Speaker 1: In nineteen twelve, the famous ship the Titanic infamously and
Speaker 1: tragically sank or did it? Yeah? Probably? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: yeah probably. I mean they made a movie about it,
Speaker 1: and I think I can knew that if it didn't happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks Cameron. It doesn't make things up out of a
Speaker 1: whole cloth, right, We've all been to Avatar. What's the
Speaker 1: name of the planet? Pandora? Who had been to Pandora?
Speaker 1: And the fact that I confuse the name of the
Speaker 1: film with the planet should not dissuade you from the
Speaker 1: veracity of that statement. But but yeah, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of conspiracies about the Titanic, and some of them
Speaker 1: are rabbit holes. Absolutely, So let's get all brock love
Speaker 1: it with this one and search for some underwater treasure.
Speaker 1: That's a comedy bang bang reference. I hope you're listening
Speaker 1: to that podcast too. From uf thos to psychic powers
Speaker 1: and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You
Speaker 1: can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't
Speaker 1: want you to know. Welcome back to the show. My
Speaker 1: name is Matt, my name is no. They call me Ben.
Speaker 1: You are you? And that makes this stuff They don't
Speaker 1: want you to know. As always, we are joined by
Speaker 1: our superproducer Tristan McNeil. Tristan, do you want to wave
Speaker 1: to us? Okay, well, everybody will just have to believe
Speaker 1: us when we say that Tristan was indeed waving. Tristan
Speaker 1: just communicates in emojis. We found out it's it's pretty intense.
Speaker 1: Like there's three that he uses. There's the O face emoji, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's the hand on jim like finger yeah, and then
Speaker 1: there's the shocked emoji. I see that one most often. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So he exists swinging between those three emojis. You know,
Speaker 1: I kind of like it when it's like when they
Speaker 1: see if you go into a really great restaurant and
Speaker 1: you know it's great because they may only have six
Speaker 1: things on the menu, but they have mastery over all
Speaker 1: of those. I just look at the pictures. I prefer
Speaker 1: to order off menu. Have you ever been on a cruise?
Speaker 1: I have no, Really, it's not it's not for me.
Speaker 1: I didn't really think it was for me either, pun
Speaker 1: doing it. But yes, interesting experience to be out in
Speaker 1: the ocean with several thousand other people just on a
Speaker 1: big floating metal thing. Now was it was it a
Speaker 1: Was it like a family cruise or was it a
Speaker 1: themed cruise, because you know those things occur, I could.
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly what it was. It was um Norwegian,
Speaker 1: I think was the name of the company. Did you
Speaker 1: see any icebergs? I saw zero icebergs, and I was
Speaker 1: looking for a good thing. For some reason, they don't
Speaker 1: hang out in the Caribbean. Yes, that's now, that's what
Speaker 1: I thought too. There's a Caribbean cruise was and I'm
Speaker 1: glad you had a good time. How old were you?
Speaker 1: That wasn't long ago? Maybe two three years? Oh, that's
Speaker 1: where you went. I'm a bad friend. I remember you
Speaker 1: said you were at sea, and I thought you were
Speaker 1: just joking and let it go. To be clear, it
Speaker 1: wasn't my idea, but it was fun. We should also
Speaker 1: mentioned before we really get cooked with gas here. I
Speaker 1: don't know if if any of you folks have heard
Speaker 1: of this before, but a while ago, Matt and Nolan
Speaker 1: I found out about a conspiracy themed cruise, conspira Sea
Speaker 1: conspiracy cruise, and when you briefly, we briefly kicked around
Speaker 1: the idea of going. But I don't know, especially if
Speaker 1: cruises aren't Nol's thing, and it just seems like an
Speaker 1: awful lot of like being corralled and kind of you know,
Speaker 1: heard it around, and I'm not really into shuffleboard, so
Speaker 1: I feel like they'd be limited stuff for me. I'd
Speaker 1: like to travel on cargo ship or via icebreaker into
Speaker 1: the polls, but I don't know if I would go
Speaker 1: on them, you know, a normal cruise, just because they're
Speaker 1: their own economies, you know, like they're their own worlds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no escape. I'd like to ride on a cruise missile.
Speaker 1: Maybe that'd be cool. That'd be kind of cool with
Speaker 1: the cowboy hate. So but whether or not we or
Speaker 1: you are fans of cruises, one thing is for sure.
Speaker 1: Cruises are super popular. People love the idea, right, hop
Speaker 1: on a boat, get away from it all. See a
Speaker 1: couple foreign countries. Maybe the practice of cruising recreationally entirely
Speaker 1: for pleasure, you know, where you don't have to bring
Speaker 1: home like spoils of war or or salmon to smoke
Speaker 1: or something. It dates back for a while. It began
Speaker 1: with the formation something called the Peninsular and Oriental Steam
Speaker 1: Navigation Company in eighteen twenty two. Now they started out
Speaker 1: as just a shipping company. They're gonna take your stuff,
Speaker 1: put it on a boat, and take it somewhere else
Speaker 1: wherever you need it to be. But then they realize, hey,
Speaker 1: maybe there's something else to this. They were going on
Speaker 1: routes between England and the Iberian Peninsula, and they adopted
Speaker 1: that name Peninsular Steam Navigation Company from that peninsular routing
Speaker 1: that they were taking. That's a great word to peninsula. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like that some law enforcement officer probably uses
Speaker 1: that in a sobriety test, like repeat the following words
Speaker 1: to me, right, rural juror peninsula. Yes, anyway they Yeah,
Speaker 1: Matt is absolutely correct. They began actually as a they
Speaker 1: began traveling to this peninsula and to Egypt to deliver
Speaker 1: mail as a postal route. But they began becoming, you know,
Speaker 1: known for this great route and you could ride along
Speaker 1: for a nominal fee. The first vessel built just for
Speaker 1: luxury cruising came only a few decades later, the Prinzacing
Speaker 1: Victoria Louise of Germany, designed by a guy with the
Speaker 1: name get this, Albert Balling yep designing ships stacking duckets. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that was a nineteen hundred and so now fast
Speaker 1: forward to twenty seventeen. As we record this, cruise ships
Speaker 1: are popular around the globe, and every market trend just
Speaker 1: indicates that they will become even more popular in the
Speaker 1: coming years. Wouldn't the full name be pleasure cruise. It's
Speaker 1: a pleasure cruise. Yeah, that's a really good point, a
Speaker 1: pleasure cruise. There's a wide variety of pleasures. Taking a
Speaker 1: pleasure cruise to pleasure island. That's nice. And it is
Speaker 1: strange to think of how harrowing a journey, a long
Speaker 1: boat trip would be and has been throughout history, Like
Speaker 1: how many people die when you take a long ship
Speaker 1: journey back in the day, even not long before this
Speaker 1: time in nineteen hundred, you would have serious issues with
Speaker 1: having enough food and water on the ship for enough
Speaker 1: of the people and be comfortable there. And if sickness
Speaker 1: was a major and like you know, sanitary conditions and
Speaker 1: spreading disease, you know, and people you hear about people
Speaker 1: getting you know, scurvy and whatnot, and like you know, malnutrition. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would think the idea of a pleasure cruise had
Speaker 1: to be a pretty big marketing push to make that
Speaker 1: fly yea. And also probably you know, for the wealthy,
Speaker 1: the ones who got to hang out up top, while
Speaker 1: we know that the steerage you know down below was
Speaker 1: where the I guess the employees and some of the
Speaker 1: less fortunate passengers got to hang out. And honestly, guys,
Speaker 1: it hasn't changed since then. Yeah, in the sea or
Speaker 1: the air, have you have you flown coach only? Rough?
Speaker 1: Why are there always new weird gradations of Luxurian planes.
Speaker 1: There's like economy economy plus they don't ever say coach anymore.
Speaker 1: They don't change anything though, they just change the wording.
Speaker 1: I mean, all these planes that you fly on, they're
Speaker 1: like the same ones from They still have ash trays
Speaker 1: in the right. We're not talking about planes, but I
Speaker 1: think it is a good comparison. So the market predictions
Speaker 1: estimate that by twenty twenty, almost twenty five million people
Speaker 1: will take a cruise each year. And of course, disasters
Speaker 1: occur in every industry, and when something goes wrong in
Speaker 1: the world of cruise ships, people can die. One of
Speaker 1: the most famous cruise ship tragedies. Yes, that's true, folks.
Speaker 1: We are getting to a point here. It's not just
Speaker 1: us talking about whether we're going to take a cruise.
Speaker 1: We are exploring one of the most infamous tragedies in
Speaker 1: modern maritime history, the sinking of the Titanic. That's a bummer.
Speaker 1: I didn't sign up for that. I thought we were
Speaker 1: just going to talk about cruises. Well they and sign
Speaker 1: up to sync or did they? Like? Wait, never mind,
Speaker 1: if you want to refund on your ticket for the podcast,
Speaker 1: then we'll have to sell tickets. There's some cool stuff here,
Speaker 1: you guys, the stuff that I was unaware of, and
Speaker 1: that certainly was not addressed in James Cameron's blockbuster smash
Speaker 1: Titanic A Love Story, which allegedly have you heard the
Speaker 1: rumor about titan they got dosed with LSD or something
Speaker 1: like that. Oh. I well, with the making of the film,
Speaker 1: I heard that James Cameron really just wanted to explore
Speaker 1: the wreckage in a submarine. He made that movie too,
Speaker 1: and he did the Mariannas Trench and his little tiny subect.
Speaker 1: But no, I heard that he was such a monster
Speaker 1: that like somebody dosed was trying to dose him with
Speaker 1: LSD and ended up like dosing all of the food
Speaker 1: on the spread or something like that for the cool
Speaker 1: crew and cast with LSD and they ended up causing
Speaker 1: some issues. That would that work? Woul that work someone
Speaker 1: with don't worry, we won't put you on blast, but
Speaker 1: someone with the experience in that in that field, let
Speaker 1: us know if experience in dosing multiple people, Well, if
Speaker 1: LSD would work in food. I had never heard that.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating. Oh heait, guys, I found it. So Apparently
Speaker 1: it was some much LSD laced chowder that was intended
Speaker 1: for mister Cameron, but others ended up eating it, and
Speaker 1: the assistant This is on an Ion nine article, by
Speaker 1: the way, excellent side. The assistant director apparently got so
Speaker 1: freaked out that he stabbed James Cameron in the face
Speaker 1: with a pencil. Oh my gosh. Well, also, you shouldn't
Speaker 1: eat other people's chowder. There are multiple lessons to learn
Speaker 1: here and and the history of the well, I don't
Speaker 1: know if the history of the real Titanic is as
Speaker 1: interesting in bizarre as that historical note on the film,
Speaker 1: but we do have the history of the actual Titanic too,
Speaker 1: which is relatively LSD free. Yes, it dates back to
Speaker 1: nineteen oh evan when a guy named James Bruce Ismay,
Speaker 1: who was the son of this other guy named Thomas.
Speaker 1: He founded the White Star line of ocean liners on
Speaker 1: the idea that people would travel farther by ship if
Speaker 1: the vessels were just luxurious enough for them to want
Speaker 1: to stay on that ship, like a pleasure cruise. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the idea of I don't want to be on a
Speaker 1: ship for two days, but if I can go bowling
Speaker 1: on that ship, maybe I will. If there's a tub,
Speaker 1: if it's opulent, if there are servants, if I can drink,
Speaker 1: and as much as I want whenever I want. Sure,
Speaker 1: For some reason, I feel like people in the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century did that anyway. Yeah, I just feel like
Speaker 1: getting drunk on a cruise ship would be a recipe
Speaker 1: for disaster because it's like, what if he even have
Speaker 1: mild c sickness, wouldn't that be just exacerbated by you know,
Speaker 1: alcohol consumption. I don't know, that's a I wonder if
Speaker 1: you I imagine that many people become acclimated to it
Speaker 1: if they're on for a week. Get your sea legs,
Speaker 1: get your sea legs, yes, exactly. And mostly people are
Speaker 1: on the slots or in the casino, just so you know,
Speaker 1: on a cruise ship. So part of the reason that
Speaker 1: Ismay was inspired to do this. He had a partner,
Speaker 1: Lord Piri, who was chairman of Harland and Wolf shipbuilders,
Speaker 1: and Puri kept talking about the Mauritania and the Lusitania,
Speaker 1: which were the newest vessels of something called the Cunard line.
Speaker 1: Ismay and Piri were convinced that they could create bigger
Speaker 1: and better and more luxurious ships. So then they imagined
Speaker 1: three giants, the Gigantic, which would isn't that an awesome name?
Speaker 1: It later would change his name to the Britannant, right,
Speaker 1: much more luxurious sounding, the Olympic and the Ti Tanic
Speaker 1: the Titanic, and these ships would but they're gonna be
Speaker 1: so posh, you guys, you have no idea how poshu
Speaker 1: they're gonna be. They're gonna be fast, they're gonna be
Speaker 1: so safe. We're gonna get you there in style. And
Speaker 1: they're huge. I mean, yeah, Gigantic was an appropriate name.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't have the same ring as Britannic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then you you think Titanic is after titan which
Speaker 1: is another just giant thing, saying Titan or Giant. I
Speaker 1: wonder if they had another name for Olympic. And we're
Speaker 1: just too embarrassed to put it in the history books.
Speaker 1: Was it just big, bigly, big boy, big boy, big atron.
Speaker 1: So the Titanic itself was, you know, not ironically named.
Speaker 1: It was almost nine hundred feet long, and it was
Speaker 1: almost ninety three feet wide. It weighed almost forty five
Speaker 1: thousand tons. It had two reciprocating engines, each of which
Speaker 1: were about four stories tall. That's incomprehensible for me. There
Speaker 1: were there were three propellers. Two of them were like
Speaker 1: a little over twenty three feet in diameter, and then
Speaker 1: there was one. There was a four blade propeller that
Speaker 1: was seventeen feet near the ship's seventeen feet in diameter
Speaker 1: near the ship's rudder, and it could make it could
Speaker 1: generate enough horsepower to get it to the insane speed
Speaker 1: of twenty seven point six miles per hour, which I
Speaker 1: know does not sound impressive, but again, this thing is
Speaker 1: like nine hundred feet long to be that huge, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then stopping it is an issue, right, And the
Speaker 1: ship was so massively Titanic that it actually could not
Speaker 1: be constructed on existing docks and launching sites, so they
Speaker 1: actually had to build a whole new set of docks
Speaker 1: called the White Star docks and the Great Gantry, which
Speaker 1: was a series of fifteen massive cranes that allowed them
Speaker 1: to accommodate all of the moving parts of the shipbuilding process.
Speaker 1: So the Titanic was finished in nineteen twelve, and it
Speaker 1: took an estimated eleven thousand people to build it. I
Speaker 1: can't even picture what that would like. How do you
Speaker 1: even like manage eleven thousand people? Is that like an
Speaker 1: Egyptian period? I was thinking the same thing. It's insane
Speaker 1: and all in all, the cost was an estimated seven
Speaker 1: point five million dollars, which today would amount with inflation
Speaker 1: to about one hundred and eighty nine million, one hundred
Speaker 1: eighty six thousand, seven hundred and seven dollars and ninety cents.
Speaker 1: And that's in twenty seventeen dollars. And here's the big thing.
Speaker 1: They called it unsinkable. Spoiler really got to follow through
Speaker 1: with that kind of promise. You know, they were all
Speaker 1: they were so, so very wrong. And here lies the
Speaker 1: kernel of today's episode. K E R in Yale kernel.
Speaker 1: Let's do it. Commercial break and we are back, as
Speaker 1: you know, well as we make very few assumptions on
Speaker 1: this show, but for this we're just going to assume
Speaker 1: that everyone knows that the Titanic is indeed sinkable and sank.
Speaker 1: What you may not know is the true story of
Speaker 1: how this disaster occurs. We're gonna set the scene for
Speaker 1: you and walk through this pretty quickly, hopefully, and we're
Speaker 1: relying a lot on some excellent work by our colleagues
Speaker 1: at how Stuff Works website on their article how the
Speaker 1: Titanic Worked, which you can read for more information. Things
Speaker 1: are eventually going to get crazy, right, yes, cool? The
Speaker 1: ship sets sail from its launching site in Belfast to Southampton,
Speaker 1: England in April of nineteen twelve. Titanic picked up its
Speaker 1: passengers from England, it moved along to France and then
Speaker 1: to Queenstown, Ireland to get the rest. Collectively, there were
Speaker 1: about two thousand, two hundred and eight passengers and eight
Speaker 1: hundred ninety nine officers and crew. So, going back to
Speaker 1: the class system we mentioned earlier, there were three hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty nine first class travelers, several of whom were
Speaker 1: titans of industry, the giants of industry, so I don't
Speaker 1: say tighten all the time, two hundred and eighty five
Speaker 1: second class travelers and seven hundred and ten third class travelers.
Speaker 1: So let's break down some of these classes really fast.
Speaker 1: Let's look at the cream of the crop of that
Speaker 1: first class. We're talking primarily wealthy industrialists and the people
Speaker 1: that they call their families hopefully actually their families, their entourages,
Speaker 1: perhaps sure, their personal servants. And among these people were
Speaker 1: well too well known John Jacob Astor, the fourth of
Speaker 1: the Astor family that you may have heard of before
Speaker 1: on this show, one of these wealthy families that made
Speaker 1: their money on what ben opium? Opium, not all of it,
Speaker 1: but a lot of it exactly. And then JP Morgan
Speaker 1: another name that you have heard before, undoubtedly, And mister
Speaker 1: Morgan was forced to cancel his passage due to insert
Speaker 1: reason here. There are so many different reasons that have
Speaker 1: been given for him having to cancel. He says one thing,
Speaker 1: other people see him doing other things. Will explore it
Speaker 1: a little later. Among the second class passengers were businessmen,
Speaker 1: members of the clergy. There were also teachers and a
Speaker 1: chauffeur who were traveling second class and then third class
Speaker 1: or steerage. The part where who was that actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
Speaker 1: That's where he would have been. Yep, the in the
Speaker 1: Titanic film. First class tickets were pretty expensive, round twenty
Speaker 1: five to forty five hundred dollars. That's between forty four
Speaker 1: thousand and a little over eighty thousand today. Whoa an
Speaker 1: eighty thousand dollars ticket? Now, granted that's top of the line. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you essentially have an apartment on the sea
Speaker 1: at that point. Yeah, but then you look at the
Speaker 1: third class ticket and it's going to be obtained for
Speaker 1: around thirty five dollars at the time, or six hundred dollars. Now, wow,
Speaker 1: it's selling. We're qvcing this for which one? For the
Speaker 1: third class? The steerage six hundred, six hundred bucks today's dollars.
Speaker 1: But no, I know, but I was saying, like, you know,
Speaker 1: even for today's dollars, if I'm paying six hundred, I
Speaker 1: would expect more than steerage. Yeah, but six hundred dollars
Speaker 1: to how many day crews? You know, you're talking multiple
Speaker 1: days a ship. It's not like all that stuff. But
Speaker 1: let me also point out that for that ticket, I
Speaker 1: don't know if we have this cer notes, but it
Speaker 1: is true that the conditions did radically differ. There were
Speaker 1: two bathtubs for everybody in third class, like two bathtubs
Speaker 1: for seven hundred people. But that's also where all the
Speaker 1: sweet Irish dancing took place. Yes, if we are, if
Speaker 1: we are, to believe the excellent documentary by James Cameron. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and all right, so fast forward. It's April fourteenth, nineteen twelve,
Speaker 1: third day of the voyage. The water is around twenty
Speaker 1: eight degrees fahrenheit. That's very cold. It's dangerously cold if
Speaker 1: you're out in the open ocean. Around noon of that day,
Speaker 1: the Titanic's Marconi wireless operators, they had a Marconi radio,
Speaker 1: very cutting edge at this time, but also very new technology,
Speaker 1: they received the first of what would be a total
Speaker 1: of four cautionary messages about large ice floes ahead. They
Speaker 1: got a second message of five to thirty five from
Speaker 1: a ship that reported three icebergs just nineteen miles north
Speaker 1: of Titanic's path and just one hour before the collision.
Speaker 1: Vessel named the Californian message the Titanic, we are stopped
Speaker 1: and surrounded by ice. And apparently the person who was
Speaker 1: manning the Marconi Whi's what they called it at that time,
Speaker 1: person who was manning the Marconi on the Titanic replied,
Speaker 1: shut up, I am busy. I am working Cape race
Speaker 1: the captain and Captain Smith wasn't worried about icebergs. After all,
Speaker 1: he was piloting a mass or captaining rather a massive
Speaker 1: steel behemoth. Instead, the story goes, he was concerned about
Speaker 1: shattering speed records set by other massive maritime behemoths. H
Speaker 1: I can imagine that, taking your mind off of what's
Speaker 1: around you and just focusing on the instrumentation going on.
Speaker 1: And he tried to be you know, he tried to
Speaker 1: be responsible at is his job. So he told an
Speaker 1: officer named Lyteler, who was stationed on the captain's bridge,
Speaker 1: that if the night became too hazy, he should be
Speaker 1: alerted immediately and they would slow the ship's speed. But
Speaker 1: the night was clear, and so the Titanic sped on.
Speaker 1: There were two officers, won by the name of Frederick Fleet,
Speaker 1: the other Reginald Lee, who were in the observation port.
Speaker 1: Fleet was getting to the end of his shift when
Speaker 1: he saw the iceberg and said I So they sounded
Speaker 1: the alarm, and they called down to the bridge, and
Speaker 1: a full thirty seven seconds passed before the first officer,
Speaker 1: William M. Murdoch shut off the engines, dropped the watertight
Speaker 1: doors to the bottom compartments, because the ship was made
Speaker 1: up of these different compartments that were able to flood
Speaker 1: and keep the water from spreading elsewhere. And that's a
Speaker 1: big issue that led to the ultimate sinking of the ship,
Speaker 1: was that these things did not work as expected. So
Speaker 1: he killed the engines, shut the doors, and turned the
Speaker 1: ship away from its front end so that the iceberg too.
Speaker 1: They took the hit on the side of the ship
Speaker 1: right right. They did not have enough time to make
Speaker 1: a complete stop or even to turn away. Stopping the
Speaker 1: ship would have required a half mile in this iceberg
Speaker 1: was nine hundred feet from the ship. That's that oh
Speaker 1: no moment if you're in your car and you're in
Speaker 1: traffic or something and you realize you have to stop,
Speaker 1: but oh, I'm too close to fully apply the brakes here.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to go to the side of this
Speaker 1: vehicle or something. Yeah, And I mean what ended up
Speaker 1: happening was the iceberg just kind of shredded the side
Speaker 1: of the ship. It's dragged along the edge of it, right,
Speaker 1: creating a huge scar that just hemorrhaged, you know, and
Speaker 1: for a few minutes, it looked like their last second
Speaker 1: maneuver may have worked. From the surface, the ship appeared
Speaker 1: to have missed the iceberg, but underneath, whereas we know,
Speaker 1: icebergs are much larger. Right, protruding fragment of ice ripped
Speaker 1: a hole through the Titanic's hull, just like a null said,
Speaker 1: if the ship was shuddering or showing initial irregularities in movement,
Speaker 1: it was subtle and went undetected or excused as the
Speaker 1: heavy groaning machinery. When Captain Smith surveyed the flood damage,
Speaker 1: he and a film named Thomas Andrews said the hole
Speaker 1: must be nearly three hundred feet wide, but in reality
Speaker 1: it was a tear smaller. It was smaller. It was
Speaker 1: like six lacerations about three and a half square feet.
Speaker 1: But not only did the captain's navigation attempt not work,
Speaker 1: it made things worse. It moved the Titanic from the
Speaker 1: sturdiest place to withstand the impact to the most vulnerable point,
Speaker 1: and even the smallest gash caused these terrible results. So
Speaker 1: earlier we mentioned how the compartments could close right these
Speaker 1: watertight things to prevent the spread of floodwater. Five of
Speaker 1: the ship's compartments had already begun to flood, and Captain
Speaker 1: Smith said the ship was going to sink. Unquestionably, we
Speaker 1: have He predicted about an hour or an hour and
Speaker 1: a half left before it would slip to the bottom
Speaker 1: of the Atlantic. And here's the thing. The Titanic didn't
Speaker 1: just sink. There are reports from my witnesses that testified
Speaker 1: that it actually broke completely in half. The science actually
Speaker 1: supports these accounts. You see the middle of the ship
Speaker 1: that you've got all the stress of the water filled
Speaker 1: compartments that we're talking about, right, that's a ton of weight.
Speaker 1: And as one of the like ends began to keel
Speaker 1: out of the water like come up and rise, you've
Speaker 1: got all that weight in the center and it just
Speaker 1: broke the thing in half. There's so much pressure there.
Speaker 1: The stress reached around thirty five hundred pounds per square
Speaker 1: inch on the boat deck itself, and that's fifty percent
Speaker 1: more stress than this whole ship was meant to take.
Speaker 1: There were plenty of life jackets to go around, that's
Speaker 1: the good news. They were built of cork, which is weird,
Speaker 1: but not so weird back then, one would hope. However,
Speaker 1: there was of the two thousand, two hundred and eight
Speaker 1: passengers and the almost nine hundred crew members, it was
Speaker 1: room for only eleven hundred and seventy six for them
Speaker 1: in the lifeboats. At twelve twenty five am, so April fifteenth, now,
Speaker 1: the captain gave the crew orders to start. We're in
Speaker 1: the lifeboats, leading the first class passengers to the boat deck. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they were when Billy Zane kicked that little girl
Speaker 1: off the lifeboat. I remember, was that Billy's Billy Zane? Yeah? No,
Speaker 1: not not the disparage, but I mean Billy Zane, the
Speaker 1: actor playing a a jerky first class passenger who was
Speaker 1: Rose's original love interest, but as it turned out, the
Speaker 1: scrappy young lad Leonardo Dicafrio won her heart at least
Speaker 1: at least well, no, I think she was in love
Speaker 1: with them and died she was in love with Is
Speaker 1: okay to spoilt Titana? I think? So? My god, that's
Speaker 1: sort of like spoiling the assassination of a Ramwick, right, right?
Speaker 1: So there were fourteen lifeboats that could carry sixty five people,
Speaker 1: to emergency sea boats that could carry thirty five people,
Speaker 1: and four collapsible boats that could carry forty nine people.
Speaker 1: By two am, all these boats have been lowered, half
Speaker 1: of the ship's passenger and crew still remained. And that
Speaker 1: part from the film is a true worry. The band
Speaker 1: did play on as the ship sank. Those folks have
Speaker 1: some real they have real spine, they have a lot
Speaker 1: of sand. Yeah. I'm trying to think of a family
Speaker 1: friendly way to say, yeah, that's what it's gonna go.
Speaker 1: At first, actually, they played the song of choice. They
Speaker 1: played if this is ever in a very bizarre macabre
Speaker 1: trivia game for you. The song of choice was Nearer
Speaker 1: my God to Thee, which is a old hymn. When
Speaker 1: a ship called the Carpathia arrived to rescue survivors, they
Speaker 1: found a floating disaster. You know. Lifeboats are adrift, passengers
Speaker 1: are shivering to death, surely deeply traumatized. The ship got
Speaker 1: fourteen boats and seven hundred and twelve survivors, which means
Speaker 1: more than fifteen hundred passengers and crew were dead. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure maybe not that specifically, but you know, regulations
Speaker 1: now would require you not to book more people than
Speaker 1: you have safety equipment for, right, I mean, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that pretty big oversight, you know. Ye, people buy tickets
Speaker 1: with that, you know, six hundred dollars inflated ticket value
Speaker 1: price for that low level. Also, that's where the flooding
Speaker 1: happened too, was down in steerage, and they were, you know,
Speaker 1: having to deal with that, and then they get up
Speaker 1: top escape only to realize that they are doomed. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Apparently the third class passengers were not allowed up until
Speaker 1: the first and class at first and second class passengers
Speaker 1: have been accounted for, which is just disgusting. Every time,
Speaker 1: every time I think I've got a handle on humanity's
Speaker 1: dark potential, man, something like this happens. This show is
Speaker 1: changing me. Yeah. Yeah, Well, there's something to be said
Speaker 1: about cruising in a place where if you do fall
Speaker 1: into the water, it's over pretty quickly like that. I
Speaker 1: don't know that a bad idea. Yeah, just seems like
Speaker 1: a really bad idea unless you've got like contingency upon contingency,
Speaker 1: you know. But then also, you know, this is the
Speaker 1: top of the line. It's best in class ship, right
Speaker 1: right right, but apparently not unbreakable or UNA. So that's
Speaker 1: the official story. It's a tremendous loss of life, financial catastrophe,
Speaker 1: a cultural catastrophe. The Titanic will spend almost a century
Speaker 1: rotting at the bottom of the ocean, creating, you know,
Speaker 1: a new shipwreck ecosystem. Right, and that is the official story.
Speaker 1: But what if there were something more to the story.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets crazy. So, as with any large
Speaker 1: scale disaster in the modern age, we all know this,
Speaker 1: alternative theories about the Titanic begin to circulate in the
Speaker 1: years following the event. So we got together and looked
Speaker 1: at some of the most prevalent, uh, some of the
Speaker 1: most plausible, which there are a few that might surprise you,
Speaker 1: and of course the strangest. So what do we have?
Speaker 1: Not so fast, you guys. First we have to hear
Speaker 1: a word from our sponsor. You rogue. The first theory
Speaker 1: surrounding the sinking of the Titanic is one you may
Speaker 1: have heard, and it has to do with the global
Speaker 1: banking elites that sank their ship to kill off their opponents.
Speaker 1: And people who think that this is true believe that
Speaker 1: this was essentially an assassination of sorts a scatter shot,
Speaker 1: a wide shot assassination attempt on several highly important people
Speaker 1: in the banking world. I feel like there was a
Speaker 1: like a British crime show I saw where there was
Speaker 1: a storyline involving a mass murderer that was actually trying
Speaker 1: to assassinate a very specific group of people. Just killed
Speaker 1: a bunch of people to cover the tracks of the
Speaker 1: motive that make it look like an accident. Well, we
Speaker 1: know that people have bizarre plane crashes often. Um, so this,
Speaker 1: this then would be an act of terrorism. Who were
Speaker 1: they actually after? You know what? They weren't killing the
Speaker 1: purposely killing the entire boat. They wanted a few people, right,
Speaker 1: like like Nolan is mentioning, well, well you got the aster,
Speaker 1: the gentleman Aster, John Jacob Isidor Strauss, and Benjamin Guggenheim
Speaker 1: another familiar name you know, rings a little something there
Speaker 1: of the Guggenheim like museum and no that's m Yes,
Speaker 1: all were millionaires, and they were all opposed to this
Speaker 1: idea of creating a central bank, a private central bank,
Speaker 1: within the United States because it's gonna negatively affect their
Speaker 1: personal fortunes and you know, the fingers that they've got
Speaker 1: in the pies of the banking world inside the US.
Speaker 1: We hate that analogy. I know it's crazy, but it's high.
Speaker 1: Like have you ever seen somebody actually have their finger
Speaker 1: in a pie saw a movie back in the early
Speaker 1: two thousand. It's American pine. It wasn't a finger, right, Yes,
Speaker 1: you're right, Okay, the pictures, pictures, the humanity and the pie.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, I see, I see what you're saying.
Speaker 1: So these three men, in particular, according to this theory,
Speaker 1: were against the formation of the Federal Reserve. Oh, yes,
Speaker 1: the creature from Jekyl Island. Yes, so named because the
Speaker 1: plans for the Federal Reserve were controversially created in a
Speaker 1: fancy pants island off the coast of Georgia, the state,
Speaker 1: not the country, in nineteen thirteen. So it is a
Speaker 1: controversial thing, privatizing, you know, the central bank for an
Speaker 1: entire country. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The word we use
Speaker 1: now is quasi government. Quasi government. Okay. So according to
Speaker 1: this h JP Morgan and Rockefeller in the various franchises
Speaker 1: excuse me, families of the Rothschild thing. We're conspiring to
Speaker 1: remove what could be substantive opposition. Here's the thing. It's
Speaker 1: true that JP Morgan had a personal suite aboard the
Speaker 1: ship with his own private deck. If he could believe that,
Speaker 1: and he had a customized you know, living area in there.
Speaker 1: He was booked on the ship's maiden voyage, but instead
Speaker 1: he canceled the trip. And you may you heard us
Speaker 1: earlier allude to what the various reasons why what did
Speaker 1: what did you guys hear? Oh man, I heard all
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff. I mean I heard he said he
Speaker 1: wasn't feeling so well, so he was gonna stay home
Speaker 1: and convalesce. But he may have just stayed in France.
Speaker 1: Remember how we were saying how the Titanic left went
Speaker 1: over to France, then went to Ireland. Well, it seems
Speaker 1: that he stayed in the French resort to enjoy, you know,
Speaker 1: some morning massages, some sulfur baths, that the kind of
Speaker 1: things you do when you're a Morgan. Sulfur bath. Sulfur bath,
Speaker 1: it's like a bathroom with sulfur instead of water. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I am so, I am lying. I am I'm not.
Speaker 1: Are you lying because you don't know? No, I imagine
Speaker 1: I don't know for sure, but I imagine for exfoliation
Speaker 1: or something feeling if it's supposed to be restorative. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a time when people really believed in curative springs,
Speaker 1: so it was probably a natural, naturally occurane water source
Speaker 1: that had sulfurous content in the water. Smells of enemas
Speaker 1: going on around this yea, yeah, yeah, yeah, John Harvey
Speaker 1: Kellogg and it smells great in a sulfur bathroom and
Speaker 1: yogurt all over your parts. Not to mention the guy
Speaker 1: who invented graham crackers, that's a whole another, that's a
Speaker 1: whole another. I don't know his story. We'll leave that
Speaker 1: for another day. Zip block full of gummy bears. The
Speaker 1: whole point is that Morgan's abrupt cancelation, the decision to
Speaker 1: not be on the ship, seems suspicious at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we will also just a side note, this is
Speaker 1: so interesting, we will also do another episode in the
Speaker 1: future if you would like on the bizarre, strange origins
Speaker 1: of commonplace snacks and silverware and other seemingly innocuous products.
Speaker 1: You are absolutely right, Matt. This last minute cancelation, whatever
Speaker 1: reason he did, apparently the story is and there was
Speaker 1: last minute, if fueled speculation that he had advanced knowledge
Speaker 1: of the fate of the Titanic, And there are there
Speaker 1: are a few variations in this theory. In some versions,
Speaker 1: the three men on the boat were opposed to income
Speaker 1: tax legislation. Chronologically, that one doesn't really work out. According
Speaker 1: to other people, the Jesuit, for some reason, lured these
Speaker 1: men on their ship. We should point out that there
Speaker 1: is also not there's not a lot of hard evidence
Speaker 1: on this flin in particular, and while we do know
Speaker 1: that maybe plane crashes can occur, we know that there
Speaker 1: have been questionable deaths or air quote accidents before. This
Speaker 1: seems like it's asking a lot like who would who
Speaker 1: would bring down a ship that's worth one hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety million dollars to kill three people. That's exactly my
Speaker 1: thought of spending that much money to make the ship
Speaker 1: and only to have it, you know, destroyed, unless you're
Speaker 1: getting insurance. There's also like there's better ways to assassinate
Speaker 1: people easier, not that they don't rely on hitting an iceberg. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like a lot of happenstance going on air.
Speaker 1: It's like a Rube Goldberg, really is I mean, it
Speaker 1: would be brilliant, It would be brilliant, But I fear
Speaker 1: this is a stretch. Some of the other ones, though,
Speaker 1: are a little less stretchy. Well, here's here's the other thing, Like,
Speaker 1: did what if the Titanic never sank at all, that's
Speaker 1: a real one that I will. It's a real one, man.
Speaker 1: It's on here. We're looking at the outline with which
Speaker 1: I was not familiar. So we said earlier that there
Speaker 1: were three boats in this giant class, right, Uh, the Gigantica,
Speaker 1: the Massifania, the Big Boy, Big Boy, and uh huh
Speaker 1: and little Nuggets whatever their names are. Their official names
Speaker 1: when they launched were the Olympic, the Britannic, and the Titanic. Uh.
Speaker 1: What if some people argued the Titanic, rather than sinking,
Speaker 1: was the victim or beneficiary of identity theft. What if
Speaker 1: it was switched at the last minute for its sister ship,
Speaker 1: the Olympia. I just don't understand why you would do that.
Speaker 1: The Titanic is the big reason, Like this is the
Speaker 1: thing you're showing off right. According to the most famous
Speaker 1: proponent of this theory, a writer named Robin Gardener, there's
Speaker 1: much more to the story. Gardener wrote a book called Titanic,
Speaker 1: The Ship that Never Sank? Can you hear the question
Speaker 1: mark we put in there? There we go perfect? So
Speaker 1: this author looks at several other events and coincidences that
Speaker 1: occurred in the months, days, hours leading up to the disaster,
Speaker 1: and concludes the ship that sank was actually the Olympic
Speaker 1: disguised as the Titanic, and it was an insurance scam
Speaker 1: by the owners of the owners of the concern, which
Speaker 1: was the International Mercantile Marine Group who bought White Star
Speaker 1: Line in nineteen o two, and the controller of the
Speaker 1: Marine Group was JP Morgan Old JP Old ap Heavy
Speaker 1: j himself. Okay, all right, all right, So the Olympic,
Speaker 1: check this out, was the slightly older sister of the
Speaker 1: Titanic and was launched in October of nineteen ten, so
Speaker 1: a couple of years earlier. The exterior profile was nearly
Speaker 1: identical to the Titanic, saved for a few minor details
Speaker 1: when we're talking about stuff like the number of portholes
Speaker 1: on one area of the ship. So here's one example
Speaker 1: of Gardner's argument. Gardner says the Buss ships were built
Speaker 1: with linoleum floors, but shortly before she was due to
Speaker 1: set sail, Jay Bruce Ismay, the director of White Star Line,
Speaker 1: inexplicably ordered the floors aboard Titanic be carpeted over. There's
Speaker 1: something else. The motivation in This theory is that the
Speaker 1: Olympic had already been involved in a couple of accidents,
Speaker 1: and that this would essentially be an insurance scam. So
Speaker 1: you'd collect the insurance of the Titanic for sinking the Olympic, Right,
Speaker 1: but you would still be, you know, killing hundreds of people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you would essentially be killing hundreds of people for a
Speaker 1: little less than our day, our modern equivalent of two
Speaker 1: hundred million dollars. I mean, what do you think the
Speaker 1: value of a human life was in nineteen twelve? Just
Speaker 1: thinking the same thing. We should calculate that and bring
Speaker 1: it back in another episode. I think that's frightening. What
Speaker 1: is our value? Yeah? Oh boy, that's a good one.
Speaker 1: I like that as a title. Yeah, what is the
Speaker 1: value of human life? But no, I mean I don't know.
Speaker 1: I said things were getting a little less stretchy because
Speaker 1: I don't know captains of industry or monsters a lot
Speaker 1: of the time. And I don't think I would put
Speaker 1: it past a JP Morgan type to value an investment
Speaker 1: over the lives of hundreds of people. Oh absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can. I mean, in principle I can absolutely agree,
Speaker 1: because I mean, yeah, it would be harder to do
Speaker 1: if it wasn't like actually an active event when it
Speaker 1: took I'm saying, like, you can't just blow up the
Speaker 1: ship at drydock. People ask questions about that, but like,
Speaker 1: you know, but then again, how do you force it
Speaker 1: to hit an iceberg? Like did they mess with the route?
Speaker 1: Like what how would you accomplish this? Right? I think
Speaker 1: that's a perfect setup, nol, because we're going to go
Speaker 1: into theories about accidental occurrences, but I think within those
Speaker 1: we're also going to find something that could lend a
Speaker 1: little credence to or answer perhaps the question of how
Speaker 1: someone would intentionally do this. And just to jump in
Speaker 1: here talking about insurance, for you know, we're discussing how
Speaker 1: people are definitely going to collect insurance on this. This
Speaker 1: was a huge investment, right, No matter what happens to
Speaker 1: the Titanic, if something bad happens, the people that own
Speaker 1: it are for sure going to try and collect as
Speaker 1: much as they possibly can on it, right, even like
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter they in their mind. I can't say
Speaker 1: what they're thinking, but it doesn't matter how many people
Speaker 1: got hurt or died for the collecting of their insurance. Right,
Speaker 1: I see what you're saying yeah, and it is tough
Speaker 1: to ascribe motive without you know, hard documentation. Well, let's
Speaker 1: go into even less stretchy I like that turn less
Speaker 1: stretchy theories, the idea of possible accidental occurrences one and
Speaker 1: this is so terrible possible wrong turn. Louise Patten, who's
Speaker 1: the granddaughter of the ship's most senior surviving officer, the
Speaker 1: man we mentioned, Charles A. Lighthowler, claims that he told
Speaker 1: his wife a crew member turned the ship quote the
Speaker 1: wrong way and into the course of the iceberg after
Speaker 1: officer William Murdock first spotted it and gave a hard
Speaker 1: starboard order. The cruise Liner was operating under two communication
Speaker 1: systems that were in direct conflict with one another, and
Speaker 1: in twenty ten Louise Patton told The Guardian UK paper
Speaker 1: that a command to turn hard as starboard miant turn
Speaker 1: the wheel right under one system and left under the other.
Speaker 1: Because I would imagine they would have maps of known
Speaker 1: iceberg areas right or like, you know, if there was
Speaker 1: a cluster, they probably would have been charted. I would
Speaker 1: think it would be a little difficult because they could
Speaker 1: be mobile. That's true, but so but so the communication
Speaker 1: systems we're talking about here, there are largely visual and verbal. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: there were on these were on the ship too, But
Speaker 1: we have to keep in mind they got numerous warnings.
Speaker 1: There were at least four different warnings throughout the day
Speaker 1: leading up to the accident after midnight. So interesting, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they kept on. Maybe the captain was a bit
Speaker 1: arrogant speaking. I just said, it's tough to ascribe motive,
Speaker 1: and now I'm like, listen to this guy. Well, there
Speaker 1: are other things too, right, There were questions about whether
Speaker 1: or not the actual materials that were used to build
Speaker 1: the ship were possibly not up to snuff, or even
Speaker 1: a shortage of viewing binoculars, a shortage of an ability
Speaker 1: to view icebergs that had the potential to be a problem,
Speaker 1: which is tough, you know when you think about it.
Speaker 1: If that is true, if there were weak ship building materials,
Speaker 1: if there was a shortage of binoculars and a shortage
Speaker 1: of lifeboats, this is starting to sound more and more
Speaker 1: like some corners were being cut outside of the public eye.
Speaker 1: Here is the most plausible, and this might answer that
Speaker 1: earlier question about how someone could purposefully plan to pull
Speaker 1: an insurance scam. If that's what if that actually happened.
Speaker 1: Is the most plausible, or at least the least implausible
Speaker 1: that a coal fire either significantly contributed to or is
Speaker 1: directly responsible for the disaster. There's this journalist named sen
Speaker 1: On Maloney. I'm going to call you miss maloneium because
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if I'm pronounce your name correctly. Maloney
Speaker 1: is a documentary called Titanic The New Evidence, and in
Speaker 1: it he argues that a fire been smoldering and bunker
Speaker 1: number six, one of the ship's coal bunker boiler rooms
Speaker 1: of the Titanic since the ship left Belfast, so it
Speaker 1: was burning the whole time. And it sounds crazy, but
Speaker 1: it's true that coal coal has the ability to combust
Speaker 1: like this. Near that bunker is where the iceberg tore
Speaker 1: the biggest hole in the ship on its maiden voyage.
Speaker 1: According to The Independent, Maloney claims photos of the Titanic
Speaker 1: showed dark marks on the side of the ship not
Speaker 1: facing the dock, hinting at existing fire and then should
Speaker 1: never been put to sea. And we have a quote
Speaker 1: from Maloney for you. The official Titanic Inquiry branded the
Speaker 1: sinking as an act of God. This isn't a simple
Speaker 1: story of colliding with an iceberg and sinking. It's a
Speaker 1: perfect storm of extraordinary factors coming together, fire, ice, and
Speaker 1: criminal negligence. It was very game of throne. Still that
Speaker 1: it really stoked to watch the finale tonight. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I wasn't even expecting the fire an ice bit, he
Speaker 1: goes on. I don't know why he talks like this,
Speaker 1: but he just he does. I guess. We have experts
Speaker 1: telling us that when you get that level of temperature
Speaker 1: against steel, it makes it brittle and reduces its strength
Speaker 1: by up to seventy five. The fire was known about
Speaker 1: and briefly addressed at the inquiry, but it was played down.
Speaker 1: It is absolutely true that there was a fire on
Speaker 1: the ship. What we count as the newer revelatory or
Speaker 1: theoretical part of this is blaming the fire for the
Speaker 1: sinking of the ship once it hit the iceberg. Did
Speaker 1: the fire create weakness in the metal in the material?
Speaker 1: According to an engineer for the Geological Society Even America
Speaker 1: and Ohio State University fellow named Robert Eisenhei, attempts to
Speaker 1: control the coal fire and the bunker could have been
Speaker 1: the reason the Titanic sailed so quickly through an area
Speaker 1: littered with icebergs, So that would you know in the
Speaker 1: film they're trying to set a speed record, right, and
Speaker 1: like some kind of oceanic icarus, they go too far,
Speaker 1: too high. My analogy is not working. So the reasoning
Speaker 1: here would be that they're going that quickly because they're
Speaker 1: having an emergency. Essentially, there's a huge issue with this fire.
Speaker 1: We have to get to a dock somewhere and take
Speaker 1: care of this white possibly and to connect the dots,
Speaker 1: maybe JP Morgan one could argue knew about the fire
Speaker 1: and didn't go and to connect the dots further, if
Speaker 1: we're playing a little bit of a breadcrumb rabbit hole game,
Speaker 1: maybe the fire was intentional. To be fair, there is
Speaker 1: absolutely no hard proof of this at all. This is
Speaker 1: this is speculative, at least the JP Morgan's reaction to
Speaker 1: the fire. Right. There are a lot of myths about
Speaker 1: this sort of stuff that are becoming folklore. At this point. However,
Speaker 1: we do know that there really was a fire, and
Speaker 1: we know that this is not the end of the
Speaker 1: alternative theories because now we are wading into the very
Speaker 1: very strange stuff with even allegations of the paranormal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: did some man tell the future or somehow prescribe the
Speaker 1: events that would occur to the Titanic In a novel
Speaker 1: written in eighteen ninety eight known as Futility or Wreck
Speaker 1: of the titan It was a guy named Morgan Robertson,
Speaker 1: and fourteen years before the Titanic menace demise, he wrote
Speaker 1: a novel that had a lot of similarities to what
Speaker 1: happened to the Titanic, and it had to do with
Speaker 1: insurance fraud. Mmmmmmm. And they think that this guy predicted
Speaker 1: It was revised by the author in nineteen twelve after
Speaker 1: the Titanic sank, to make the ship a little bigger,
Speaker 1: a little different. Yeah, just like make it a little
Speaker 1: more similar to the events of the Titanic, probably to
Speaker 1: sell copies. And so still there are multiple purported similarities
Speaker 1: between the events depicted in the story and the true
Speaker 1: story of Titanic, which, of course war some of us
Speaker 1: will call to mind the famous narrative of Arthur Gordon
Speaker 1: Pim of Nantucket, written by Edgar Allan Poe, a bizarre
Speaker 1: coincidence in a very dark one where Poe writes a
Speaker 1: story about some people lost at sea and survival cannibalism,
Speaker 1: and then later something very much like that happens. And
Speaker 1: don't you spoil that post story for me. I think
Speaker 1: Poe did a good job of spoiling it himself. What
Speaker 1: are you saying. I mean, it's just not my favorite
Speaker 1: of his story. He's following him a hack. No, no,
Speaker 1: just so you know, in Robertson's tale Futility, Yeah, one
Speaker 1: of the main characters or one of the characters gets
Speaker 1: off onto the iceberg with I believe a child and
Speaker 1: then is forced to do some battle with a polar
Speaker 1: bear that is also making residence on the iceberg. That's
Speaker 1: kind of fun and terrifying. Yeah, but you know, it's
Speaker 1: a story that I would want to read if I
Speaker 1: was in eighteen hundreds. Speaking of Game of Thrones, is
Speaker 1: polar bears, zombie polar bears. It's gonna leave that right there.
Speaker 1: I have no idea what you're talking about. Not really
Speaker 1: a spoiler. It's just zombie polar bears. Okay, I've just
Speaker 1: I've been pretending to know a Game of Thrones is
Speaker 1: for the past several years. So Nat, please don't give
Speaker 1: me your disappointed dad side. I for one feel betrayed.
Speaker 1: Matt Matt's the kind of guy who would not be
Speaker 1: mad at you, but just disappointed, which is somehow so
Speaker 1: much worse. Blame parents right well, speaking in fantastic segues,
Speaker 1: there are a couple others that are They're pretty strange.
Speaker 1: This isn't so much a conspiracy theory as a paranormal stuff.
Speaker 1: There was another writer in eighteen eighty six, a British
Speaker 1: writer named William T. Stead who had a short story
Speaker 1: called How the Atlantic Mail Steamer Went Down. A mail
Speaker 1: steamer in the Atlantic collides with another vessel, shortage of
Speaker 1: lifeboats on board caused an enormous loss of life. More
Speaker 1: than a decade later, Stead was a passenger on the
Speaker 1: Titanic and he was one of the fifth around fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred who did not make it. Whoa and then the
Speaker 1: very last one which we saved. Because it's just so,
Speaker 1: it's so strange, and it feels more like creepy pasta
Speaker 1: or a campfire story. One of the mystical versions of
Speaker 1: the crash is associated with the legendary folkloreic Curse of
Speaker 1: the Pharaohs. An ill fated ship was carrying the mummy
Speaker 1: of an ancient Egyptian priestess that belonged to Lord Centerville,
Speaker 1: shipping it to New York via the Titanic, remember the
Speaker 1: whole shipping days of these boats still happening. To avoid
Speaker 1: the damage, the box with the exhibit was placed on
Speaker 1: the captain's bridge allegedly allegedly allegedly, and at the head
Speaker 1: of the mummy there was a statue of Osiris according
Speaker 1: to the story. Osiris, of course, as we remember, as
Speaker 1: the Egyptian god of death. The words inscribed on this
Speaker 1: were allegedly allegedly allegedly rise from the ashes and let
Speaker 1: your eyes strike those who stand in your way. So
Speaker 1: is it talking about the iceberg or the boat? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, we could do an entire episode. I would
Speaker 1: be surprised if our friends at suff you missed in
Speaker 1: history classes stuff you should know, haven't already done an
Speaker 1: episode on the alleged curse of the Pharaohs. We've done one,
Speaker 1: haven't we. I know, we did a video. We did
Speaker 1: a video, but we haven't done write it down. Guys,
Speaker 1: here we go, do do Yeah, So we have some
Speaker 1: great ideas for upcoming stuff. There we have. We have
Speaker 1: the bizarre origins of otherwise innocuous things. Kello Cereal Graham
Speaker 1: crackers shout out to our friends at food Stuff who
Speaker 1: delve into some excellent history and culture of food if
Speaker 1: you want to check that out. And then we also
Speaker 1: have the the Pharaoh's curse, so we hope that you have.
Speaker 1: We hope that you have enjoyed exploring these alternative theories.
Speaker 1: At this point, most people are the vast majority of
Speaker 1: humanity believe the official narrative, with the strongest other contender
Speaker 1: being the idea that there was a fire contributing to
Speaker 1: the disaster. The other stuff is interesting and it leads
Speaker 1: us to a bunch of different possible threads, right, but
Speaker 1: in the end way, what do you what do you
Speaker 1: guys think? For me, it remains a tragedy that happened
Speaker 1: because of a lot of a domino effect of things
Speaker 1: that were occurring. And maybe it's just I'm too deep
Speaker 1: in the official story, but I still see it as
Speaker 1: that way. Nothing has convinced me thus far about this stuff,
Speaker 1: although the fire thing that's the closest I would say, well,
Speaker 1: the official story also as corroborating firsthand witnesses in terms
Speaker 1: of survivors, people who were actually there. I think it
Speaker 1: would be amazing if somebody could replace an entire ship
Speaker 1: and disguise it. It's but it's so amazing and astonishing
Speaker 1: because it borders on insanity in terms of planning, and
Speaker 1: it seems very difficult. What do you think? No, I
Speaker 1: think it was those fat cats standards of industry, just
Speaker 1: like wanting to kill everybody for insurance money, and they
Speaker 1: knew they were gonna get a life boat. You know,
Speaker 1: they just colluded to I don't know, man, I it's
Speaker 1: I guess it just depends on who who holds the policy,
Speaker 1: like who specifically holds the policy to benefit from thinking.
Speaker 1: But still, even at that level, it feels you guys,
Speaker 1: remember that board game mouse Trap that barely ever worked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it feels like a level of unnecessary complexity comparable to
Speaker 1: mouse Trap. Even in those days, I mean you had
Speaker 1: some semblance of like, you know, sniper kind of equivalent
Speaker 1: of it, or poisoning or someone gets someone with a
Speaker 1: terminal disease to perform a hit so that their family
Speaker 1: can benefit. Oh yeah, no, that wouldn't get you the
Speaker 1: insurance money. But you know, what was the problem? What
Speaker 1: was the issue? What? You know? It seems like an
Speaker 1: awful you could get if you wanted to make a
Speaker 1: quick buck on an insurance scam. You think you do
Speaker 1: it with like life insurance for a human or like
Speaker 1: you know, like like building a gazillion dollar luxury liner
Speaker 1: and then arranging it to sink with people on it
Speaker 1: so to collect the insurance money. It just doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to add up to Maybe they've got into deep. They
Speaker 1: build three of them, right, and that is true. That
Speaker 1: is true, and that would be an equivalent of just
Speaker 1: under six hundred million dollars. But still, oh yes, that's
Speaker 1: our other episode. We're going to find out how much
Speaker 1: each of us is worth justin I think justin raw
Speaker 1: materials is probably the best way, you know, like our
Speaker 1: people ever gonna boil us down for copper. We did
Speaker 1: the illegal organ trading stuff, maybe we could we could
Speaker 1: figure out, like what would each of our organs be
Speaker 1: worth on the black market, and then what would be
Speaker 1: the lifetime value of us, like in like you know,
Speaker 1: slave labor. I don't know, jeez. Yeah, yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: that's a great episode to do. Check out the Red
Speaker 1: Market if you have not, if you haven't listened to
Speaker 1: it yet, but do make sure you're not listening to
Speaker 1: it while you're eating it. Is there is some very
Speaker 1: disturbing content in there, and most importantly, we would like
Speaker 1: to know what you think about these stories. One of
Speaker 1: the more interesting things to us, I believe in these
Speaker 1: sorts of situations is that so much time has passed,
Speaker 1: you know that there's a pretty clearly cemented concept or
Speaker 1: narrative that every upon which everybody agrees. But as we know,
Speaker 1: those sorts of things can be overturned often throughout human civilization.
Speaker 1: In a it's it's terrifying how often that can happen.
Speaker 1: We have to remember, this is a species that totally
Speaker 1: thought Troy was a made up city for centuries and
Speaker 1: then some guy found it and it's real. So we'd
Speaker 1: like to hear your take, not just on this, what
Speaker 1: on other maritime disasters of human history, or your opinion
Speaker 1: on cruises. And that's the end of this classic episode.
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Speaker 1: us a call. Our number is one eight three three
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