My Experience On The OceanGate Sub — With David Pogue

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1:25Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Our guest today is David Pogue. He's the host of the Unsung Science Podcast. It's a great podcast. You should check it out. And he's also a correspondent on CBS Sunday Morning. And in his role as a correspondent there, he was aboard the Ocean Gate Titan in November 2022. Yes, the sub that was going to explore the wreckage of the Titanic and itself imploded last week. So today we're going to get into his experience aboard the sub, of course, what happened to it, and then we're going to go deeper into our discussion, the merits of risk and exploration.

2:02David, so great to have you here. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. So just to start off, how did you first hear about this sub? Because, you know, it does strike me that so many people have heard about it, but it was news to most of the world. So where did you first encounter it? Stockton Rush, the now familiar name, the CEO of Ocean Gate and the designer of the sub, was a fan of our show. And he sent over an invitation to our producers that said we could accommodate three of you on our support ship for one of our nine day expeditions. and there's room for two of you on an actual dive to the Titanic.

2:43Somehow the producers thought of me, maybe because my science background, science explaining background. And I was so excited. I see a lot of stuff online about like, his boss has probably forced him to do that or risk firing. I'm like, it wasn't like that. It was my answer was in all caps, let me at it. So I was, I mean, I could not imagine a more thrilling assignment. But you're going 12 ,000 feet under the sea and you're going way deep. And there must have been, we're obviously going to get into some of the safety stuff, but what sort of goes through your mind in terms of safety? Is it just like, oh, well, this guy is going down there anyway, so we should probably be okay?

3:23Or what are the calculations that run through your head when you get an invite like that? I mean, one thing that's been missing from all the discussion about me, not that this is about me, but I have been lynched on Twitter. One of the things that I don't think most people understand is that I've hosted 20 specials for Nova on PBS. These are science specials. And the team I work with there has a philosophy of really telegenic experiments. And so to illustrate various scientific points, they've had me ride in a demolition derby car. They've had me hang gliding. They've had me swimming with sharks.

4:03They've, you know, tried to freeze me in a chamber. It's all in the name of, you know, making interesting, memorable television. And I always agree because I just don't think anyone would want to kill me on camera. I don't think that would be a good look, especially Ocean Gate, whose purpose of this is obviously to draw attention to their outfit. I just took that as a given that they want to look as good as possible. As it turns out, they were very unhappy with the story, but. Oh, really? Well, because, so there is this moment in the story where you talk about how, it's a great story, by the way, if you're listening, I recommend folks check it out, but there's a moment where you highlight how so much of it has been jerry-rigged effectively, where there's a light from, I don't know, something like a home, a camping store.

4:52and it's now this is apparently standard with subs but it's controlled by a retro retrofitted playstation controller and there's this amazing scene in your report where you're like on the sub descending and he shows you the playstation controller and you kind of lose your mind i mean what's going through your mind so you obviously trusted the safety you're not going to get you don't think you're going to get killed on camera and i don't know like i would imagine you'd want to do a little bit more planning than that but then you see that the way that this thing has been built and there's like the only way to open it is from the outside.

5:23Are you starting to question your decision to go on that when you see that stuff? Like what is going through your mind then? No, there were so many reasons to believe in the safety of this sub. First of all, he told us it had been designed in collaboration with NASA, Boeing and the University of Washington. We should talk about that at some point. Secondly, it had made 20 uneventful dives to the Titanic depths and back without a blink. Thirdly, probably the most famous, one of the most famous living Titanic explorers in the world, P.H. Nargellé, was on board as an Ocean Gate employee. He had been looking over the design, construction, and testing of the Titan submersible and fully approved.

6:12And this guy has been on every titanic submersible there ever was. He was on the Mir from Russia. He was on the Nautil from France. So he's seen them all. And he approved the design and went down on it every trip. And he ended up being there when it did implode. So he lost his life. He died as well. That's right. There is a very obvious culture of safety among the crew. I mean, this thing is run like a rocket launch with long countdowns and checklists and inspections and mandatory twice daily briefings. Even if you're not diving, you have to be there where they go through every single line of every single spreadsheet about every single component and confirm that it's been recharged and refreshed and ready and polished.

7:04They canceled these dives with the least provocation, the tiniest thing. Our CBS dive was canceled at 37 feet down because the way they do this is they have a big floating platform, maybe five feet high and 20 feet square. The sub is bolted on top. they sink the platform let the air out till it's 35 feet underwater because the water is calmer under the sea so that's why they do it that way it's it's much more dangerous to try to launch in bobbing waves and then they uh send scuba divers to detach the sub from the platform and the sub drives away so on our dive there are these black four foot oval floats at the corners of the platform that just keep it facing the right, keep it upright.

8:00And on this dive, two of them came untied and started floating away on the sea. Well, that has nothing to do with the sub. The sub was fine. We were done with the platform part. I just thought it was a stupid reason to cancel the dive. And I was annoyed. But again, now it looks different as I look back on it.

8:25was we don't even tolerate little things. So there were many reasons to think that this was okay. I didn't sleep the night before just because, well, the ship was rocking badly and I had a lot to process and I had a one-shot chance at this. This is our only chance to go down. And maybe there was some lizard brain screaming for survival in my subconscious. In some way. So one of the things I've wondered about this the whole way through is, is this sub, like, was this sub something that was pushing forward exploration or was it simply a very expensive Disney ride for people who wanted to go see the Titanic?

9:05Well, this is something else that not a single news report has mentioned. It was a combination science expedition and extreme adventure tourism opportunity. So what I mean by that is there's five seats on the sub. There's always a pilot. There's three paying passengers. And then there's a scientist on board every dive. There is a scientist. He is there to show you what you're looking at. There's a marine biologist. There's an undersea archaeologist. And if you think about it, Stockton Rush could have sold that seat to another passenger. He could have made another quarter of a million dollars per dive, but he didn't.

9:47He, in effect, the passengers are subsidizing science. And there was a long interview I did with two of these scientists. And I mean, they are doing publishable, actual research. One of the things they were doing that no one else can do is longitudinal studies of the wreck. And what that means is over time. So this outfit goes down five times a summer, and this was its third summer. So for the first time in history, these scientists can observe the Titanic over time, not just the deterioration of the hull, but also what's growing on it. on our dive, they were doing eDNA, which is this really cool technology where they grab water from around the sub, from around the wreck, and then they bring it back to the surface and analyze the DNA.

10:42They can tell every critter that's been near the Titanic in the last 24 hours. Amazing. And every time they do that, they see new critters, including species that have never been seen before. So this was very much a scientific endeavor as well as a consumer one. And Alex, have you ever heard that in any of the news reports? I have not. So it's good that we're here talking about it. One thing that I also wonder about going down to the Titanic is that it feels almost a bit macabre, like the fact that people who came up on the sub that you were on seemed overjoyed about the photos they had gotten and the views they had gotten of this wreck.

11:24But effectively what they just did was visit one of the world's largest underground graveyards, right? Where so many people lost their lives in one of the most tragic ways possible. So can you help explain a little bit about the thrill of seeing something so historic balanced with the fact that it's really a tragic place to visit, not an exciting place to visit? Or maybe it is. But we do that, though. We visit Gettysburg. We visit the Taj Mahal. These are graveyards. we do that to honor the people who died in those events. So I had a long conversation with Stockton Rush about this. And he said, I think that the people who object are wrong.

12:05Because first of all, this wreck won't be there in 50 years. It's going to be a lump of rust. And if we're not there filming it, shooting it, making models of it, then it'll be gone and no one will be able to learn anything from it. And he did joke, we don't have a gift shop, but we are, we are no different from any other famous grave site that people go to show their respects. Absolutely. And it is just pretty wild. I mean, how the Titanic has been just this thing that's stuck in the globe's consciousness. I mean, it is, there's something about it, right? that just captures people's imagination.

12:49Maybe they put themselves in the place there. I'm curious what you think it is. Is it the, maybe it's nature pushing back. I mean, it's kind of ironic, right? But it is nature pushing back about humans' belief that they can control the world and impose their will on it. I mean, I think that's most of it. I mean, there have been many shipwrecks, some much more dramatic, some much more cool looking underwater. Um, but it's this one because it was the ship that couldn't sink and it was its first maiden voyage. And, uh, and of course the movie, the James Cameron movie kind of made it a popular pop cultural icon.

13:33So I think all those things continue to make it a singular icon. Yep. So what was your first thought when you heard that it had gone missing? the first thing i thought was oh my god these media making a big deal out of nothing uh-huh you know i'm sorry to say but i mean i knew i had been with this thing long enough to know that it glitches all the time all the time they all do the mirror the alvin the nateel all of these submersibles glitch all the time and through all this through this whole conversation let's keep in mind what PH Nargily told me, all submersibles are prototypes. These are not mass produced.

14:12There was not a 1.0 and this is 2.0. They are all one-offs. And that means there are no spares. There's no mass produced parts to swap in. So things go wrong all the time. James Cameron had to cancel dives. The Alvin had to cancel dives. The Noteel had to cancel dives. There's a Chinese one and a Japanese one, all of them glitch all the time. On our week over the Titanic, you may remember that there was a team of paying passengers who went down and got lost. I don't mean they were out of contact with the surface ship. I mean, they were lost. They didn't know where they were. They couldn't find the ship.

14:52There's no such thing as GPS underwater. water so what they do is in the control room on the surface ship they can see both the sub and the pieces of the wreck and they direct the ship using text messages sent as acoustic pulses through the water radio waves don't travel through water either by the way so only acoustic pulses and i have this great picture of the codes that they use the text messages are like are like three characters long, you know, like, you know, XXY means we've reached the bottom and so on. So the control room on deck has to direct the sub which way to go to find the Titanic.

15:37And on this occasion, for some reason, the Ocean Gate GPS system and the ship's own GPS system were disagreeing with each other. So they kept sending instructions down to Stockton in the sub and giving him bad directions. And we had a GoPro in there and we recorded all this and you can just hear them going, you just said we're a hundred feet off it to the right. And now we're 500 feet off it to the left. You know what's going on? And they came up, they came up after four hours they never saw anything they saw a boiler but they didn't see the ship um and so when i heard that the thing was missing i thought oh okay so it's a it's a comms glitch then i heard a couple hours later that this news was coming out 24 hours after it lost and moms.

16:36That's a different matter. Then, you know, my stomach dropped out of my body. Yeah. And so, okay, you were initially like pretty hopeful after hearing that it had gone missing. It had been 24 hours, but the scenarios that you were thinking about was that like they had potentially just lost communication. Right. So, so once I'd, once they'd been gone for 24 hours, I mean, I didn't like to think about this, but there are really only three things that could have happened. And so much of the speculation online was so uninformed. The only things that could possibly explain a loss of communication are, number one, it imploded.

17:19Number two, it got to the bottom. It lost power, so therefore couldn't communicate. Because remember, it wasn't yet to the bottom when they lost communication. It was only an hour and 45 minutes in. So the second possibility is they lost power and they got snagged on something on the bottom, either embedded in the silt or caught on the Titanic. There was a submersible a few years ago that got hooked on the Titanic's propeller and they had to wiggle free. That seemed like a stretch. And the third possibility is they lost power. But and so they were on the surface somewhere bobbing. um one another thing that nobody else reported is that this thing had so many redundant life support systems it had seven different ways of returning to the surface you know they could dump construction pipes they could dump sandbags they could they had an air bladder that make a balloon they could dump their legs and so on some of these were designed to work even if the electricity went out it was a manual mechanical lever some of them were designed to work even if The hydraulics went out and one of these backup systems would work even if everyone inside was unconscious or dead.

18:32It was a time-release 16-hour dissolving sandbag hook. So if they were floating on the surface there without power, that would be a really horrific way to go. Because you'd be looking out at the porthole at the air you need, but you can't reach it because you were bolted in. so i was hoping that if they had to die that it was implosion because they would not have seen that coming it would have been just cessation of consciousness yeah and james cameron when he was asked about it basically said that he knew that it was it was an implosion from the beginning there's a tremendous amount of pressure we can talk about that that ends up you know being pushed on this sub.

19:18And what he pointed to is that carbon fiber was actually like, it's very good for keeping gas in, keeping pressure in, but very bad for repelling pressure outward. I'm curious what you think about that. I mean, you got to remember, this was not a science experiment. This thing had been designed with experts. It had been tested many times. Stockton first made a one third scale model. Nobody talks about this. The University of Washington subjected it to pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure until it imploded to see what the level of pressure was that it could handle. The carbon fiber also had an acoustic monitoring system.

19:55Carbon fibers are actual fibers. They're like hairs. And when they break, they make a little crackle. And he had eight microphones embedded that could pick up on the crackling. And he said, you know, in testing, they'd take it down to a thousand feet and they'd hear it crackling. And so they'd come back up. Then they'd go back down a week later to a thousand feet, no crackling. This time they'd go down to 2000 feet until it started to crackle. Then they'd go back up. In other words, the weak fibers had already died. So each, so they, they tested it and tested it until there were no more fibers to pop.

20:38Right. So CBS News posted on the CBS News website the complete transcripts of the four interviews I did with Stockton. And if anybody actually cares about the science of it or the background or the testing they did, they should they should go read the transcript. I'm not, you know, of course, I'm not a Stockton Rush apologist. But my God, the things people are saying, you know, they make it sound like he built this thing out of Lego and threw it in the water. It was tested and it was inspected by some of the greatest mines and submersibles. So it's not as simple as the guy was shooting blind. So how did this thing implode?

21:20I believe that I interviewed a veteran Navy pilot for CBS, and I believe that he's correct, meaning submarine pilot, that it's not the carbon fiber. It's the dissimilar materials connected to it. So the titanium end caps and the plexiglass porthole, seven inch thick, what happens is each of them has a different coefficient of compression and expansion. In other words, under pressure, under temperature change, they each expand and contract a little it differently. And I keep saying, wow, he'd been down 20 times without an incident. That gave me reassurance. But this theory says, no, no, that shouldn't have given you reassurance.

22:08That's what should have terrified you because that's called cyclical fatigue. Every time the thing goes down and back up again, you're weakening it. So I believe that the carbon fiber did not give way. I think that his acoustic monitoring system never went off. But what happened was all it takes is a couple molecules of water in the seam between the carbon fiber and the titanium or the titanium and the plexiglass. And it's over. David, I mean, you were like a couple months away. Like if you had been there a few months later, you'd be dead. How do you feel about that? It's worse than that. um, after our aborted dive, they made two more that week.

22:51Um, the one that got lost and then the one that was successful. And then we, we came back to shore and they brought in the last group of the, of the summer and they made it down once. And so if you think about it, the only thing that separated the CBS crew and the fatal dive was three dives. I was, it's it was like it's like Russian roulette so um it's honestly been a lot to process um this has been a really rough week you know there's there's anger there's little survivor's guilt there's unbelievable gratitude you know at the luck and uh yeah I'll be thinking about it for a long time. David Pogue is here with us he's a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning and also the host of the Unsung Science podcast, which you can get on your podcast app of choice.

23:47On the other side, we're going to talk a little bit more about merits of risk and exploration and a little bit more about David's experience on the sub. Back after this. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

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25:33And we're back here with David Pogue. He is the host of the Unsung Science Podcast. He's a correspondent on CES Sunday Morning and also the author of many books. You can go check them out on Amazon or with your local bookstore. David, actually, this is like the second time we're talking on a podcast. I don't know if you remember, but you were on my first podcast, which I started like 10 years ago. I probably should have kept it going. It was called On the Program, and it was kind of jerry-rigged, like the, well, anyway, I won't make a comparison. But we talked about your very creative proposal video.

26:07And we didn't really have sound. We didn't really have an audience. And so I appreciate it. I guess things have changed since then, but it's good to be back on with you. Thank you. You too. So let's talk a little bit more about the merits of risk in exploration. There was a line, we talked about it on the show Friday when we were going over what happened. But there's a line that Stockton Rush used where he said, at some point, safety is just a waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed, don't get in your car, don't do anything. You know, in retrospect, I'm curious what you think about that line.

26:37People are saying, I mean, this is kind of what we spoke about when we were on Friday. We do a show on Friday talking a little bit about the week's news. But basically, like, there's a difference between, like, being open to risk and preparing for every possible outcome. And then also just taking reckless risk. So actually, like, actually hearing you now, I'm thinking, okay, maybe this wasn't as reckless as I thought in the beginning. But to hear that line about safety, it does. I think that's kind of what set off a lot of people about Stockton saying, well, come on. Come on, man. What were you doing?

27:07I mean, he did a lot of sort of swashbuckling for the camera and it did not age well. I mean, he said all kinds of things. And on our follow up story for CBS Sunday Morning that appeared on Sunday, you can find it on YouTube. You see more of that kind of stuff where, you know, he I mean, his other line is when you when you think outside the box, all the people still in the box think you're crazy.

27:39And he says it when you see on camera, he said he's saying it with a smirk. He's trying to be a little provocative. He fancies himself, fancied himself with a little bit of Elon Musk, a little bit of Steve Jobs, to whom he compared himself often. And I have to say. That's not a red flag. No, because you don't know. I mean, it seemed like he'd done it. He'd done it 20 times. Yeah, yeah. He built a sub that nobody said could work and done it to the Titanic depths 20 times. I should also say there's another part of this story that nobody's talking about, and that is that he started out as an aerospace engineer, and he built and flew his own airplanes.