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Alison Stewart:  This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on-demand, I'm grateful you're here. On the show today, someone who has released their debut album at 73 years old. The accomplished filmmaker, Sally Potter, joins us to discuss her new record, it's called Pink Bikini, and we'll hear the story of the once corrupt Harlem Police Precinct nicknamed the Dirty 30. That is in the future. Let's get this hour started with David Pogue and the Titan submersible.

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Alison Stewart: Today is the one-month anniversary of the Titan Submersible disaster that led to the deaths of a Pakistani British businessman and his son, a French diver, a British pilot and adventurer, and Stockton Rush, the American CEO of the company. Before June 18th, few of us had ever heard of OceanGate and its submersible trips to see the wreckage of the Titanic, but CBS Sunday Morning contributor David Pogue had. He and his team had been invited to take part in one of the expeditions this time last year. Here's how the story first appeared on CBS Sunday Morning in November 2022.

David Pogue: "For the most part, the only people who've ever seen the Titanic since that night have been scientists, until now."

Stockton Rush: "It's a very unusual business. It's its own category. It's a new type of travel."

David Pogue: "Stockton Rush is the CEO of OceanGate, a company that offers dives to the Titanic in a one-of-a-kind carbon fiber submersible for $250,000 per person. Who are the typical clientele for these missions?"

Stockton Rush: "We have clients that are Titanic enthusiasts, which we refer to as 'Titaniacs.' We've had people who have mortgaged their home to come and do the trip, and we have people who don't think twice about a trip of this cost. We had one gentleman who had won the lottery."

David Pogue: "This summer, Rush invited us to come along."

Alison Stewart: Pogue kept a journal about his experience, and his entries are now eerie. He writes about being bummed that his trip in the sub was aborted at only 37 feet underwater. As he notes in a piece for New York Magazine, "Now, of course, it all looks different. Now I'm sick to my stomach. Now I feel like I won at Russian roulette. Three dives later, the Titan imploded and killed five people on board."

Now, if you go to the OceanGate website, it's a black screen that reads "OceanGate Expeditions has suspended all exploration and commercial operations." Its social media presence is gone. The tragedy has raised so many questions. What's the purpose of this kind of travel? How is safety actually handled? Should a story like this get as much coverage as it did? Was it avoidable or just a freak accident? What might change as a result of Titan? David Pogue's piece is titled What I Learned on a Titanic Sub Expedition. Unraveling the enigma of Stockton Rush — and understanding the Titan tragedy. He joins me now. David, thanks for being with us.

David Pogue: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, do you have any questions for David about his experiences with OceanGate? Did you follow the story? Why or why not? What do you make of extreme adventure travel? Have you ever been on a trip like this that was that dangerous? Would you ever want to go see the Titanic? Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call and join us on air. You can also text to us at that number, or you can reach out on our social media @allofitwnyc.

Your June 13th, 2022 entry is about getting the invitation to join the expedition. What did you think when you first got this invitation?

David Pogue: Oh man, I lost my mind. I wrote back immediately. I literally said, "I would pay you to take this assignment." As the company was fond of pointing out, more people have been to space than have been to the Titanic. It is a rare, rare opportunity, so yes, I was fired up.

Alison Stewart: When you and your team got together-- and I worked at CBS News. They're very serious about news value and things. Why did you decide it was worth the trip? What was the news value of it?

David Pogue: A couple of things. First of all, nobody goes to the Titanic anymore. Not even scientists. The last time anyone went for a scientific expedition was something like 2010. The fact that someone was going, the fact that they were bringing tourists, was interesting to us. Here's a part that's been completely lost in the news coverage. There were room for four passengers and the pilot, and he always took only three passengers and one scientist. They were doing real science. They were doing actual studies that they would publish, and the customers were in effect paying for the science. There was a scientific hybrid element to this too that we thought was interesting.

Alison Stewart: There was this one part in your story where one of the science guests says, "I'm a real scientist, not a show scientist." What did he mean by that?

David Pogue: I'd asked him. I was like, "Is this real science or are you just here as a gimmick, as a fun thing?" He said, "I don't do show science." In other words, he was doing real science. I'll just give you one of the examples they were doing our week. They were studying something called eDNA. They take water samples around the Titanic and they analyze it, and they can figure out every critter that's been in or around the wreck in the last 24 hours. It's like DNA fingerprints. They routinely see species that no person has ever seen before, so there's really cool stuff going on.

Alison Stewart: How was it explained to you what would happen? Once you were engaged and said, "Yes, this is something we want to do."

David Pogue: They treated us to Zoom calls with Stockton Rush and his wife Wendy. This is the same treatment that paying customers got as well. You'd meet over Zoom. He would explain stuff. The website was full of information about what to expect. For example, they would discourage you from going to the bathroom on the sub. There is basically a glorified Ziploc bag if you need it, but they talked about this low-residue diet you'd have to eat the day before. They talked about the fact that it's very warm at the surface, very cold at the bottom, so you're to dress in layers. Things like that.

Alison Stewart: The CEO of the company was Stockton Rush, and you spent time with him. In your diary dated July 10th, 2022, you note that he is charming and chatty. What was Stockton Rush like on paper as opposed to Stockton Rush in person?

David Pogue: In person, there's a little bit of the right stuff in him. He wanted to be an astronaut. He couldn't because his vision wasn't good enough, so he turned to the undersea. He was an aeronautical expert. He designed and flew his own fiberglass airplane. He built submersibles before, so kind of a Maverick. He loved throwing out those little provocative statements like, "After a certain point, all safety is worthless. You want to be totally safe, don't get out of bed." He would say stuff that looks really bad now, but I think he was just trying to get a rise out of us. He loved being on camera.

I think he was a very wealthy guy. Direct descendants of two signers of the Declaration of Independence. Steely blue eyes. Yes, kind of a cowboy.

Alison Stewart: Did you get a sense that he was passionate about exploration? Was he passionate about invention, was he passionate about the Titanic, or some combination?

David Pogue: Yes. [laughs] He knew everything about everything. He knew everything about submersibles, everything about the Titanic. He had studied all the previous submersibles, all the previous divers. He could go on. We published the complete transcripts of four of my interviews with him at cbsnews.com, and it's [chuckles] tens of thousands of words.

Alison Stewart: Wow. You did four separate different interviews with him?

David Pogue: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why did you feel like you needed to do so many?

David Pogue: Well, you got to remember the expedition is nine days long, so it's two days sailing from land to the Titanic, five days over the wreck, and then two days back. Most of those days, every time they did this, were canceled because of weather or mechanical failure, so you got a lot of time on the ship. We did one interview outside the sub where he gave us a tour, one inside the sub. Another one we did a month later back on land at his headquarters in Everett, Washington, and so on. We just had a lot of time, so we just rolled.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Randy calling in from Hastings-on-Hudson. Hi, Randy. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Randy: Thank you, Alison, for taking my call. David, I've been following you since I used to read your tech columns in The New York Times.

David Pogue: Wow. [laughs]

Randy: One of the things I kept hearing over and over again after the disaster happened, was the term that everybody knew the risks. One of the people on this disaster was 19 years old. He was legally a minor. I think the question about consent needs to be discussed, and whether or not minors should be permitted on extreme adventures, clearly life-threatening things. I know everybody signs a waiver, but the question of whether a 19-year-old kid really knew what he was getting into, or was being brought along by his parent, I think is something that merits serious discussion.

David Pogue: There are two great questions in there. One is about the waiver and the risks, and I thought so much about this. Yes, you signed a waiver that literally is a list of ways you could die. You could die on the support ship. You could die walking on the sub. You could die in the sub. I just signed it without thinking. I think we all did because you sign the same thing when you go bungee jumping. Same thing when you go white water rafting. You sign the same thing when you go to one of those trampling parks. You assume that it's safe. There wouldn't be an operation if it weren't safe, and that this is just lawyers covering their butts. You just assume that. That's what I did.

As for the 19-year-old, I don't know the dynamic of that family. I will say that on my week there was also a young man, probably about 20, who came with his hedge fund dad. They finally made it to the Titanic, and both he and his dad said their lives were changed forever. He said it was the most incredible thing. Given the first part of this answer, that you trust the company, you trust the outfit, they'd already been to the Titanic depths 20 times as of last summer, I don't think that the 19-year-old was any more or less informed than the grown-ups. I don't. I think everybody said, "Yes, well. It's got to work or they wouldn't be in business."

Alison Stewart: It's described in the waiver as an experimental vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body. Now, when you read that sentence, it brings up a lot of questions. A rich person or inventor can hire all these people, build the sub, hire a big boat to bring people and the sub out to the Titanic site, and dive. That there's no regulatory commission body. Is that the case?

David Pogue: That's the case because it was operating in international waters, so it's governed by nobody's laws. Obviously, I wouldn't have gotten on this thing if I thought it was unsafe. He made clear that he had worked in designing the hull, this carbon fiber part, with NASA and Boeing, and the University of Washington. We can talk about that. All three companies were identified in my story that aired in November and were pleased to get the publicity, but after the disaster, of course they're all saying, "Oh no, we didn't. It wasn't like that." [chuckles] They were in fact all involved with OceanGate, no matter what they say, at various stages, and I trusted that they knew what they were doing.

Alison Stewart: My guest is David Pogue. The name of the piece is What I Learned on a Titanic Sub Expedition. Unraveling the enigma of Stockton Rush — and understanding the Titan tragedy. If you'd like to call in and join this conversation, maybe you have questions for David Pogue about the experience with OceanGate. What did you make of the story? Have you ever been someone interested in extreme adventure travel? Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call and join us on air in the conversation, or you can text to us or reach out on our social media. Let's talk to Silke calling in from Brooklyn, who has a question for you, David. Silke, thanks for calling All Of It.

Silke: Oh, definitely. I love this show so much. I'm a nurse and I'm traveling to the next visit, but I had to pull over because there's big rain coming down. I had to ask this question as I'm listening to you. You already answered it, which was that you felt safe. You had all this information, saying that it was safe. I'm just curious, was there any part of you that had any internal doubt for a moment that the word "carbon fiber" just doesn't sound right going under 12,000 to 13,000 feet of really dense water? Was there any part of you that said, "This doesn't really feel right"?

Then the other one was that I think despite all the tragedy that comes from such adventures, the technology itself is really important to keep working with. In other words, that even though these things happen, horrible as they are, that perhaps the trouble itself is incidental. That something comes from this technology, and the development and the process and the thinking through that might lead to something else that's really, really amazing and life-altering and planet-altering that has nothing necessarily to do with going down to see the Titanic, like who cares? Do you know what I mean?

That there's something really marvelous about what could possibly happen from such research. I'm just wondering what you think about continuing with this kind of exploration and how you improve it and where it can lead.

David Pogue: Well, on the first question, I think that Stockton Rush might have been too influenced by something that happened 25 years earlier when he built that fiberglass plane. Everybody told him, "We don't build planes out of that material," and of course today, everybody does. I think the lesson he took away from that was, "I know what I'm doing with these new materials. There's always going to be naysayers."

No, I wasn't worried about carbon fiber at the time. In fact, I'm not sure I'm still worried about the carbon fiber. We don't know why the thing imploded, but my reigning theory is that it wasn't the carbon fiber itself. It was the fact that it was mated with these two titanium end caps, one of which had a plexiglass window in it. All these three different materials expanded and contracted to different amounts at the depths they went to, and going down and back up 20 or 22 times gradually worsened the seams.

As for the Titanic exploration, I really do believe in it. There is so much to learn in the part of this planet that we just have not explored, that we have not seen. To me, it is as cool as going to space. I was very annoyed and bummed that my dive was canceled. Now I probably never will see the Titanic, but yes, I now know that probably carbon fiber with titanium end caps is not the way to build the sub.

Alison Stewart: I want to say something that a lot of people are calling in saying, "19 is not a minor," but I think it's the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law at question. The idea of someone being very young and being taken by a parent, as opposed to their own independence. I think that's what the caller was getting at, more than perhaps the actual 18, 19, or 21 of it all.

David Pogue: That's right. His mom, of course, was on the ship as a passenger. I've read some people saying that this 19-year-old was brought against his will. Like he's, "I don't really want to go." I've heard his mom say no, he was thrilled. It was a Father's Day present, so I'm not really sure where the truth lies.

Alison Stewart: From the video, watching you get inside of this submersible, part of it looked like this, we said, exciting invention and innovation, and then other parts of it looked really cheap and really DIY. What part of the sub made you feel confident when you went in it? Then what part did you think, "How is this DIY short of duct tape?" Didn't use duct tape, [unintelligible 00:16:49], but really like parts from Camping World to make this.

David Pogue: Yes. Stockton Rush gave me this tour and he was laughing, as you say. The handles overhead which light up to provide illumination, he said, "I got those from Camping World." Famously, he steers the thing with a PlayStation game controller. A $16 game controller from Amazon. He argued that on a previous submersible, he'd spent $10,000 building a custom steering unit. You know what? It was huge, it was heavy, and it was bulky. This way, he carried two spares on the sub. It does what you need. It's meant to be banged around.

I guess ultimately his argument, that appealed to me most, was, yes, these bells and whistles are cheap and off the shelf, but the part you care about, the pressure vessel where the people sit, that is mistake-proof. That was designed, sparing no expense, with top-of-the-line experts. I like to point out that for every James Cameron who's now saying, "Oh, you could have seen this disaster coming a miles away," there was also PH Nargeolet, the most famous Titanic expert in the world, who dived on all the submersibles and oversaw the construction and the building and approved of it.

As well as Phil Brooks, then the director of engineering, who helped design the sub. I interviewed him. They were all fully confident in this thing. I don't think it was as obvious that it would fail as everybody now thinks it would have been.

Alison Stewart: Someone wrote in, "Regarding the Titanic, as a former seafarer I would never visit the site of the wreck. It's a maritime grave, not a tourist destination." That's Nick from the Upper West Side. We've also got, "Being retired, I had time to read quite a bit about the Titan disaster. My impression is that if it survived this expedition, it would have failed the next or the one after that. In my opinion, it was an experimental vehicle without an adequate safety regime and some critical design flaws. Does your guest agree or disagree with my conclusions?"

David Pogue: Agreed. The three different materials thing makes me super nervous. Again, one thing that's gotten lost in all the media coverage is they did test this thing. They made a one-third scale model, and on YouTube, you can still see the carbon fiber pressure testing that the University of Washington did with Stockton Rush. It had been tested. They did sample dives in the Bahamas. They drove it across the country to Woods Hole to have them pressure test it. It had made, as I said, 20 dives.

Now I believe that it's the 20 dives. As your listener said, that was not a reason for reassurance. That was seconds clicking off of its lifespan. I think I would have been more comfortable on one of the earlier dives than the later and later it got.

Alison Stewart: How did you feel to be inside of it? You got to go inside of it. You got to go underwater for a bit. What was that experience like?

David Pogue: It's like a minivan without seats. It's obviously a cylinder and the floor is a rubber mat. He got that from a welding supply store, [chuckles] speaking DIY. There's one window at the end that you see out and there's two computer screens, and that's it. There is nothing inside. It's very clean looking, modern looking. It has cool lighting. He would play music on the way down. I found it comfortable. You couldn't stand up, but it held five people comfortably. Probably could have taken six.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to John calling in from Bradley Beach on line eight. Hi, John. Thanks for calling All Of It.

John: Hi. I just want to ask if the guest and you, Allison, read the piece in The New Yorker about this. I think it was called An Accident Waiting to Happen. I know your guest wrote a piece in New York Magazine, but after reading The New Yorker article, it seems like everybody in the industry knew this was absolutely going to happen. Everybody in the industry tried to talk Stockton Rush out of doing this and taking tourists on such a vessel, and he just ignored everybody. I want to hear what your guest says about that.

David Pogue: He ignored the naysayers, for sure. The New Yorker article focused on the two people in 2018. One was an employee of OceanGate who said this thing is a disaster and he got fired by Stockton Rush, and there was lawsuits and all that. Then there was this group of submersible engineers who jointly wrote a letter to Stockton Rush. Never actually got sent to him, but Stockton Rush heard about it, called him up. Yes, he discounted all of the naysayers, but as I've made clear, there were also plenty of people who gave him the thumbs up, and those were the people he chose to listen to.

It's hard. The guy compared himself to Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. There are always these hotshots who come up with ways to do things that they think are better, and when they turn out to be better, we hail them as heroes every time. If this guy were still going in his carbon fiber sub, we'd say, "Wow, he's a rebel, and he came up with a better way to do something." It didn't work out that way, so now he's an idiot who ignored the naysayers. You know what I mean?

Alison Stewart: To follow up, and to John's point though, was he delusional? I think that's a little bit behind his question of, yes, he ignored them. Why would he know better?

David Pogue: I guess because he had been there for the testing and he had his experts who were saying, "Yes, this will work." Again, I think that airplane experience poisoned him to thinking, "I know better."

Alison Stewart: Explain to people what you mean by that. I'm not sure.

David Pogue: Yes. He had built a fiberglass airplane 25 years earlier. Same critics came out and said, "You can't build an airplane with composites," and he did and it worked fine, and now everybody builds airplanes with composites. Every airplane you fly is made of composites. He thinks, "Well, see, there are always going to be naysayers." It's not that he was a total con man or a total idiot. He just chose to tune out the critics and tune in the thumbs up. I guess that's how I see it.

Alison Stewart: When you went back and you looked at your journal from that time, what stands out to you now? What felt very strange? What gave you the tingle and the goosebumps?

David Pogue: There were a lot of weird things about this outfit, I got to say. They had a PR person who told our CBS Sunday Morning crew, "By the way, in your story, don't refer to these people as tourists or passengers. The term is mission specialists." Like, what? It just seems so--

Alison Stewart: Every journalist was like, "Yes, no." [laughter]

David Pogue: Yes, exactly. I'm like yes, no.

Alison Stewart: No.

David Pogue: Again, these junky added-on accessories seemed weird. One thing they really don't tell you is how rarely they make it to the Titanic. We now know that they ran five of these nine-day operations each summer. They'd done it for three summers. This was the third. They usually get down to the Titanic once out of the five days they were over the wreck, or not at all. The week I was on board our dive was canceled. Next two days were canceled because of weather. Fourth dive, they went down, couldn't find the shipwreck. The sub got lost on the bottom of the sea, it had to come back up. Can you imagine paying a quarter of a million dollars and getting that?

Then the fifth day they made it down, they saw the Titanic. Everybody cried. It was the most moving thing in the world, and suddenly it was the big payoff. Yes, I don't feel like they were upfront or transparent about how rarely you actually make it down. Everybody wants to know do you get your money back? No, there were no refunds, but if you don't get to see the Titanic because of mechanical problems with the sub, Stockton would invite you back the next summer for a free do-over. If it was canceled because of weather, he gave you a half-price do-over.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting. I'm looking at some of-- We can't get to all of our calls, but there seem to be two camps. One is, "This is a waste of money. All the money that was spent on the rescue mission. Why are we spending money like that?" Then on the other side, we have a lot of people saying and writing things like, "Exploration is important. Innovation is important. There are lessons to be learned from this." What do you think about that idea? That this is somewhat polarizing?

David Pogue: I do feel kind of sick to my stomach about the fact that there was the ship in Greece that killed 600 immigrants the same day.

Alison Stewart: Yes, exactly.

David Pogue: You would have had to hunt to find a headline about that. The expense of the Coast Guard search when we pretty much knew that thing was done. The fact that the communications from it stopped abruptly and there was nothing further, that's a pretty good sign that it's not just bobbing on the surface somewhere. For a whole week, they kept searching. That said, I'm not one of these people who says we should ban it, we should regulate it. I think that there are people who are adrenaline junkies and thrill seekers.

The people I met who were the paying customers, they had been to space. They had swum with sharks. They had been to volcanoes. This is the life of a vastly wealthy middle-aged guy who lives for thrilling. Courting death is part of it. Everybody knew there was risk. It's a decision that everyone has to make for themselves. I respect everybody who says, "You couldn't pay me a quarter of a million dollars to get on that sub." That's a legitimate stance. I also think it's a legitimate stance to say, "I'll take the risk because the payoff would be incredible."

Alison Stewart: The name of the piece is What I Learned on a Titanic Sub Expedition. Unraveling the enigma of Stockton Rush — and understanding the Titan tragedy. David, thank you for sharing your reporting with us.

David Pogue: My pleasure. Thank you.

 

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