Tragic failure of deep sea exploration…Titanic.

0:00 Speaker 1 And joining us now is Michael Reese, who was on the Titan Sub on an earlier trip. Michael, first of all our thoughts and prayers, what was your reaction when you heard this terrible news that.

0:11 Speaker 2 Just broke you know, just to be perfectly cannon as a man who’d been through this. My wife and I when we heard the news on Sunday that the sub was missing and lost communication, we knew it would be a bad ending. We knew that, you know. We tried to say optimistic, We were interviewed a lot and tried

0:33 to look on the bright side of things. But this was a very well built sub and a very responsible company. But they were at the mercy of the harshest environments in the world. And when you start, when you hear one small thing goes wrong, you know it’s going to have dire consequences.

0:53 Speaker 1 What was your reaction to because you knew some of these guys, right, at least some of the ones that were on this Titan sub were on what the sho ship that led you out.

1:02 Speaker 2 Yes, I knew. I knew Stockton Rush, the founder of the company. He was piloting the sub. You know this. He was a visionary He’s the great American dreamer, and he infected us with his dreams. And as they say, he was a brilliant man. He was an engineer, he was a wit, he was a salesman, and he was

1:28 an excellent pilot. And that was it. He tried to do the impossible, and he actually succeeded, you know, ten times. He brought ten different voyages down to the to the Titanic before his luck finally ran out.

1:46 Speaker 1 What is it like down there? You were down there? What was it like?

1:49 Speaker 2 It’s an amazing thing. People love this part of the story that I got on the submarine, And even though I was filled with trepidation, and even though I was hugely excited about the adventure of a lifetime, I fell asleep on the way down. It’s a two and a half hour drop straight down, and he built you know,

2:10 the submarine on the inside is dark and warm and comfortable, and there’s nothing but blackness outside the small porthole that I dozed off and didn’t wake up till we touched bottom. And I know, tell you that is a way to wake up.

2:31 Speaker 3 Did you did you meet? Yeah, I’m Hamish. He talked to me a couple of months ago and he wanted to buy one of my seven twenty seven jets.

2:40 Speaker 2 Oh my he uh. You know that it attracted an amazing group of people. I heard about one or two people who seemed to just be record centers and I got to get there and I got to do this.

2:53 But most of them were just people like me, just people who loved the world and had kind of a boundless curiosity to see things with their own eyes. You know. They weren’t skydivers, and they weren’t people who climbed Mount Everest just to get a selfie up there. There are people who really just wanted to be places and see

3:14 what the world had to offer.

3:16 Speaker 1 Now you’re you’re a writer, right, You’re a writer with the Simpsons, isn’t that?

3:19 Speaker 3 Is that correct?

3:21 Speaker 2 I’d been with the Simpsons for thirty five years, and writers have a lot of free time, and I spend all of mine traveling if.

3:29 Speaker 3 You allow me. Did you have to pay? Yes?

3:33 Speaker 2 I did. I paid quite a bit, my w two hundred.

3:36 Speaker 1 And fifty thousand, that’s what they were saying.

3:40 Speaker 2 You know, candidly, I don’t know. My wife just kept saying I got a good deal, and you know, I don’t know if she got it for half price or for ten dollars off, but you know we all love a bargain.

3:55 Speaker 3 Well, and then if you bought life insurance since you couldn’t lose. I apologize for making a joke and a bad day like this, but that’s all we can do right now. And I feel bad for those families. I feel bad. I got to know Hamish a little bit and it’s very, very sad.

4:19 Speaker 1 It is so sad. You know your thoughts too, of what’s the future now of these sort of private endeavors.

4:24 Speaker 3 No, no, I want to know how much time did you spend down there looking at the Titanic and did you see did you feel like you saw something worth seeing?

4:37 Speaker 2 Yes, I’ll tell you my experience, which was a little off, which is you have it takes two and a half hours to get down. You have three hours on the ocean floor, and then two and a half hours to go back, and it’s limited to about ten hours at the most, just because you have to come back in

4:58 daylight so that your ship can find the submarine bobbing in the water. So you have three hours down there. And we landed about five hundred meters away from the Titanic. And I heard that number again today that the submarine seemed to have imploded five hundred meters away from the Titanic.

5:22 So correct, I recognized that location. But when you land there, you don’t know where you are. You know you’re you’re in the darkest darkness you can imagine. And we spent two and a half hours just groping in the dark, using our best estimate to find where the Titanic was, and with twenty minutes to go before we had to leave,

5:46 we stumbled on it. And you know, I got the Instagram experience. We took a picture of the porthole and the anchor we got I got to see the bow of the ship, and then we had to go.

5:59 Speaker 3 And it wasn’t you mean they were that disoriented with any They took them two and a half hours to find it after the lands on the bottom.

6:09 Speaker 2 That is correct, it’s you know when you we drop like a stone. We dropped directly above the uh the sinking site, the Titanic site. But there are in two and a half miles there are underwater currents that will buffet you this way and that, and your compasses don’t quite work right when you’re down there, and so you’re

6:31 going on maps and using just using common sense.

6:36 Speaker 1 So let me ask you, Michael, based on that the fact that they believe they lost contact at an hour forty five and maybe it’s catastrophic very quickly, you think it was just obviously an implosion that just happened so fast.

6:48 Speaker 2 I think it happened so fast, and you know, it’s it’s in the scale of things. It’s a large sub that if there was the slightest imperfection rat or something like that somewhere in the entire complex vehicle, that could have been all it took to make it implode.

7:12 Speaker 1 Absolutely, Michael Reese, thank you so much for being with us on such a sad day.

7:16 Speaker 2 Thank you, Thank you so much. BOBBYE