowers got pushed out. Reality bent around a narrative that had already been constructed. Because once an idea becomes your identity, you stop testing it, and you dig in your heels to do whatever you have to do to [music] defend it.

It's not just, how did OceanGate happen? It's how many people saw this coming and why no one was able to stop it.

Zach: I think this would be a good place to start. What comes to mind when you think about OceanGate? When you hear the word OceanGate, what pops into your head? Could be a person, could be a metaphor, could be anything that comes into that sweet, beautiful dome of yours.

Dave: Man, I just think of OceanGate. I mean, I don't know. I just kind of think of the Titanic or something. Just crazy exploration happening. But I feel like it's tainted now with, unfortunately, I think I just think of death, honestly, in the ocean. If I'm being honest, I just think of unfortunate stupidity. [Laughter]

Zach: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of death going on. They're on a submersible that became full of death, and they were exploring another ship that was full of death.

Even if everything goes well—because there are a lot of other missions that have gone to the Titanic and back that are successful, that aren't the Titan disaster—it feels creepy to be exploring, doing deep-sea diving. I'm just talking as someone who's seen the documentary; I've never actually been on one of these expeditions. But to be in a submersible underwater, looking at a thing like the Titanic, where you know a [__] ton of people died in the ocean and then sank underwater, there is this otherworldly element of, “I'm not that far away from the people who died on the Titanic. I may be about to meet them soon if just one little thing goes wrong down here.”

I may have bought a ticket to the Titanic's final destination, which, for a lot of people, was heaven.

Dave: Yeah. Or hell, depending on how they—

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. I mean, depending on how you interpret the movie. But these people, it's like, dude, it sucks, but also it wasn't that hard to not join these unfortunate members of the Titanic.

Dave: I know, but there's this weird human curiosity where there's disaster and historical disasters, and you need to be the special person to see that it happened. It's almost like Mount Everest, where you're like, “Oh, I did Mount Everest.” You come back and tell your friends. I mean, that's a pretty cool story: “I literally saw the Titanic.” But it's almost like, dude, was it worth it? I mean, for some people it is.

Zach: It is kind of like the inverse of Mount Everest because you have to have a lot of money to do both: to climb Everest or to go in a submersible to see the Titanic. And in both cases, there are other people essentially doing the work for you.

I know there are some people who climb Everest, and I guess the Sherpas are not as involved, but from what I understand, there are packages that people buy. Let's say it's like $50K to go climb Mount Everest, and essentially you won't have to lift a bag. You'll have a two-pound personal pack, and you just essentially hired Sherpa slaves to carry your entire life in these 30-, 50-pound sacks for you so you can say you climbed Everest. You're still doing the walking, but you're not carrying nearly as much weight.

And when you go down and see something like the Titanic, you don't have to have the expertise. You don't have to get licensed, do the work. You hop in a submersible, and some guy who hopefully brings you back alive leads the mission. He's your underwater Sherpa.

Dave: He was a Sherpa to bring you down. I also wonder how much of it is the movie influencing the curiosity about everything that happened, too. It's obviously a crazy thing, but then you have this whole blockbuster film, and it's like, “All right, we got to see this.”

Zach: You mean the Titanic movie or the Netflix documentary?

Dave: Both of them. You've got the documentary, but also just exploring the Titanic with the increased popularity from the movie. Is that causing people to want to see it? Because otherwise, maybe without the movie, it would have just been like, “All right, it's a disaster.” But with the humongous movie from James Cameron, it's like, “All right, I got to see this [__].”

Zach: Yeah, 100%. I think the movie, the cinematic element, the pop-cultural element sways people's interest in it, for sure. I don't think people would be anywhere near as interested in the Titanic if that movie didn't star Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and make a billion and a half dollars.

There's another book—we've both read it. You've read Endurance, right, with Shackleton?

Dave: Maybe. Was it a high school book? Because I might have read the CliffsNotes.

Zach: No, I don't think it was assigned in high school. It was about this guy, Ernest Shackleton, who led a voyage to attempt to cross the Antarctic landmass, to be the first one to cross it and sail there. This is over a hundred years ago. This was the early 1900s, and there hasn't been a movie made about it.

I was thinking this while I was reading Endurance: how has there not been a movie made about this guy who led a voyage? The goal was to get across Antarctica. Their ship ended up getting caught in ice and stuck in the vicinity of Antarctica, and they were stranded for a year and a half, and no one died. Not a single person died, and they eventually made it back.

Dave: I've never heard of this.

Zach: Yeah. If this was a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio—I don't know what Leonardo DiCaprio is doing, but his next film role should be Ernest Shackleton. And then the lore of the Endurance ship through movies, if the movie ever got made, would probably attract more people to visit the wreck because it's frozen. It's literally a frozen wreck in Antarctica. You'd have to pay a lot to get there, just like people have to pay a lot to go dive—

Dave: Is it still there?

Zach: —see the Titanic? It's still there.

Dave: Oh, [__].

Zach: Yeah. It's frozen. It got crushed by ice, and I think it's still there, frozen.

Dave: I've heard of this, but I haven't [unclear]. I'm surprised—I mean, this documentary took one or two years to make. I'm surprised no one jumped on that. That's kind of crazy.

Zach: Yeah. I think there's probably some type of YouTube video or something, but I'm surprised there's not a major picture about it. There has to be something in the works.

If you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spare right now and you're looking for an investment, you should buy the book rights to Endurance because that is 100% going to be a Leonardo DiCaprio movie.

Unidentified speaker: For any viewers out there, you might want to put all of your life savings into making Endurance. Leo is playing Ernest Shackleton, 100%. You heard it here. Play this clip back when he lands that role and it eventually comes out in the cinema.

Unidentified speaker: It's either Leo or Robert Pattinson. It's got to be one of those.

Zach: I could see Robert Pattinson playing Shackleton, too. I'll tell you, speaking of actors, I had another thought when I was watching the OceanGate documentary, going back through it this week to prepare for the podcast.

Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, who ultimately took those people down—a lot of his decision-making led to the demise of himself and others. I saw a lot of parallels between Stockton Rush and Dr. John Thackery from The Knick.

If anyone's seen The Knick—Clive Owen—it's an amazing show. Ran for two seasons. Clive Owen plays this megalomaniacal, narcissistic doctor, and he thinks he's God.

I think they're very different characters, but there are a lot of similarities. I think Stockton Rush is more selfish and dumber than Dr. John Thackery because Thackery's character in The Knick doesn't really gamble on other people's lives as much as he gambles on his own. And then, in the end, ultimately performing surgery on himself—it's the perfect ending to going out.

Whereas Stockton Rush was like, “I'm God, but I'm also going to lead disciples in a company to follow me.” He had the people who followed him, but I think Stockton Rush took it to another level where he was like, “I'm going to bring these people down with me, and if I fail, everyone dies.”

Dave: And they did. [Laughter]

Zach: They did.

Dave: But no, I think that's a good comparison. One of the biggest differences is it's mostly evidence-based, whatever he does, except for—

Zach: I would say most of it's evidence-based, except for performing surgery on yourself and then refusing help as you're going blind. [Laughter] Peripherals are gone.

Dave: Wild. That's one of the wildest endings I've seen. But I was just thinking that the egos are the same. I think the ego levels are the same, the God complex, but there's almost a human [element]—the heroin addiction. He's almost likable because he's so mentally [__] up.

But Stockton is like, “No, I'm always…” You don't see the vulnerability with him. He's just like, “I'm going to do whatever I want.”

Zach: Yeah. He was almost like a billionaire automaton on a script of an egomaniacal person, Stockton Rush, who didn't care at all about human life.

You could see the tinges in Dr. John Thackery, how he cared about human lives. He wanted to be famous because of his treatments and be known as someone who could save human lives, but he wouldn't disregard human life to become famous.

Dave: Except his own in the end.

Zach: Exactly. But Stockton Rush was like, “Yeah, I'll kill five people to achieve my dreams.”

Dave: What came to mind earlier when you asked me was, I feel like he wanted to be the Elon Musk of the ocean. But he forgot that Elon sent shuttles without people first and made sure they mostly worked, or worked. He just wanted to be the guy, the Elon Musk of the ocean, where he was like, “All right, I got down to the Titanic. I'm going to do it as fast as possible.”

But he forgot that most people mess up so many times until—you can't have 100% certainty, but the rockets got to a point where it's pretty [unclear]. I forget. I don't know if Elon Musk puts people in his shuttles, but I think they're unmanned still.

Zach: They're still unmanned. But you could watch a SpaceX launch, and there have been failed SpaceX launches where they literally explode, or they don't land properly, and they lose hundreds of millions of dollars when one of those goes out. But no one dies because they're unmanned.

Stockton Rush literally says in the documentary, he's like, “I'm a big swinging dick. I want to be a big swinging dick. I want to be the Elon Musk of the ocean,” like you said.

But he gambled with human lives unnecessarily, even with his own life. If you just disregard the Titan disaster at the end that everyone knows about, where it [__] imploded and killed everyone—even when he was building the Titan, there was a point where one of the lead engineers, David Lochridge, I believe it was, who ended up being the whistleblower, said, “Hey, this guy's going to [__] kill people.” Which he ended up doing.

David Lochridge went to Stockton Rush and said, “Hey, why are we not sending this sub down on a wire? You don't have to get in this.”

And Stockton Rush goes, “No, I'm getting in.”

He's like, “Literally, the experiment is the same with you in it or not in it. Let's just send it down on a wire and see if we can get to depth.”

And Stockton's like, “No, I'm doing it.”

So he does have this messiah, God complex of, “I'll put myself on the altar for the good of being the CEO, leader, billionaire, big-swinging-dick-type figure.” He literally was like, “I want to be Elon Musk. I want to be Jeff Bezos of the ocean.”

Dave: Yeah. Maybe he didn't see all the work they put into their stuff. He thinks it was just an instant, two-year thing to make Blue Origin and SpaceX, but it was not. They had so many more [unclear]. If Elon Musk saw—in the documentary, it shows the audio files of the weakness in the metal—

Zach: Yeah. The audio—what do they call it? The acoustic monitoring system, AMS.

Dave: Yeah. If any other sound engineer—or, because they were working with Boeing or something, and he fired all of Boeing, right? And then he fired David [unclear]. If any other sound engineer or scientist in their right mind heard that, they would just be like, “Yeah, there's no [__] chance we're doing anything at all.”

Zach: Yeah. Hey, guys, this is a quick break in the episode to let you know about The Zach Show 2.0, where I give early access to subscribers, bonus episodes, the ability to get featured on the show, and more.

The first tier is called Support Zach, where, for $2.50 a month, you get early access to every episode of The Zach Show, early access to the Zach Unpack series, which is a comedy solo deep-dive-style show on different topics I'll be launching next month. You also get the “Zarives” [series name unclear], which are 31 bonus episodes you can find nowhere else, on topics like the rise of Tim Dillon, Ted Bundy, the Tuskegee experiments, and Oppenheimer.

Some of the archive episodes are on single topics. Other episodes are a combination of current-event stories. Some are me reacting to debates. It's a whole mix of things in those archives.

Then we have the Full Z Access tier, where, for $7 a month, you get everything I just said, plus the Zach Gets Real bonus pod series launching next month, where I'll talk about personal stories and challenges I went through, like failing my dream of becoming a pro baseball player, almost dying while climbing Saddleback Mountain, and my mom driving me to the hospital when I got too high smoking weed.

You also get exclusive AMAs, a sneak peek of topics for every episode, and a personalized letter from me.

Finally, we have the “Fool's Access Supreme” tier [tier name unclear], for 17 bucks a month, which gives you everything in the previous two tiers, plus the ability to get featured on the show by submitting guest questions, a monthly Zoom hang, and credit as a producer in the show, which is like a mini ad placement on the video version of The Zach Show in exchange for your support.

The best way to support the show is to go to “zackshow.supcast.com—supercast.com” [URL unclear in transcript] and subscribe to the tier that's right for you on The Zach Show 2.0.

I wanted to give a wide spread of options financially and perks-wise because I know that everyone's situation and level of interest in the show is different. I am going to do my absolute best to make everyone in every tier feel like they're getting as much as, or hopefully more than, what they pay for.

So, thank you so much, however you choose to support. It's just me hosting, editing, producing, cutting these videos, every single episode, and every subscriber truly makes a difference. All right, let's get back to the episode.

Zach: One of the craziest parts of the documentary, one of the craziest lines that I wrote down, is the actual opening where Stockton Rush—I don't know if you remember—he's talking to one of the other engineers inside the sub and giving them a breakdown of the warning system.

Stockton Rush says there's nothing that happens that requires an immediate response. If you hear an alarm, don't worry about it. The best thing you can do is don't do anything.

I wouldn't even say that to an employee in an ice cream shop, let alone running a sub that I'm gambling people's lives on to bring them down to the Titanic with thousands of pounds per square inch of pressure. [Laughter]

If I was the CEO of an ice cream shop and I was going over the machines, like, “Hey, if you hear this beeping and it starts leaking liquid ice cream, you should probably do something about that. Don't do nothing. You should inspect the machine and see what's going on.”

He was doing things that were 10,000-fold more risky than that and saying, “Yeah, no, if you're on the ship and you hear an alarm, it's all about vibes. Just be chill, and the sub will be chill.” It follows you emotionally. Just tell the sub, “No, we're chilling right now.”

Dave: Just like the plane, and the engine goes out. Dude, it's totally fine. We'll make it. [Laughter]

Zach: Yeah. After that, there's another quote in the first few minutes where there's another engineer talking about Rush. Speaking about Stockton Rush, he says he was an arrogant scientist. He knew he was a genius. He was a very confident person, says things with conviction. He tells you what he will do and why it will always work.

That made me think about how speaking confidently can kill people. If you're speaking confidently without a knowledge base that is suited to doing what you are setting out to do—the air of confidence, because some people are blessed with it. Some people just have that gene where they're like, “It doesn't matter if I'm not an expert in this. I'm just going to speak confidently about it.”

There is a percentage of the population that is like that. Things happen, and later it comes out that this person actually wasn't an expert, but they convinced themselves and, more dangerously, they convinced other people: “I'm just going to talk about [__] with a level of confidence.”

I don't know where that comes from because if I even think I don't know something a little bit, I'm like, “Yeah, I should probably start this out by saying I'm nowhere near an expert, but this is just an opinion.” Or I might not say anything at all.

But someone like Stockton Rush is like, “No, I'm just going to say this thing about an acoustic monitoring system that's never been done before on an underwater sub and just be like, yeah, we can listen to the damage before it's happening, and that's how we'll figure out if we're going to die.”

Obviously, that didn't work. But the people who went on that sub and worked on it believed what he was saying.

Dave: Do you think he had some sort of personality disorder or narcissism going on?

Zach: Obviously, I can't diagnose someone as a narcissist. But if you were to ask me, what is a level of confidence, lacking knowledge, that will have an effect on people and gather an audience, almost like a cult leader? I felt like he had a cultish energy.

Some people consider OceanGate a little bit of a cult, with the employees who stuck around, because a lot of people did leave, but some people did stick around and believe in him, even though a lot of what he was saying was [__]. I would say he would have been a really good cult leader if he survived and wanted to start a cult.

Dave: I think a cult just requires confidence, even without intelligence. I think you just need confidence.

Zach: Yeah. Literally, there's something in that type of person's brain—or the intelligence. Clearly, he was—I forget what his exact [background was]. He did have some type of physics background or something.

Unidentified speaker: He got an aerospace engineering degree from [unfinished].

Zach: So he had intelligence, but he didn't have discernment, I guess. He didn't have the brakes on his own master plan of ego [__], you know?

There is something in that type of person. I would say 99.99% of people, when they don't know something, there's a thing that inhibits you, where it makes you more timid. Maybe that's an evolutionary design or something: if you don't know something, you're not going to be able to communicate it as confidently. So you kind of will be hesitant when you're speaking, or you'll preface something by saying, “I don't actually know for sure, but this is what I think.”

Some of the smartest people I've talked to on this podcast have said, “The more [__] I know, the more things I realize I don't. So I'm never really saying things as gospel. I can always be wrong.” And that, to me, is a sign of true intelligence.

Then you have another type of person, like Stockton Rush, who gives off the appearance of intelligence through confidence, even though it's not based in actual intelligence. He had enough vocabulary and intelligence and charisma to convince people that he was right when he was absolutely wrong and ended up killing people.

Dave: Yeah. It is an interesting background with his academics. I don't know if it was also influenced by him trying to race other companies. I think there were a couple of other private companies trying to [unfinished]. But still, just seeing real data in front of his face, where the carbon fiber hull literally just explodes in his own lab, and he's like, “All right, we're getting there. Maybe next time we'll throw a person in there, but we're close.” [Laughter]

Zach: Right before they started building the Titan, they had the third-scale model test, and it just completely [__] shattered. I think it reached maybe 3,000 meters, and then Stockton Rush goes, “All right, let's start building the actual model.”

One of the engineers was like, “Build what? We haven't had a positive test yet.”

And he's like, “Oh, yeah, but it'll work out.” So literally, without a single test with a third-scale model at depth, he just went, “All right, yeah, we'll go ahead with this set of designs we have.” They never had an effective model.

Dave: He did testing, right? Then he was like, “All right, now let's do the full carbon fiber. This model will be called the Titan.” He just called it the Titan, and he's like, “All right, this will be the one.” Never had a [unclear] test.

Zach: I want to get into the carbon fiber hull because I think this is interesting both from an engineering standpoint, knowing what happened, but also from a psychological standpoint.

This was the first time carbon fiber was ever used for a hull in deep-sea diving. Normally, it's steel or titanium. I don't know how you felt when they started describing carbon fiber because I never actually sat back and thought about what carbon fiber was. I knew carbon fiber was in cars or phone cases, just a lightweight material.

But then, when people started describing carbon fiber in the documentary, where they go, “Yeah, it's just strings held together by glue.”

Dave: Yeah.

Zach: That's legit how they were like, “Yeah, it's carbon strings of atoms chained together, held together by glue, and then they paint an adhesive over it.” I was like, “This is going to be bad.” You can't make an underwater sub made out of strings of anything. As soon as you hear the word “strings,” you're like, “No, that's not the material.”

Dave: Too much space. Yeah, me too. I always heard it was in new tech. I don't know if it's in space shuttles. I'm not sure if it's in that type of stuff, but it's lightweight. He wanted to use it because it was either lighter weight or it was cheaper. I forget, something like that.

Zach: Well, it was both. The weight was part of the cost. In the documentary, they say that the two biggest drivers of cost are the actual sub, what you're building it out of—carbon fiber is cheaper than steel and titanium—and then the cost of transporting the vessel. The more the vessel weighs, the bigger ship you have to have to transport it.

If you have a carbon fiber ship, it's going to be light as [__]. I think I just read it was like 1,500 pounds or something. But if it was titanium or something else, it might have been like 5,000, like that.

Dave: Yeah.

Zach: It would have been a lot more. The cost would have not [unfinished]. The idea—and he even says this out loud—he's like, “Accessibility is ownership.” That was his whole plan: if no one else can access the Titanic, then we own it.

He wanted to build a fleet of these subs, these carbon fiber subs, at scale. When you're mixing cost with people's lives, it never goes well when you're taking the Silicon Valley approach of, “Let's just move fast and break [__],” because people die. If you make a phone that sucks, no one dies. But if you make a carbon fiber hull that doesn't hold people, and you keep testing it with humans inside, people are going to eventually die.

Dave: Did they say why he didn't just go with—I know he's trying to cut costs, but why not just use the normal submarine metal to go to that depth? There are others. James Cameron has been down. These people have been down. Wouldn't he still profit if you just used the normal method?

Zach: I think he wanted to be different. He even says this in the Netflix film: he wants to do the carbon fiber [__] and prove it. Carbon fiber almost became his identity, where he became attached to that decision at the beginning, made a wrong turn initially, and then just stuck to it.

He was like, “Okay, now we have to reverse-engineer why carbon fiber works,” even though every test we do is telling us that—they describe the carbon fiber screaming every time we go down.

Just as a background for people, I took some notes from the Netflix documentary on why carbon fiber sucks for deep-sea exploration. There is a lot of study on using carbon fiber in aerospace. It's really good with tension, which is pressure outwards, like when you're trying to pressurize air and the pressure is low outside and high inside the vessel. It's terrible for compression. So when you have more pressure outside the vessel, carbon fiber is not—

Dave: What he was doing. [Laughter]

Zach: Exactly. So you have thousands of pounds per square centimeter concentrated by the ocean water on this vessel. Carbon fiber is not good for that.

The carbon fiber has zero compression failure warning. It holds, holds, holds, and then it just fails instantly. The whole acoustic monitoring system is made up by Stockton Rush as almost a marketing thing: “We have this monitoring system, and we're listening to the sub to track the failure in real time.”

But in reality, it happened exactly as it happened, which is you have no idea, based on noises, when carbon fiber is going to fail. It's strong until it's not. And it literally happens in—

Dave: The ironic thing is, the acoustic monitoring in the documentary kind of just made his ship look like a piece of [__]. It was constantly, under a certain—under 3,000 feet, it was just going off like fireworks.

I forget what he says, but he went solo, I think, one time to a different wreck or something.

Zach: Yeah.

Dave: He was just listening, and he had no reaction. He's like, “Oh, all right.” Didn't he call it, “Oh, it's just adjusting itself,” or something?

Zach: He said “seasoning.” He's like, “No, no.” One of the engineers was like, “Are you sure the cracking noise is made up? We shouldn't be worried about that?” And he's just like, “Yeah, no, it's just seasoning. The hull is just seasoning.”

You know, like you put a turkey in the oven for Thanksgiving, and it's got to harden up a little bit on the outside. That's basically the hull. We're just sitting inside a Thanksgiving turkey. It's so beautiful. Happy holidays.

Unidentified speaker: [Laughter] Just crushes.

Dave: Once you heard him call that seasoning, I would have just been like, “That's enough for me.”

Zach: It points to the type of personality because he had to know. It would be interesting if he were still alive and could sit in a court and give depositions on the Titan, which now we'll never have. Was he convincing himself that this was actually true, that you were seasoning the hull by literally carbon fiber snapping, and every fiber that snaps weakens it exponentially?

This thing you're calling seasoning, like you're just hardening the hull—essentially what he was saying—it's the exact opposite. Every sound you hear is weakening the actual hull of the ship.

He was an aerospace engineer. I'm sure he was very familiar with the mechanics of carbon fiber because it's used in airplanes. You can't become an aerospace engineer and not know how carbon fiber works.

So I would be interested in hearing him talk about it if he were still alive: if he was so psychopathic and narcissistic and delusional that he convinced himself that what he was saying was true, or he was just telling his engineers what they needed to hear to continue with the project and kind of get them off his back.

Dave: Yeah. I honestly think some people are crazy enough that they lie to themselves so much that they start believing stuff. I feel like he believed that if it didn't implode ever, he's probably like, “All right, I think I got this. It's just going to make some crackly sounds, but I should be good.”

Zach: I lean toward the delusional, too. I think him being intelligently manipulative is too much credit. I think he was self-delusional because he put himself—

Dave: Actually, why I lean toward that is because he put himself in the ship, which is basically like, “I trust my ship so much that I'm going to sit in my own ship, and this is going to work.”

You probably remember, there's a scene that really demonstrates how delusional he is. If you remember, with David Lochridge, they're doing a different wreck or something. David Lochridge is like, “I really think I should drive this. You don't know what you're doing.”

And he's like, “I got it. I'll take care of it.”

Immediately, he's like, “Dude, no, don't go forward. Don't go forward.” And he just gets stuck under a piece of metal.

Zach: Yeah. They get stuck underneath the bow of the ship, and then David Lochridge has to be like, “Dude, get the [__] out of the driver's seat.” He almost killed everyone there because if the debris didn't move, they would have had no way of actually getting up.

I remember David Lochridge was just like, “Yeah, this guy didn't let me drive the ship.” He's like, “Don't worry, I got it,” and we're just going through a debris field. I'm picturing Star Wars, space debris just flying all over and nicking the ship.

Eventually, David Lochridge is like, “Dude, get the [__] up. You're going to kill me and everyone else.”

Dave: I'm glad he said that because he could have just been like, “Dude…” But he got stuck. I think after that, he said their relationship was never the same, even though he saved—

Zach: Yeah.

Dave: That's how crazy this guy is. He saved everyone, and then he said after that, the guy hated him, and he eventually fired [him].

Zach: Yeah. That's because, to a guy like that, safety and competence matter much less than how he's perceived by other people. So he probably didn't like the perception that David Lochridge was the guy coming in to save the day as the pilot, even though that's literally what Stockton Rush hired David Lochridge for: to pilot the ship.

The ironic part is that because Stockton Rush thought he could pilot the ship, it allowed David Lochridge to come in and save the day. Whereas if David Lochridge just started as a pilot, and Stockton was like, “Yeah, this is my pilot, and I'm the head of the company,” people would have been like, “Oh, yeah, CEO. This is a pretty smart guy.”

Because he tried to pilot the ship and had this dumbass moment of having to be kicked out of the driver's seat by Lochridge, that probably triggered something in him where he's like, “No, this is not how I'm going to let people in the company see me. I am in the driver's seat. I'm controlling everything.”

Which brings me back to the carbon fiber. Just as a recap: carbon fiber, terrible for compression. Carbon fiber has zero compression failure warning, which is why it's terrible. It holds and then fails instantly. Titanium and steel deform and crack first. It doesn't just [__] compress like a can, like the Titan did when the hull cracked.

You also can't reliably inspect carbon fiber fatigue. The threads separate invisibly. Whereas when you have a steel or titanium hull, you can do an ultrasound, and you can internally inspect the hull for weakness. When you have a carbon fiber hull, threads are snapping. You could have the appearance of an audio or acoustic monitoring system, but you're not actually doing [__] because you don't know the breaking point. You're taking an absolute guess when it comes to carbon fiber.

So my theory is that Stockton Rush chose carbon fiber [snorts] for complete control because he said that he wanted to make engineering decisions. Carbon fiber has much fewer precedents than steel and titanium. It's not studied nearly as much in deep-sea diving. Never been used before. Fewer rules, much fewer experts on carbon fiber deep-sea diving, harder to argue against because of that. The less evidence and statistics you have in an area, the more you can insert your own [__] and make people believe it.

I don't know if it was a direct choice for control by Stockton Rush, but I think indirectly he chose carbon fiber because he wanted to be the man of this material. He was like, “I'm going to be the carbon fiber guy.”

Dave: I agree. I think he was trying to be different. He just wanted to be a pioneer, basically.

Zach: He wanted to be the person who brings it to deep-sea exploration, regardless of the evidence. And because the evidence wasn't there, he could kind of create the story himself with his own lies and overreach of knowledge that he didn't have.

Dave: Yeah. And he wasn't patient. It would have been another three to five years, probably, to try another model or material, and he was like, “No, we're just doing what we have, and we're going to try it out.”

Zach: Yeah. I just thought—obviously, it's bad to say because people died—but before the epitome of the mission that took five people's lives, when you were looking at the acoustic monitoring system, and you had Stockton Rush saying, “Oh, yeah, we're listening to the seasoning,” and then you could hear the hull about to crack, and then it cuts to the other engineers, like David Lochridge, saying, “Yeah, this is made up. There's no acoustic monitoring system for subs with carbon fiber. You have no idea when it's going to fail.”

I was trying to think of a metaphor for what that would be like in another situation. The thing that hit me was, it's kind of like trying to listen to a gunshot before it arrives.

Dave: Yeah.

Zach: Where you're like, “I'm not going to move until I hear the gunshot,” but by the time the trigger's pulled, you're dead. It's like a sniper. You're like, “Oh, I'll move my head out of the way when I hear it, and I'll start to do my safety precautions.” But by the time you've heard it—

Dave: It's a perfect metaphor. Yeah.

Zach: There's nothing you can do. It's so fast, it's so quick, it's so devastating that by the time your [__] acoustic monitoring system is signaling it's going to go, you're done. You're dead.

Dave: I don't even know if they got to the Titanic depth in their testing.

Zach: I heard James Cameron say—I'm sure it's a very small community of people who have ever been to the Titanic, and they all talk amongst each other—James Cameron was saying how they kept warning Stockton Rush: “Don't [__] do the carbon fiber hull. Don't do it. It's stupid.”

Based on what James Cameron heard in the aftermath—and he probably has much deeper insight into what actually happened because he's in that community—he thinks that they were doing some sort of emergency measure and coming up. I guess the AMS, the acoustic monitoring system, maybe it was going crazy, and then they tried to surface.

I think they dropped the weights. You put weights on the ship as you're going down, and it looked like they dropped the weights and were trying to surface, and that's when it just [__] imploded.

Dave: Okay. I didn't even know that.

Zach: So he thinks maybe it started to go crazy, and then by the time they [__]—that's the thing, literally a gunshot. It's like, “Oh, [__].” You hear the sound, and by the time you're like, “All right, let's surface,” it's like, boom, you're [__] exploded.

Dave: Yeah. I didn't know. That's crazy. So maybe they were trying to rescue themselves, and it didn't work.

Also, these people who took the [__]—they obviously signed a waiver, but I'm sure he withheld a lot of information. He probably wasn't telling them what's going on with these safety tests and how much noise he's hearing. He probably was just like, “Yeah, here's a new technology, and if you want to try it, you got to sign your life away, but it's probably going to go fine.” And then they just got on. I feel terrible for these people.

Zach: Yeah.

Dave: I don't know how much the passengers who got on the Titan knew. I hope he was like, “Yeah, you can definitely die taking this.” But maybe he was just like, “Oh, you're going to be fine, but just sign this just in case,” or something like that.

I forget, was that his first? He did get to the Titanic previously, right? That wasn't his first?

Zach: Yeah. He actually did do—I forget if it was nine or 12. He'd been to the Titanic. But the thing is, because of the nature of carbon fiber, every time you go down, it weakens, and you never know where it's going to break.

One of the investigators said this in the documentary. He said making it to the Titanic once is not a marker of success because if you're doing it with a faulty design, you can make it once, or you can make it 10 or 100 times, but eventually it's going to [__] pop.

The marker of success is having a hull and a design that doesn't weaken over time to the point where you can't monitor it and have an idea of when [__] needs maintenance and when it's going to completely implode, which you can't come back from.

Dave: Yeah.

Zach: I also thought it was hilarious, given everything that has happened recently with Boeing—obviously, there's been a lot of sketchy engineering decisions that have been made by Boeing with airplanes. You hear the [__] about engines and doors coming off and all that [__]. Even the Boeing engineers that Stockton Rush contracted to work on the ship wrote him a memo with skulls and crossbones at the depth that he wanted to go, saying, “Carbon fiber, skull and crossbones, do not go, dude.”

And Stockton Rush was like, “I'm just going to disregard [that].” Even Boeing engineers were like—there's been a lot of sketchy [__] recently happening with Boeing planes—even they were like, “I wouldn't do this, dude. I would turn down.”

Dave: It's literally just like Steve-O saying, “Dude, don't jump off that. Don't bungee jump this cliff, dude. I've done a lot, but please don't do this.”

Zach: Yeah. [Laughter] If you're about to do a stunt, and Steve-O's like—and not new, sober Steve-O, but still pilled-up, [__]-up Steve-O was just like, “Dude, I wouldn't [__]. That's not something I would do, man.”

Is this a good Steve-O impression?

Dave: Yeah. No, it's not. It's a cross between Steve-O and the cigarette commercials where they have—

Zach: Yeah. “No, this is Steve-O, and I have lung cancer, but I've kept doing pills. This is an alternate reality where Steve-O is not sober, and I'm telling you, dude, don't do that bungee-jump stunt. It's going to be bad, man.”

Dave: Yeah, he'll never die. His soul will—they're not going to find his body. But I remember seeing the Boeing thing. I'm like, dude, this must be terrible.

Is there anything you could do to prevent a private company from doing what he did? Let's just say Boeing, a public company, the engineers verify that this guy is insane. Are there no ocean regulations where they're like, “No, dude, you can't take people in this”? That surprised me.

Zach: There are regulations for certain countries. I think it depends, but they spoke about this in the documentary. One of the engineers was saying that one of the first warning signs should have been that Stockton Rush, by design, was trying to avoid U.S. regulations.

He said, “Let's build it in the Bahamas and test it there. We'll launch from Canada.” And then the Titanic wreck is in international waters. So nothing they did had to be regulated by the U.S. He was doing everything in his power to not have U.S. regulations.

Dave: Yeah. Sometimes you want to speed things up. Sometimes there are stem cell treatments where you're like, “All right, I got to go to Germany or whatever,” and maybe they work. But this guy—that should have been a red flag to everyone that he was trying [that].

There was that blonde girl in the documentary, and he literally made her the pilot, or he wanted to train her to be a pilot. He was like, “You're—”

Zach: Do you remember, before her, he wanted to make an accountant the pilot? There was this other girl, Bonnie, who resigned. He was like, “Yeah, we're going to train you to be a pilot,” and she was like, “I'm a [__] accountant. I literally run the books,” and left after that.

Then he goes to that other girl, the blonde one, and is like, “You're going to be the face of OceanGate. You're going to be the face.”

Dave: And she's like, “I have no [__] clue.” She kept her job because it was COVID, and all her friends were getting fired, so she's like, “I might as well stay on.” Then eventually she was just like, “I'm out. That's enough.”

They filmed recent college grads at 22 years old who were coding and doing the engineering on the computer. A guy was literally 24. He's like, “I just graduated from university.” This guy's literally calculating what's happening right now.

Zach: Yeah. What do you think? Because this is something that I've gone back and forth about in my own head. Silicon Valley has been the birth of a lot of great products. We've gotten decent technology that has changed the world. Something like the iPhone—for all of the negatives the iPhone has, I think it's been a net positive to be able to mass-produce smartphones that have the capability of an iPhone. And that was born in Silicon Valley.

But you have Silicon Valley logic: move fast, break things. Like we said earlier, when you apply that to deep-sea diving, when you apply that to safety-first companies and industries, when “move fast and break things” is the mentality, but things are people, you can't do that.

There needs to be some sort of regulatory body that comes in and is like, “Hey, you can't startup deep-sea diving.” Or, at the very least, you can't put people on this sub. You can't have a startup mentality and try to do something that's going to kill people if it doesn't work out.

That's something I've been going back and forth on: is the Silicon Valley logic, the startup-culture logic, a net positive or a net negative on society? So many people are now like, “Oh, well, this worked for the iPhone, so we can do it for [__] medicine or deep-sea subs,” things where people die if it goes wrong.

Dave: I think, overall, privatizing companies and having capitalistic logic applied to companies—and maybe it's not capitalistic, but like you're saying, America, the U.S., has a ton of innovative private companies that race against each other. You could take SpaceX, for example, Nvidia, Amazon. I think good things have come from that.

I have nothing against someone trying to make a whole new submarine industry. That's a whole—

Zach: Yeah. A whole new—a hole in a submarine with people in it.

Dave: But, yeah, that would actually be a great name. But in my opinion, it's a totally separate thing. I think you do have to fail a lot, honestly. You have to try so many repetitions and fail a lot to get good at something. But there has to be—it honestly should be obvious, but it wasn't to this guy. It should be obvious, when you have people involved, then the innovation has to be [different].

If I had to take an example from some jobs I've had or the medical stuff I've read about, take clinical trials, for example. You have human subjects as well, and sometimes it takes seven to 10 years to make one drug because there are very gradual stages. Some of the stages start with not just seeing, “Do you get healthier?” but, “Is this drug going to kill you? Is it toxic?”

I think the clinical-trials mindset is much different than an iPhone mindset. An iPhone mindset is, “Let's move on this, and let's get this team together, and let's release this because we got to be the winners, and we got to be Apple.”

But then you have OceanGate or GLP—what's that, Ozempic, right? That should take longer. Just as there's a regulatory body for drugs, there should be something for anytime a human's involved. But, like you said, they're in international waters. They're in the equivalent of going to a Swiss bank with your money, for a sub.

Zach: Yeah. They're essentially doing human trials on an untested technology, which is using carbon fiber for a deep-sea diving sub. That's a good comparison, comparing it to an untested medicine.

It's like if I just put together some combination in a lab in my kitchen, and instead of going through medical trials where I'm trying to prove how this holds up against petri dishes and animals and then humans, going through all the steps, I'm just like, “[__] it. Let me just prescribe this to people who sign up, and I'm going to tell them it's safe, and then I'll see how it reacts on them.”

Dave: If they followed clinical trials, stage one of OceanGate would be, like you said, release it down with no one, on a string. That's stage one: on a string, no one. Stage two might be—sorry to the animals—but put some pigs on OceanGate.

Zach: 100%. [Laughter] We do that with [__] hair products.

Dave: We do that with aspirin. Why not do that with something that's people? He didn't even want to release it on a cable. He didn't even want to put a [__] human dummy, at least, on the thing.

Zach: That's why I think he had to be such a delusional psychopath because I'm an idiot when it comes to this [__]. And even me, in my mind as the head of testing for OceanGate, you go, “We're going to send this down on a wire. If the Titanic is 4,000 meters down, we need this to be tested to at least five, ideally six.”

You don't just want to test it—that was what blew my mind, too. They were testing it to the depth of the Titanic. They were like, “Let's try to get this to 4,000.” And it's like, “What if you go 4,001?”

You want it tested to something beyond the capability of what you're doing so that if something happens when you're down there, and you sink—you can't account for every situation. If I'm going down to 4,000 meters, I want that tested to at least five, ideally six. You send it down on a wire, and you keep doing it until it doesn't [__] implode. And if it does, then you just go, “All right, carbon fiber…”

There are a lot of people who talk [__] about Elon Musk, for example, or Jeff Bezos. There are a lot of things that they do that demand pushback. But something they don't do with their space companies that they're building is just throw human bodies on ships and be like, “Yeah, let's just [__] see what happens.” And that's essentially what this guy did with the carbon fiber hull.

It would be like if you went skydiving, and they were like, “Yeah, we're testing out this new parachute technology, and it's super safe.” They're just lying to your face, and they're like, “Oh, yeah, we have this audio monitoring system that, if the parachute's ripping, we can hear it before it rips.”

Then it [__] goes, and you're just sinking on your way down, plummeting to the earth, thinking, “Why the [__] did I think a parachute made out of papier-mâché was going to work?” Because this guy told me it would.

When you have a CEO like that who's maniacally confident, just telling you this shit's proven and tested, and having you sign your life away—

Dave: You went skydiving. Would you have gone if, when you got to the training, they were like, “Well, this material has only been used in 2023. We just started, and we're experimenting. Would you like to use this parachute?” [Laughter]

Zach: Oh, no. If they were like, “Yeah, we're using experimental parachute technology,” [__] no. But I don't even think Stockton Rush told people who were passengers that. I would be surprised if he was honest about the actual state of the experimentation.

I'm sure Stockton Rush did not say, “Hey, by the way, the carbon fiber hull is completely experimental, but if you want, you could still pay $250K to come on the sub, and you might die.” There's no way he was selling it like that because no one—

Dave: I was wondering if the waiver had that stuff on it. But, yeah. Can I pee quick?

Zach: Yeah, go ahead. I might do the same, actually.

Zach: And we're back. Took a really big piss.

Dave: Really? Wow, dude.

Zach: Coffee just—I feel like if Stockton had some coffee, it would have just cleared his mind a little bit, and he'd be like, “I shouldn't go on this, man.”

Dave: Or made him even more, “Yeah, let's do it.” [Laughter]

Zach: As the sub is about to implode, he goes, “Deeper, deeper, deeper.” [Laughter]

Unidentified speaker: More content.

Unidentified speaker: Let's lean into it. Lean into the acoustic monitoring system as the bangs get louder.

Dave: Do you think he was sitting like this when it exploded? [Laughter]

Zach: Yeah. I don't know how you felt about it because they kind of just glossed over this in the documentary. They said this at the beginning, like 20 minutes in, and they never talked about it again. But they were like, “Yeah, Stockton Rush, they used a PS2 controller to control the [__]…”

Dave: Another—how many red flags?

Zach: Could you imagine if you're getting open-heart surgery, and the surgeon, before you go under, is like, “Yeah, I'm just going to whip out this Game Boy to control everything. I'm controlling this robotic arm, like, up…” [Laughter] He's like, “All right, I'm about to save your life. Up, up, down, A, B.”

Dave: You'd be surprised, dude. There's a da Vinci machine for urology where it's literally like a [__] joystick. But it's not an Xbox controller, so it's not as bad as Stockton Rush.

Zach: Yeah. I was like, this is hilarious that he's controlling a multimillion-dollar sub with people's lives on it with something that you could buy in a GameStop, if they were still around. He walks in, and the guy's like, “Oh, are you a gamer?” He's like, “No, I'm using this to control a $4 million deep-sea [sub].”

Dave: Weirdly, that's not even the biggest red flag because it's like, “All right, it's to move the ship.” But that is concerning, though, because when you put it together with the carbon fiber, you're just like, “This guy's…”

Zach: Here's a big question: how many people do you think today we're giving leeway to walk around and do [__] because we see them as visionaries? They're almost like a Stockton Rush who gains people's trust. They're the heads of Fortune 500 companies, just running wild, heading toward a ditch because we see them as smart.

Dave: Oh, yeah. That's a good question. I feel like it's not most, but I'd say, out of the Fortune 500, there's probably 10 that are on the road to just killing customers sometime in the next five years.

I think there are a lot of Stockton Rushes on planet Earth, but you just need the perfect storm of power, money, and some crazy idea. I feel like there's a lot of him walking around who just don't have the money or the leverage. There's a dude in his garage right now who was going to be Stockton Rush, but he had a beer, and he's like, “That's too hard.”

Zach: Or there's a guy in a smoke shop with the same ego as Stockton Rush, and he's like, “I am God, and I'm going to save the world through selling vapes.” But he doesn't have the capital to actually kill people.

Dave: Yeah.

Zach: He's like, “If I had capital, I would start a ship powered by vape smoke and bring people down to see the Titanic.” But he just has to manage a vape shop.

Dave: Yeah, exactly. I really think there are thousands of people who will come home from work, have a crazy idea that would maybe kill a lot of people, and then they turn on Netflix, and they're like, “Never mind.” [Laughter]

Zach: Yeah. They just sink in. That's the thing, too. Sometimes it's healthy to just sink into life. You have a crazy idea, and then you turn on Mad Men. You're like, “I'm just going to watch Jon Hamm for an hour and go to bed. I don't need to fund that startup.”

Dave: Exactly.

Zach: “Quit my job and sacrifice my family's life to chase a stupid dream.” Stop. You only have egomaniacal behavior combined with death when you have the capital and influence to be able to do that.

When you're just an egotistical person who thinks they're God, you have a narcissistic God complex, there are probably a lot of people walking around like that who work at a sandwich shop, or they're construction workers. They play out situations in their minds, but they never actually get to a point where they can realize it.

Stockton Rush is kind of just this trust-fund boy who went to Princeton, came from a really rich family. His great-great-great-grandfather signed the Declaration of Independence or something like that. You can trace his roots back. He had a lot of money, and he could make the world his megalomaniacal playground.

The dude, I think he was a couple of therapy sessions away from not killing people.

Dave: And maybe one good Netflix episode.

Zach: Maybe a couple thousand. [Laughter]

Unidentified speaker: Or if he just took shrooms once.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. If he took shrooms once. [Unclear interjection]

Dave: No, I agree. Like you were saying, people with ideas who just don't act on them—I don't know if you've experienced this, but it's always the Uber or taxi drivers who turn around. They're like, “Dude, I feel like I could build the next Disneyland or something.” The whole car ride, they're just like, “All right, it's going to go like this, and then we're going to…”

When you get out, you're just like, “That's never going to happen.”

Zach: Yeah. [Laughter] Or an Uber driver will be like, “I have an app idea where you take a self-biopsy of your brain.” [Laughter] “The app comes with this cranial screwdriver. It screens for brain cancer, and it just drills in through your ear, pulls out a piece of your brain.”

You're like, “All right, dude. Sounds good. I'm not going to tip you because I don't want you to get rich enough to make that.” [Laughter]

Dave: It always ends with, “Yo, if I had $10 million, dude, this would be it.” But maybe some of those things would work. I legit had some cab driver in Florida, I think, who was like, “Dude, I have this roller coaster idea that would go across the country.” And I'm like, “All right, I just need to get to my plane.”

Zach: The last Uber I got in was pretty crazy. I was in New Jersey, and this girl was saying that her friend got captured by a cult.

Dave: Really?

Zach: She was saying something like, if you're in this cult, you don't say “good morning.” You say, “Grand morning, king.”

Dave: Okay.

Zach: I don't know what this cult is called, but she was like, “Yeah, you wake up, and if you post on Instagram, you know people are in the cult because they say grand morning—sorry, grand rising. Grand rising to you.” Instead of “good morning,” they'll be like, “Grand rising, sir. Grand rising to you.”

The whole idea of the cult is that you don't pay taxes, and you band together as citizens, and you say that taxes are evil and you don't have to pay them. I was like, that's just large-scale tax fraud. People do that on their own. You don't need to join a cult to do tax evasion. You can just commit it.

Dave: Do they pray to Tom Cruise, by any chance? [Laughter]

Zach: It might be an offshoot of Scientology. I'll have to ask if I ever have Tom Cruise on the podcast. I'll have to say “grand rising.”

Dave: The Tomcast.

Zach: I'll have to say “grand rising” and see how he responds.

Unidentified speaker: “Oh, so you're familiar with the tax fraud?”

Dave: No, that's crazy.

Unidentified speaker: “Come with me.”

Dave: I'm glad you didn't get sucked into that.

Zach: No, she was totally against it. She was telling me her friend got sucked in.

Dave: Maybe I'm ignorant, but I'm always just like, “Dude, I would never get convinced to join a cult.”

Zach: She also thought there was a conspiracy of female children going missing, and the purpose behind the missing female children was that trans men were stealing their uteruses and implanting them in themselves to be able to have babies.

Dave: Wait, the girl that got— [Laughter]

Zach: The girl who was driving me in the Uber, who told me about “grand rising.” She was also telling me about a conspiracy theory that she learned about little girls going missing and getting their uteruses carved out for trans men.

My mentality in an Uber is, I want to lean deeper and deeper. Tell me more. I'm not going to say this is weird. I want you to go as far as you possibly can. I want to see who you really are.

Dave: You have to pretend. You have to be very interested in these people's stories.

Zach: Yeah.

Dave: Sounds like some Alex Jones [__].

Zach: Yeah. She could have been the female Alex Jones.

Dave: Do you think there's any scenario where someone could convince you to join a cult?

Zach: I think thinking that I'm immune to getting persuaded by a cult probably makes me more vulnerable. So I'll say that there's always a chance that I could be psychologically swayed to join a cult.

Because I've been interested in cults, I've had people come on the podcast who have talked about escaping cults, and this other guy, Rick Alan Ross, who actually deprogrammed hundreds—

Dave: Okay.

Zach: Rick Alan Ross, white Rick Ross. He has deprogrammed people from Scientology—

Dave: I think I saw—

Zach: —from Mormonism, from other terrible cults.

Dave: Wait, so he literally finds people in cults and gets—

Zach: People come to him. Let's say your son is caught in a cult. The dad will reach out and say, “Hey, my son is part of this thing I think is a cult. Will you meet with him and try to deprogram my son?” He gets a lot of people reaching out, family members, friends.

Dave: Because everyone else knows in your family. That must be the most awkward part, where, “Yeah, Dave's in a cult.”

Zach: Yeah. The actual person—he is, but don't tell him because it's funny.

Going off of psychology, people's brains, the cult-adjacent [discussion], if you're taking a metaphoric aspect to the carbon fiber hull and applying it to psychology, that's kind of what I'm going for with this question.

If you look at big tech, if you look at Meta, TikTok, Twitter, in a way, they pressure-test people's brains. They're experimenting on brains of people, seeing how they react, adjusting the algorithm, looking at watch time, looking at how you click, comment. It divides people, creates more engagement based on that divide.

This is not necessarily my argument, but this is a way you could see it: just like OceanGate was creating cracks in the carbon fiber with the way that they were testing their hull, big tech creates cracks in people's brains with the way that they're testing the technology.

But the carbon fiber hull is such a physical, implosive event that it's obvious five people died. They went down on the Titan, and those people are dead and will never come back. With big tech, you don't see the physical cracks in people's brains and how it can put someone in a rabbit hole and totally take over their psychology.

You have doctors who are anti-vax now because they get caught in some Facebook rabbit hole. You're 100% creating these metaphorical cracks in people's brains, but you can't actually see it like an event like the Titan disaster.

That was something I was thinking about when I was rewatching the documentary. We were talking about big tech before, the iPhone, that's a net good for people. But recently, with social media, you could argue that they are experimenting on people in a way like OceanGate, but it's not a physical death. It's more this mental degradation of society and its users.

Dave: Yeah, that's a great observation.

Zach: You're creating cracks in the hull, and the hull is people's brains.

Dave: That's a great observation. The Social Dilemma documentary was kind of eye-opening with how much the algorithms are tailored toward controversy, anger, what gets you to scroll—if you feel an emotion about something.

I think, with big tech, basically the biggest currency now is our attention, how much view time. They're just, “What can we do to get your eyes on our app or something?” And it's not always going to be the healthiest thing that grabs your attention. So I totally agree.

Zach: Yeah. If you're valuing attention over everything else, the actual value of the content doesn't really come into play. You're not really worried about the fulfillment of human beings. You're more worried about how we can get someone to watch this for five more seconds, disregarding the effect it's having on humans.

Dave: I'm actually really curious about the younger generation. What content are they going to view when they're older? Because I feel like there are still a lot of people who view long-form content on YouTube and movies and read books and stuff, but everyone else who's younger is doing TikTok.

I'm wondering, what are they going to watch? Do they even watch these hour-long YouTube videos anymore? It's crazy that YouTube seems healthy now compared to TikTok.

Zach: Yeah. Watching an eight-minute video on YouTube is healthier than watching a 34-second TikTok where you're just doomscrolling.

Dave: It's crazy. I could go on about all the social media stuff, but I agree. It's like an invisible rift kind of happening.

Zach: Yeah. Do you think OceanGate was a cult?

Dave: I think it was cult-like, but usually, I feel like in a cult it's not that easy to [leave]. In a cult, most people buy into it. People escape cults, obviously.

Zach: Yeah. The people who buy into it buy into it, and the people who ask questions are kicked out, like in OceanGate, right?

Dave: But I think he recycled people so often that it was impossible for anyone to ever ask questions. At least from what I've watched in documentaries, when you have a cult, most people buy into it and some escape. But it seemed like most of his employees got fired, at least the initial first round.

Zach: At least the ones who were interviewed in the documentary, a lot of them left. But there were still enough people for a functioning company who stayed, even while all those people were leaving. The blonde girl, I forget her name, David Lochridge, the other guy, Tony Nissen, the engineer who stayed on for longer—eventually they left, but they still had enough people to form a company who were true believers.

Because if people are raising red flags, and you're sticking around at a company like OceanGate, you're believing despite the evidence, which is very cult-like to me.

Dave: Yeah. That raises a good question of when does startup culture cross into—or how do you define a cult, I guess, is the first question.

Zach: I have a unifying theory of how OceanGate would be a cult if you were going to put it within cult parameters. I don't actually think OceanGate was a cult of Stockton Rush. I don't think it was a cult of personality. I think it was a cult of carbon fiber, and Stockton Rush was the high priest.

Essentially, he made the decision very early on, made a wrong turn. I think he realized this at the beginning, before he convinced himself [unclear self-correction] it was the wrong decision. Carbon fiber is just not a material you're going to use for deep-sea diving because of everything we talked about with the nature of it.

Then he made the decision, “Okay, now I have to reverse-engineer a company based off of diving with carbon fiber, and I'm going to make things up like the acoustic monitoring system.” I think he believed this himself, like the seasoning, that when you hear pops in the hull, it's getting stronger around there.

Basically, doing everything you have to do with carbon fiber having been chosen by you ahead of time as, “This is the promised land.” Now every decision you have to make is in service of the carbon fiber.

The carbon fiber became this sacred communion, like the Catholic Church: you cannot go against the carbon fiber. People who did—if you question, “Is this actually the blood of Christ? Is this actually Jesus's body?”—it's like, “Oh, you're not Catholic. You need to get out of here. Don't question our communion.”

Stockton Rush was the high priest of carbon fiber. He was the interpreter. He was the only one who truly understood it because people would constantly come to him and say, “I don't think this sounds right,” or, “I don't think we're looking at this [right].” And he's like, “No, we've been doing this for eight years. I understand it. I am the keeper of the carbon fiber.”

Evidence became blasphemy. Dissenters like David Lochridge became outcasts. It left only the true believers. Then the final test, like many cults, is the sacrifice. You have to bet your life and others' that this is going to work.

That would be my grand unifying theory. If OceanGate was a cult, which I wouldn't go as far as saying it is, but I'd say it exhibited a lot of cultish characteristics, it wasn't a cult of personality. It was a cult of carbon fiber led by Stockton, who convinced people that this is going to be the next new tech.

Dave: When you bring in the sacrifice thing, yeah, that is kind of [similar]. The Catholic stuff, it's a religion, in my opinion, but also you can't really prove—that's why they call it faith. You can't prove, “Is Jesus real?” But you can prove carbon fiber doesn't work through every test they did, where he managed to spin it into something positive.

I think it was pretty much—I would have to say it pretty much was a cult because he brought this ideology in, and they followed it like a religion. Eventually, there was this whole, “All right, let's test it out. Let's sacrifice. Let's put our bodies to the test. Let's see if this holds up.”

I agree. The carbon fiber—I'm trying to think of another real-world example, but when you have an idea, you're just so headstrong with it, and you don't want to admit you're wrong. But it's totally wrong, and you just keep going with it. Maybe he did know it was wrong, but he just convinced himself it wasn't.

He had the evidence of the previous dives, but still, like you said, it's not evidence. The game was, how many dives can we make until it explodes?

Zach: Yeah. He took survival as evidence of proof of concept: “Oh, we did a dive and didn't all die, so this means the carbon fiber is working,” when, in reality, it was just weakening and weakening and weakening until it popped and killed those five people.

Dave: I don't know the exact definition of a cult, but I would say it was very, very cult-like.

Zach: Yeah, I would agree. I want to get into the whistleblower a little bit, David Lochridge, and also the other engineer, Tony Nissen, who ended up staying around for longer.

You have David Lochridge, who was brought on as the pilot and the head of marine navigation. He raises safety concerns. He literally says, “I'm looking at the carbon fiber. It looks like Swiss cheese.” You could see the porosity, the voids, the delamination.

He raises this concern to Stockton Rush in a meeting where Stockton Rush ultimately fires him. One thing Stockton Rush says to him is, “I'm not going to force people to join my religion, for people who don't want to.”

Another cult-like thing: when he's presented this evidence, instead of saying, “Oh, let me look at this evidence from an objective perspective because I'm risking people's lives,” he's like, “Dude, if you don't believe in me, then get out of here because this is not a space for nonbelievers.”

Then you have Tony Nissen, who ultimately ended up leaving the company, but he stayed on a little longer. He says in the documentary, after Lochridge's firing, “That changed how I managed the engineering department.” This is Tony Nissen. After Lochridge got fired, he says, “That changed how I managed people. I had to make sure people didn't speak up.”

How much do you blame Stockton Rush for what happened, ultimately killing five people on the Titan, versus the other engineers, like Tony Nissen, who stayed on and were essentially the lackey of Stockton Rush, making sure people didn't speak up?

You had Lochridge, who was like, “[__] this. I'm going to risk my career on speaking up,” and ended up getting fired, sued by OceanGate, had to drop it because he ran out of money even though he was right. And then you had guys like Tony Nissen, who were like, “Well, I'll just make sure people don't speak up when Lochridge got let go.” He made the decision to stay on and essentially become an enforcer for Stockton Rush.

Dave: He's just as bad, I would say. Rush is the worst, but I would say he's—I mean, how do you believe that guy? I don't know. Some side piece or something.

Zach: Yeah. Why do you think so many smart people stayed on for so long?

Dave: I think status. I think career. It's a never-before [opportunity]. It's a résumé thing, like, “Oh, I'm literally a part of the first prototype of this, and it went down to the Titanic, and this guy's a billionaire. Maybe I'll get a bonus for millions or something at some point.”

I think it's money. It's status. It's a feeling of importance. If a billionaire hires you, and you're the first guy under him, you don't really get that at another company. When you go to some other huge company, you're going to start from the bottom.

I think there are a bunch of different reasons. Even that girl stayed when she feared for her life, but she needs money. So I think it's really just a money and status thing. Unfortunately, they probably saw it was terrible. But I think there's something in the back of your mind, maybe, where you're like, “This guy's crazy, but maybe he's right.” But you got to get out of there, though.

Zach: Do you think innovation culture is toxic? Innovating for the sake of innovating? Because something like the carbon fiber hull for OceanGate, for the Titan—if you have something that works, like titanium, like steel, why [__] with it?

I feel like a lot of technology companies, especially startups, try to push boundaries, not necessarily because they believe it's the better option than something that already exists, but because it's the next new thing. We've started to snowball in a lot of aspects of society where we're just innovating for the sake of innovating and doing the next new thing without actually thinking about whether or not that technology is going to benefit us if it becomes implemented on a wide scale.

Dave: Yeah. I think it has to be, you're innovating because you're improving people's lives, or you're making things more efficient, or you're improving safety. I'm trying to think of, for example, a medication, or automobiles, trains, flights make it more efficient to travel. Roads, safety, bridges—there are good reasons to innovate.

But I think what you're talking about is just racing to have the coolest thing possible.

Zach: Yeah.

Dave: Which, in this case, I think can be dangerous if there's no regulating body.

Zach: There really was no regulating body for this. It's crazy that they were able to just geographically eliminate any sort of oversight by building in the Bahamas, launching from Canada, and then the Titan going to explore the Titanic, which is in international waters.

If human lives are involved, there has to be some sort of body that comes in and says, “Hey, we're going [to inspect this].” That was part of the reason why Lochridge left, because they refused to get the Titan classed. It wasn't classed. They refused to get it certified.

Dave: Yeah.

Zach: There was a point where Lochridge was out to lunch with Stockton Rush, and Stockton was like, “Oh, yeah, I don't think we need to get it classed. I don't see a reason to get it certified.” And Lochridge, in his head, was like, “Oh, yeah, I'm leaving this company. I'm [__] done.” To not have it independently [certified]—[__] insanity when you're dealing with people's lives.

Dave: Yeah. I wouldn't even group this guy with innovators. I wouldn't even call this guy an innovator. I would just call him reckless, honestly. What did he innovate? He just killed five people.

Humans are naturally creative, innovative people. As you can see, there's so much new technology and advancement since the last thousands of years. But this guy, I wouldn't group him with innovators.

I feel like governing bodies usually add precaution to stuff. If you take something like a freaking plane or something—sure, I know Boeing, whatever—but it's still going through so many different checks. If the submersible went through a Boeing facility, they would literally just burn it. They would just light it on fire and be like, “This is a piece of [__].”

Zach: Yeah. Part of me is like, every startup company should be contracted to have an average Joe on staff, just as an observer. Someone who's not even that smart, but who can just look at something and be like, “Dude, that looks pretty stupid to me. I don't know. You're trying to listen to the cracks?”

I'm not that smart. I think I'm pretty average intelligence. If I was in a board meeting with people who are like, “Yeah, we're going to try to listen to the cracks, and then when the cracks get too big, we're just going to go up and hope that we don't implode on the ship,” I'd be like, “Dude, I think you should have a system that doesn't rely on microphones saving people's lives and listening to the sub crack in pieces before you…”

I feel like, in a lot of ways, intelligence gives you—if you're super-high intelligence, which I don't think Stockton Rush was—but I think there are a lot of people who, the smarter they are, the better they are at convincing themselves that stupid ideas are worth pursuing.

It's up to a point where you're like, “Dude, instead of just getting this boat classed, we're filling it with microphones and hiding cracks.” There was one point where they found a crack inside the sub and had to rebuild it, sealed it over, and had to build it over again. And they're using PlayStation controllers. I'm like, “Maybe we should just ditch this design and start over and just [__] figure something else out.”

Dave: He kind of strikes me as someone whose parents never told him no, or he was never disappointed. He seems like that guy because he was bullying people around. He seems like the guy where no one was ever like, “Hey, Stockton, you're a [__] idiot, dude.”

Zach: That's true. [Laughter]

Dave: I feel bad—well, I feel bad for the other people more, honestly—but talking posthum… post-death. What's that word again?

Zach: Posthumously.

Dave: Posthumously.

Unidentified speaker: A lot of words.

Zach: Doctor, we don't have to speak [unclear]. Get familiar with “posthumously” because that'll be a lot of the reports you're filling out after, especially people—all your patients.

I did want to ask you about that as we start to end off. As someone who's training to be a doctor, like yourself, what level of confidence is too dangerous? As someone who's going to have power over people's lives—and I'm sure you're around a lot of other people training to be doctors, you're with a lot of doctors—I'm sure there are some people you encounter where you're like, “You might be a little bit too confident for your own good. You're going to end up [__] doing some bad [__] because you should question yourself more.”

What level of confidence is too dangerous for someone in a position where you're saving someone's life, or in a position to possibly kill them if something goes wrong?

Dave: I really don't know if it's so much about confidence. If I had to make an analogy with Stockton, it's like if a surgeon didn't follow the systems he's been trained for, for seven years, and was just like, “Yeah, actually, today I'm going to try a non-evidence-backed thing and see if it works.”

There was some surgeon in Florida, I think, who—who knows why—took a dude's liver out instead of the spleen and just killed him. It's like, what was that guy thinking when that happened?

I think you should be confident as a podcaster with your experience. A doctor should be confident in their experience. But there's a reason, when you try new things, it's in a laboratory, or it's not on—

Zach: Yeah. It's not on a person.

Dave: If you have the confidence to try a new procedure that hasn't been proved yet, that could be harmful—the thing we say, the oath, is “do no harm.” So if you think something's going to do more harm than good, and you're confident, and you still do that thing, that's pretty messed up.

If you're like, “This could possibly harm the patient more than help them, and there's no reason to do this, but I'm going to do it,” that's kind of weird.

Zach: It's like, “I can either stop doing this and start over or just start a cult full of nurses that will allow me to do it.” [Laughter]

Dave: Exactly.

Zach: And take them down to the Titanic. There was something in the documentary that made me think of being a doctor, being a surgeon.

There was one thing Stockton did to circumvent the passengers. I think it was something with the waiver, or having people on the ship who were passengers versus operators. He would call the passengers “mission specialists.” Do you remember this part? He would train the passengers because it would allow him to circumvent something with the documentation.

They were almost in charge of part of the ship or something. He would train them to do certain things on the sub as mission specialists, so they weren't technically passengers. When other people in the company called them passengers, he'd be like, “No, don't do that. They're mission specialists.”

They were doing it to get around certain regulations with having people on the sub who were passengers. People paying to be on the sub as passengers—there were different regulations. They were just like, “Let's just call them mission specialists,” and they would have them do jobs on the sub.

To me, imagine if you had a brain surgeon about to perform surgery, and he just calls in a random guy in the waiting room and is like, “Do you want to be an operation expert? Do you want to be an operation specialist? I'll just give you a quick rundown. If any arteries start to burst, or you see a brain bleed, you're going to help me clamp arteries and stop someone from [unfinished].”

That's not that far off from being in a sub where turning a dial or getting something wrong could literally kill people, and you take a wrong measurement. To me, it's not that different. It could be comparable to a surgeon telling someone, “Hey, I know you just signed up for this, but do you want to help me perform the surgery, and I'll have you as my assistant [unclear]?”

Something that would take over a decade to train to learn how to do properly, you're like, “Yeah, sign some paperwork and come over here and help me do this.”

Dave: I remember now that he did that. It was to get around something. I forget what it was. I think it was a passenger-versus-team-member thing, something about the legal aspect of it. It might have been that he could have more people on board because you can only have a certain amount of passengers. I forget what it was.

Zach: Yeah. It's crazy that—

Dave: That's a good metaphor. That's another good metaphor.

Zach: Do you personally see any overlap between OceanGate and what happened with the Titan and the culture of medicine?

Dave: It's a good question. I'm trying to think. I'm going to be Kanye right now. You know that video where he's like, “No, don't. I'm thinking. I'm thinking. Don't move on. We're not moving on right now.”

Zach: Think as long as you want.

Dave: I just thought of the guy. I think, in general, medicine, compared to almost every other field, is extremely regulated. Every test I have so far, there's, “Here's the USPSTF recommendations. When do you screen someone for diabetes? Forty-five to 70 years old. When do you screen someone for abdominal aneurysm? Oh, they've smoked in the last 15 years.” It's down to the year where you're like, “All right, screen them.”

But there was the guy, Dr. Death. I don't know if you—

Zach: Dr. Death, that guy, the surgeon?

Dave: Yeah. I think that would be a perfect example. There's a whole documentary on it. He actually was a surgeon. He wasn't impersonating one. But he was doing—I forget if it was an esophageal transplant. He just made this plastic thing, like a Pyrex thing, and he's like, “Yeah, we're just going to start using it.” Never been tested before. He's like, “We're just going to start putting it in people's throats,” and all of his patients were just dying.

I forget exactly because there is another Dr. Death, but this guy, it's on Netflix. He was kind of a player with girls. He was always traveling around, and his surgeries were just killing people. They were not working at all, and they were all experimental.

He was a surgeon. He was a spinal surgeon, or I forget if it was GI or spinal, but I'll have to find the documentary.

Zach: Was this before hospitals kept records of doctors? How was he able to just move from one—

Dave: First of all, I think he operated in Europe mainly. But also, I don't know if he would fudge the records, and I don't want to [say], because I'm not exactly sure what happened. He got away with this for a while because—I don't know if he would write in the notes, “Oh, just a patient mishap,” or something like that.

I'm trying to—I can't believe I can't think of it, because Dr. Death might be a different case. I remember Matt was telling us about that podcast. It might be a brain surgeon or something.

Zach: We'll watch it, and it'll be the next podcast we do. Another way to kill people besides—

Dave: Yeah. Apparently, there are people in medicine who have done crazy [__], for sure. Especially when you go back into the 1900s, there's been some crazy [__], but it happened before.

Zach: Yeah. Knowing what you know now, having watched the Titan disaster, would you ever get on a sub to explore the Titanic, fully paid for? Someone came to you next week and said, “I got a ticket for you. $250K, paid for. Titan submersible. We're going down to explore the Titanic.” Would you do it?

Dave: Based on knowing that I barely even want to get in an MRI machine, I would say no. [Laughter]

It would be an incredible story. But to me, if I don't enjoy an entire experience, if I'm anxious, I don't see the point of doing it. I'm sure if I went on the James Cameron one, I'd be fine. But I don't like planes—

Zach: Until James Cameron rips his [unclear].

Unidentified speaker: “I've been alive. I took an escape raft.” [Wording unclear]

Unidentified speaker: Yes. Yeah.

Dave: No, dude. I get way too anxious in tight spaces, so I would probably not, unfortunately.

Zach: Yeah, I feel the same way. I hate MRI machines. I've gotten a bunch of those from baseball injuries.

When I went skydiving, at a certain point I hated being in the plane because it was such a small, rickety plane climbing up, and you feel everything. I felt claustrophobic on the way up, to the point where I was like, “I want to get out of this plane now.” It actually helped me be less scared about skydiving because I was like, “I just want to get the [__] out.”

Dave: Maybe that's part of the strategy. They want you to not like the plane.

Zach: I couldn't imagine being in a space that's five times as tight as the plane we went up on. I don't know if I could ever relax and not just have a panic attack the entire time.

Dave: I don't think I would. I don't know if I told you, but even that float tank we did—remember? I feel like the first 20 minutes I was great, and then, for some reason, I was like, “Oh my God.” I feel like I'm in space, and I was freaking out.

Zach: I didn't mind that. I thought that was fine for me. There were moments where I was like, “Oh, this is kind of weird,” but I didn't feel claustrophobic.

Dave: I did like most of it, but I was like, “Oh my, where am I?” The lights go off.

Zach: Something's wrong with you, and that's why you're becoming a doctor, because there has to be something off in your brain to want to put yourself through medical [school]. Some type of psycho-masochist. And the world will be better for it with the future Dr. Dave on the planet.

Dave: You'll be my first experimental patient.

Zach: I will, for [unfinished]. Thank you, future Dr. Dave, for coming on the podcast. This was a great discussion on OceanGate. I had a [__] blast.

It's yet to be seen what type of doctor you'll be. You could experiment on me without my knowledge. You could start a cult. You could be a great doctor. You could be all three because, you know what? Who's to say you're not a good doctor if you have a cult? You could have a little side cult and also be good at operating on people. Those two things are not—

Dave: I plead the Fifth.

Zach: —mutually exclusive. Could happen, it could not happen. It's yet to be seen. But thank you, Dave, for joining me on the podcast, and we'll see you guys next time.

Dave: We'll see you later, people. [Snorts]

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