Cruises

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_06] Astonishing Legends Network

[00:00:04] [SPEAKER_02] Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

[00:00:15] [SPEAKER_04] Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Collari. And I'm Ed Vecola. And after all of that exhausting talk about sleep deprivation last episode, I thought we needed, nay, deserved a vacation. Something calm and relaxing, something maybe tropical. Good food, some entertainment, some drinks, something like a cruise. Except, let's be honest, beneath the buffets and Broadway shows, beyond the water slides and costume characters,

[00:00:44] [SPEAKER_04] cruises are hotbeds of truly horrific nightmares lurking just out of view. These floating cities we call cruises are just a menu of nightmares waiting to happen, filled with horrible people, aggressive diseases, devastating accidents. And that's just the tip of the, wait for it, wait for it, iceberg. Oh jeez. So buy a ticket if you dare. This week on Scared All The Time, we're taking a one-way trip to paradise.

[00:01:15] [SPEAKER_01] What are we? Scared. When are we? All the time. Changes. Changes. Changes. Now it is time for... Time for... Scared All The Time.

[00:01:27] [SPEAKER_04] Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. We've got a great one for you today. Ed has said words from the mouth of the man himself. This might be one of the best episodes you've ever done. Oh wow. So I'm excited for you guys to take a listen. But before we get to the show, as always, a little bit of housekeeping. First of all, if you don't follow us on Patreon already, we have a Patreon. It rules. Everybody loves it. You've probably seen pictures of the shirts, the buttons, the things that go out, the posts about the bonus episodes.

[00:01:57] [SPEAKER_04] There's a lot of good stuff on there and we're really proud of it. So hop on over there and join us if you haven't already. Ed, the merch store is... It's open for business.

[00:02:07] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. It's still going. I mean, I'm... Ugh. It's almost like they listen to sleep deprivation episode and we're like, let's make them stay up more. Let's make them work more. Because we've gotten a whole new slew of orders, which is great and awesome. And people have been posting pictures of them with the, you know, in the shirts or with the stuff or slapping stickers places. And... Yeah. We have someone who wore the shirt to Egypt. Yeah. Isabella. Isabella. Way to go. That's awesome. She wore it to Egypt and sent pictures in a sandstorm.

[00:02:35] [SPEAKER_05] And there's nowhere on our website that says that these are sandstorm proof. So hopefully it got through it. I don't know. Yeah.

[00:02:43] [SPEAKER_04] I think so. It didn't get shredded too bad. These are high quality shirts, man.

[00:02:47] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. I'll ask. I'll be like, hey, what? How did the shirt do? You know, I'll ask. Yeah. A lot of people post pictures of the cards. We send out... I mean, I send out these handwritten cards with everything. And a lot of people post their cards. So I have to be better about not... They're almost always different, but sometimes I'll redo some stuff. So...

[00:03:04] [SPEAKER_04] Well, you know what? You know, it happens. You write enough cards. It's coming from the heart. And you know what? Our hearts only contain so many words.

[00:03:11] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. When we get these bigger... When we get these bigger orders, my handwriting gets worse and worse as it goes on too. So someone's getting like the sixth or seventh card might be like... Remember in Primer? It's like, why can't we write anymore? It's like that. That's a reference for no one.

[00:03:28] [SPEAKER_04] No, that's a reference. If you haven't seen Primer, people, what are you doing? Go rent Primer.

[00:03:33] [SPEAKER_05] One of my all-time faves. If someone just heard that and then they went and watched it, they'd be so mad. I feel like it is like... It's kind of hard.

[00:03:39] [SPEAKER_04] It's a great low budget. It's hard sci-fi. Yeah. But I mean, I saw it in high school. I feel like it was pretty... So did I. Blown away by it.

[00:03:46] [SPEAKER_05] My dad and I went to a bunch of the filming locations when we were driving through Texas. Nice.

[00:03:51] [SPEAKER_04] The filming locations, for those of you who haven't seen the movie, are like a parking lot. A U-Haul. A U-Haul. A bland apartment building.

[00:04:01] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. And my dad, who has not seen the movie, was like, what the fuck are we... Why are you stopping? Why are we at a... What's this movie about? A small town library right now.

[00:04:11] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Yeah. This movie, you said it was a science fiction movie, but the locations are more like the Florida Project.

[00:04:17] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, exactly. So anyway, moving on. So we give that movie five stars. Did anyone give us five stars?

[00:04:24] [SPEAKER_04] Yes. We have some new five star reviews. You know it. You love it. If you listen to the show, you know how this works. You leave a five star review. We might read it on the show. If this show goes on long enough, we will read it on the show because we will have read all of them eventually. So we'd like to start with some new ones. This one I really enjoyed. This is a five star review from Ligaratus. Hilarious and occasionally existentially terrifying, which is exactly what we're going for. Ligaratus says, love the show.

[00:04:54] [SPEAKER_04] I've been binging the backlog for a couple of weeks now, and it's very funny and honestly, as a fellow 30 something neurotic, relatable. Even the episodes I thought weren't so scary were entertaining. Sorry, Ed and Chris, I love spiders, and I find funerary customs and historical accounts of necromancy and other instances of bothering the dead to be fascinating. Excellent. So do we. Also, thank you, and then in quotes, thank you for giving me a new existential terror to mull over instead of falling asleep.

[00:05:22] [SPEAKER_04] The quantum immortality stuff at the end of sudden death is now a top tier middle of the night fear, along with accidentally seeing the hat man and falling victim to one of the UK's occasional freak tornadoes, which sounds like something that might happen late at night in one of the UK's underground rave bars, a freak tornado. Keep up the good work, and I hope that you're holding up all right after the wildfires this winter. Thank you, Ligaratus. We are holding up all right.

[00:05:51] [SPEAKER_04] The pod headquarters is still standing, and we are here to pod into eternity with all of you. So thank you very much for the five-star review. Thank you. Ed, hit us with another one.

[00:06:03] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, everyone knows I can't read, so I'm going to go with this nice short one. It comes to us courtesy of an account called IWillDeletePlus, and it's a five stars. Subject to the review is, I follow you on Patreon. And the body of the review is, here's your five star.

[00:06:19] [SPEAKER_04] Well, not a lot of creativity there. I will delete plus. I hope you don't mean you're going to delete Frog Plus, one of the streaming options on our Patreon. I'll do that for them. I don't know who this is. Ed'll do it for anybody. He hates Frog Plus. But thank you very much for leaving that. And we'll do one more here. We've got Woke Up My Family With Laughter, five stars from Dinker Dad. Oh, shit. This show, by far, is the funniest podcast I have found to date for me. Oh.

[00:06:49] [SPEAKER_04] I honestly never laugh so hard. You can't stop with media shows or whatever. But the first episode I listened to, Monkey One. No way! I found myself... Okay, for those of you who are turned off by the Monkey episode, Dinker Dad says, I found myself rolling with laughter, waking up my family and thinking I was losing it. Wow.

[00:07:10] [SPEAKER_05] Wow. Now... You sick son of a bitch, Dinker Dad. Yeah.

[00:07:13] [SPEAKER_04] Now one of my favorite things to do is just listen to this podcast. I often have to be away from family and friends for a long time due to work. So when I throw you guys on, it's like hanging out with my buddies back at home. I consider you my brothers and thank you for what you do. Well, that's very sweet of you, Dinker Dad. We consider you a brother as well from afar. Thank you very much for listening to the show. I'm glad that our most controversial episode hooked you. Yeah.

[00:07:42] [SPEAKER_05] Mike Racine's also glad. Thank you, Mike, for helping us reel in Dinker Dad. I think I find so surprising why I'm laughing over here is that's the first one. So someone recommended our show to you and you were like, I'm going to start with the newest, which I'm like that too. I'm for that. I think everyone should start with chip attacks.

[00:08:01] [SPEAKER_04] It's a real, it's a real, you'll, you'll get a real good sense of whether or not you like the podcast or not. So, but thank you guys. There's a lot more five-star reviews we have not read. Don't worry if you left one. Ed and I have read it. We just don't have time to read them all on the show. So we will get to them eventually. And then last, but so not least, we want to remind you guys that we're back on our bullshit. We are back on our bullshit. We're back out there in the world on the tour grind.

[00:08:28] [SPEAKER_04] And we've hit two other podcasts that we want to draw your attention to both to listen to our episode and hopefully become a fan and listen to all the other episodes. So the first, if you missed it, is we were on Cryptid Cocktail Party, which is a great podcast established on the East Coast, Best Coast. Sure. And great guys. Funny dudes too. Funny dudes. They love a lot of good music and they also love monsters and stuff like we do.

[00:08:54] [SPEAKER_04] So we went on there and we talked about the time that the CIA used a local vampire legend to try to take over some territory in a foreign country, which was a story I'd never heard before. And really combined my love of conspiracy theories and monsters with a conspiracy theory. That's not a theory. It actually happened. And it's a crazy story. You can listen to hear me forget the name of a documentary that I've talked about on the show multiple times.

[00:09:23] [SPEAKER_04] Every single time forgetting the name of it. And I forget the name every time. But we talk about that documentary. We talk about the case of the Aswang, this Filipino vampire. It's a great episode. So go check it out. And then Ed, the other show that we were just on.

[00:09:38] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, we were on Perplexity, a mystery podcast, which was a lot of fun. And it also has a video component, which we rarely ever do.

[00:09:46] [SPEAKER_04] Or have we only we've ever been on something with our. Yeah. Kedra, who hosts that podcast, little did she know she was capturing video evidence of two cryptids us on the podcast.

[00:09:57] [SPEAKER_05] It's Chris and Ed. Yeah, we rarely are on camera. So we were on camera the whole time. And you can catch it on YouTube. Catch it on anywhere you get your pods if you don't want to see us. Maybe that's recommended. I don't know. But it was a lot of fun. And we talked about Satanic Panic, which I knew more about this time than when you told me about it. And I still was like, what? So, you know.

[00:10:18] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, we covered a lot of great material on there. I learned a new term for. Oh, killing yourself. Yeah.

[00:10:24] [SPEAKER_05] You don't commit it. You complete it. You complete it, turns out. Like a game. Listen to this before you complete it.

[00:10:29] [SPEAKER_04] Honestly, I mean, I didn't bring it up on the podcast. But complete is to me. Sounds worse. A challenge. It sounds. Yeah. It's like something you don't want to tell people. Complete it. It's like, okay, well, let me start.

[00:10:41] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, I know. You are daring them at that point.

[00:10:44] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. But anyway. So go check us out on those podcasts. Follow them. They'll be in the show notes.

[00:10:49] [SPEAKER_05] You can find those episodes in the show notes.

[00:10:51] [SPEAKER_04] And we have some others coming up. We're booking some right now. We're booking some great guests for later in the year. We are. Everybody knows at this point, I think. But we're fully on our every other week all the time schedule. Yeah. So there will be no more breaks. But we will be every other week. Which also means we are booking guests and recording episodes further out than usual. So I don't know when certain guests are going to be on. So we're probably not going to announce guests and stuff. It'll just be fun mystery surprises. And we'll tease them.

[00:11:21] [SPEAKER_04] But the episodes will probably be further in the future. So.

[00:11:24] [SPEAKER_05] And if you're like, I'm watching the news right now. And these guys didn't bring up these two obvious things, whatever. Well, the episode might have been recorded three weeks ago. So what are you going to do?

[00:11:32] [SPEAKER_04] If 9-11-2 happens and we're not talking about it, that's why.

[00:11:36] [SPEAKER_05] We'll do. We'll do an update.

[00:11:37] [SPEAKER_04] We'll put it in the housekeeping.

[00:11:38] [SPEAKER_05] Well, we'll add it to housekeeping. Yeah. By the way. There's a lot to put in the housekeeping. But it turns out 9-11-2 happened. They're working on a bonus episode for Patreon.

[00:11:48] [SPEAKER_04] I'm looking to sniff out. Yeah. We'll put it in the bonus episode. All right. Well. I think that's it. Cruise ships. Yeah. So enjoy this cruise into hell. Let us know if you think it's one of our best episodes.

[00:11:59] [SPEAKER_05] I was half asleep when I told you that.

[00:12:02] [SPEAKER_04] But let us know what you think. Because what you think is what really matters, not what we think. So let us know if it's a great episode or not. Let us know if you want more vacation content. And we will see you in the episode. Let's go. This topic actually comes to us via the Facebook group. I don't know if you saw this, Ed. No. But a few months ago, I did that annoying thing where I sent out invitations to join the group. Oh. I try not to do stuff like that because I'm self-conscious about bothering people. But I feel like we have a pretty good show.

[00:12:31] [SPEAKER_04] We have a really great community on Facebook. Maybe one of the last nice communities on Facebook. We keep them on the rails. We keep it on the rails. Everyone's got good vibes over there. And so anyway, I wanted to invite people. So I went on Facebook and sent out an invitation to as many people as I could that I'm friends with. Mostly people from high school and college who I haven't talked to in years since we graduated or whatever. And we actually got a good bunch of new members from it. I think we ended up adding like 80 or 90 people. Wow.

[00:13:01] [SPEAKER_04] So go join if you haven't is part one of that story. Part two of that story is that a guy I went to elementary, middle and high school with, a guy named Jeff, jumped on. And within minutes of joining, he submitted the idea that we should do an episode on cruises. Yeah.

[00:13:20] [SPEAKER_05] He might be the first. He might not. But it's definitely one we saw.

[00:13:22] [SPEAKER_04] His comment that we should do cruises is one of the most active posts in our group of all time. Wow. Lots of people said, absolutely do cruises. Go for it. Sure. So thanks, Jeff. I hope you're enjoying the show. Shout out Hershey people. You're the best as always.

[00:13:39] [SPEAKER_05] And I guess we'll push taking my shirt off to 12 more episodes from now per usual. Why are we taking our shirts off? I'm saying I have my fear of taking my shirt off.

[00:13:47] [SPEAKER_04] Oh, that's right. We had. Yeah, I'm sorry. We're going to have to kick that down the road. But we could take our shirts off on the cruise ship. I won't take my shirt off. That's the reason we're doing a whole episode about it one day. The first thing that came to mind for me in thinking about scary cruises is a topic that we actually don't touch on as much as we ever thought we would on this show, but movies. Oh, well, cruises is weird.

[00:14:07] [SPEAKER_05] There's speed to cruise control. Like Titanic wasn't a cruise. It was a mode of transportation. Same thing with Poseidon Adventure. I don't think that was a cruise either. I think that's...

[00:14:17] [SPEAKER_04] No, Poseidon Adventure was a cruise. It's a luxury cruise. Titanic was a cruise.

[00:14:21] [SPEAKER_05] Titanic was a cruise for the rich people. It was a cruise liner, but I just kind of looked at that. Titanic, in my mind, it's like you can't take a train across the Atlantic, so you have to take a boat if a flight is not possible. True. So it's like it truly is, whether it's nice or not, whether you're going on a cabbage boat or a White Star liner, it's still like it's your option. When I think of cruise, I think of buffets, there's shows, there's... Yes. Which also might have been on the white liner.

[00:14:48] [SPEAKER_04] There was music famously on the Titanic. Until the very end. Until the very end, as there will be on this show, we'll be going down swinging. But the first movie that came to mind for me was actually a much forgotten film, Ghost Ship. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was like it's cut in half. 2002, 2003. Yeah. I was working at... It's one of the lesser Dark Castle entertainment horror movies. I didn't know that.

[00:15:12] [SPEAKER_05] I thought that might have been their pinnacle. Honestly, I was working at Blockbuster at the time that came out. So I remember the cover very well. And I remember taking it home early to watch it and see someone get cut in half.

[00:15:22] [SPEAKER_04] The pinnacle was House on Haunted Hill 99. Their first release, I think, is their best movie by a mile. Happens to a lot of people. The House on Haunted Hill 99, it is a campy horror movie. And it's a very 90s horror movie with meta references and bad CG and a bizarre cast that's like half SNL people and half real actors. Okay. But it does have some effective scares. And there's some really weird special effects and ghost designs and stuff in that movie that I really like.

[00:15:52] [SPEAKER_04] The follow up to that 13 ghosts, less of a good movie. It's a remake. They're all remakes. Yeah, I'm saying. Except for Ghost Ship. Ghost Ship wasn't.

[00:15:59] [SPEAKER_05] That's what I'm saying. That's why I didn't say also a remake of Ghost Ship. Because I was paying attention to what's coming out of your mouth. But 13 Ghosts was a remake.

[00:16:06] [SPEAKER_04] 13 Ghosts was a remake. Also weird cast. Also some good ghost designs, but worse movie. Anyway, the first five minutes of Ghost Ship are the best part of the movie. As you mentioned, it is an entire boat of people getting cut in half by a very taut wire that is pulled taut by a mysterious hand. Very Final Destination style. I don't think it was scary enough to make me think I should never go on a cruise ship or anything. And I don't even remember the rest of the movie. I don't think it was a cruise ship. It was a cruise ship.

[00:16:35] [SPEAKER_04] It opens with everybody dancing. Oh man.

[00:16:38] [SPEAKER_05] I guess we're establishing pretty early on. I don't know what a cruise ship is.

[00:16:41] [SPEAKER_04] We'll have to. We'll dive into the definition of a cruise ship. Because I think Ed just thinks it's a...

[00:16:45] [SPEAKER_05] It's a carnival cruise. It's like the only, in my mind, Viking carnival. The Disney big red boat. Like these are what I think of when I think of cruises. Those are modern cruise ships. Correct.

[00:16:55] [SPEAKER_04] But the idea of the cruise goes back older than that. Yeah, we're going to get there. I'm sure. We're going to get there. The best 90s cruise ship part of me is, without a question, Stephen Sommers' Deep Rising. I've never seen it. Holy shit. I've seen Mercury Rising, which was a mistake. Well, that, yeah. Never again. Ed, correct that immediately. Listener, if you haven't seen Deep Rising, it is the movie that Stephen Sommers made before The Mummy in 1999. Something.

[00:17:23] [SPEAKER_04] I believe that was 99 or 98. One of those. And it is just as rousing of an adventure movie, but it is more violent. It is gooier. It's a monster movie through and through. There's a monster on the ship? There's a monster on the ship.

[00:17:37] [SPEAKER_05] Okay. I have to definitely watch it then.

[00:17:39] [SPEAKER_04] It is so fucking good. It's just one of those movies that, I mean, it's not going to win an Oscar kind of fucking good. Might win me over. One of those movies that you can rewatch every year or so, every couple of years. And it has Treat Williams basically. Connecticut's own. I didn't know that. He's a Connecticut guy. I'm 180 to 40% sure. Ed's never been more almost sure of something in his life. What I am sure of is that Treat Williams in this movie basically invents Nathan Fillion

[00:18:08] [SPEAKER_04] before Nathan Fillion existed. Oh, wow. He's doing what you think of when you think of Nathan Fillion. Sure. He has sloppy hair too? He has floppy hair in it? Yeah. He's the handsome, slightly not the smartest, but brave hero who's always got a quip. It's great. I love Deep Rising. And there's the end I won't spoil, but it sets it up for a sequel that still has yet to happen. So that goes on the list of scared all the time productions. Deeper comma still rising.

[00:18:37] [SPEAKER_05] We have to write it tonight. I was supposed to watch a movie tonight, but instead we're writing the movie.

[00:18:40] [SPEAKER_04] We'll have to put in some calls and see if we can get our hands on that property. But great movie. Definitely don't show it to your kids maybe, but it's a fun one. What's that movie?

[00:18:50] [SPEAKER_05] It's a fucking phenomenal movie. Phenomenal movie. But I think the boat aspect is non-existent in it. I feel like Alfred Hitchcock movie, it all takes place in a lifeboat after a ship is sunk by like a German U-boat. The film's called Lifeboat. It's just called Lifeboat. It's just called Lifeboat. Okay. That movie's phenomenal. Yeah. Lifeboat's really good. It's such a good movie. If anybody wants to watch a movie that has nothing to do with cruises at all, but someone was on the water, definitely find that and give it a watch. Yeah. Well, we could do a whole episode on both movies.

[00:19:21] [SPEAKER_05] But we're also realistically will do an episode about being lost at sea. That seems crazy. Absolutely. Yeah. All right.

[00:19:26] [SPEAKER_04] Moving on, people. The only other movie I was going to mention was Poseidon Adventure. We touched on that briefly. The Ernest Borg 9-1. The Ernest Borg 9-1. I never saw the remake. No one did. Like 2005. Not worth it. Wolfgang Peterson, who has quite a history. He does big movies. He does big, big boat movies. He did. Pirates of the Caribbean? Well, he did. That's somebody else. No, no, no. He didn't do Pirates of the Caribbean. He did. Lone Ranger. Not U571. Das Boot. Oh.

[00:19:51] [SPEAKER_05] That was his first big movie. I guess I thought it was someone else entirely. I'm thinking of all different director's movies. And then he did The Perfect Storm. Yeah, there's a belt in that. And then he did Poseidon Adventure. You think this guy would want to get out of the tank at some point? Yeah. I mean, maybe he likes swimming. Maybe.

[00:20:05] [SPEAKER_04] He also made Air Force One.

[00:20:06] [SPEAKER_05] So he got out for a minute.

[00:20:07] [SPEAKER_04] So he's got boats, planes. I mean, the man is unstoppable. He needs to be moving.

[00:20:10] [SPEAKER_05] His movies need to be moving. Poseidon Adventure, Ernest Bornein. It wasn't a new world picture, I don't think. Maybe Concord or something. But they had, I think it was the same company that did Towering Inferno. Yes.

[00:20:20] [SPEAKER_04] It was the same. It was Irving. Berlin. Not Thalberg. This would be well after Irving Thalberg.

[00:20:27] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, no, no.

[00:20:27] [SPEAKER_04] Be like his kid or something. I can't. Irving Kushner who directed. It was the same producer did all that. Irwin Allen. Oh, okay. We did Earthquake, Towering Inferno, Poseidon Adventure.

[00:20:37] [SPEAKER_05] What happened to Irwins? We had a fucking bunch of Irwins for a while. There was Irwin, there was Thalberg. There was Irwin Allen. There was Irwin Kushner, the director of fucking Empire Strikes Back. Maybe that's Irving. I'm thinking of Irving. Irwin Irving. Or was Irwin Irving? I don't know. Either way, we've, whether I was right or not, we've abandoned the IR beginnings of names. We'll bring it back. If I have a second kid. You gotta do it.

[00:20:59] [SPEAKER_04] I'll happily consider it.

[00:21:01] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah.

[00:21:01] [SPEAKER_04] I also would just say that those 1970s disaster movies scared the shit out of me as a kid because it was a parade of people who, even though I didn't know who they were because I was born in the 80s and well after their careers, I knew they were famous people. And it's just a parade of them dying. Yeah, stuck. Stuck somewhere, dying horribly, often off screen. But as a kid, you know, they'd be on TV and your brain's filling in all the gaps. And I could not. I couldn't watch them.

[00:21:28] [SPEAKER_05] And as a kid, I think you're not as susceptible to call out miniature work because it's real water. It's real fire. Even if it's at a 150th scale. Whereas an adult, you'll be like Thunderbirds is clearly. Yeah. That's a fucking, that's a matchbox car. But as a kid, you're just like, that's real. Yeah. In a way that I never felt that way about CG. Like CG, you'd always be like, there's a separation there. Yeah. Where there's something real about miniatures. That's cool.

[00:21:52] [SPEAKER_04] I read something once about how water is tough. Water's the hardest in miniature. Yeah. Because of the way that the ripples move or something.

[00:22:00] [SPEAKER_05] We saw that with the fucking Loch Ness Monster. It's like, oh, well, a small thing, the waves wouldn't be that size. So water's the hardest. But I think Pixar, I don't remember what, maybe it was Brave or something. Something you wouldn't expect. But every Pixar, there was a time when every Pixar movie introduced something new. Like that no one can do or no one can do well. And I think it was the texture of like water on rocks in Brave that was like, holy shit, wet rocks. Never seen that before.

[00:22:28] [SPEAKER_05] You'd think they would have taken care of that in Finding Nemo. No, because that's underwater. There's plenty of rocks above the water in that movie. I don't remember. All I know is that Shark Tale didn't fucking introduce anything. No, except Martin Scorsese voice acting. Oh yeah, I forgot about it. He had big eyebrows, big fish eyebrows. Yeah. Anyway, moving on.

[00:22:46] [SPEAKER_04] Moving on. And other than my experience with cruise movies scaring me, my experience on this topic is pretty limited. I don't know. I've been plenty scared on boats, but never cruises. I remember one time I took a ferry with our friend Pat. Oh yeah. From somewhere in New England out to Long Island. And it was like a big, when I think of a ferry.

[00:23:06] [SPEAKER_05] It's the Portrait Island Ferry. I've taken it a million times in my life.

[00:23:08] [SPEAKER_04] I think of ferries as like the ferry from The Ring. It's like a big, just kind of floating. This ferry is a fucking jet boat. A giant boat. And there were waves. And we were crashing through these waves. I mean, I don't know if that's the Port Jeff Ferry now. I don't know what you took. I don't know. But Pat was making fun of me for being scared. And I was like, this thing's going to fucking sink.

[00:23:26] [SPEAKER_05] Because the Port Jeff Ferry, you drive cars onto it and everything. It's big.

[00:23:28] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. It just, it made me feel like I was on an airplane in the water. Sure. It scared me.

[00:23:33] [SPEAKER_05] You take an airplane this week, the week of recording, and then you're going to end up in the water. They're still falling out of the sky, guys. You may have to, when we did Fear of Flying, planes stayed in the air that season. That's true. We may have to like revisit it now that it's no longer a pipe dream.

[00:23:47] [SPEAKER_04] And then the only other kind of connection I have to cruise is that one of my dad's many odd jobs he had when I was growing up was running a travel agency in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Okay. And that place ate shit hard because my dad thought the internet was a fad and there was no way people would ever book travel on the internet because you could never get a good deal on the internet. That's us talking about AI right now. Yeah. Can't do our jobs. So, but I guess that leads me to ask, Ed, have you ever been on a cruise?

[00:24:16] [SPEAKER_05] I've never been on a cruise. I feel like if someone right now walked in the room and was like, you guys want to go on a cruise? It's paid for to go on this cruise. I probably would say yes. Yeah. Weirdly, I think I would say yes. I get horribly motion sick. So I don't know if you still need Dramamine and stuff on something that big. I don't think so. But if there's a way to get motion sick, I'll find it.

[00:24:36] [SPEAKER_04] I don't, I mean, I've always considered cruises to be like floating condominiums sort of where they're so big that, I mean, unless you're in a major storm, I don't think.

[00:24:46] [SPEAKER_05] Which you think you can find if you're on like a real ocean. So yeah, but we'd sail a lot. You know, I was in a sailing team as a kid. Okay. And you know, it doesn't take much to, uh, when you're fucking out somewhere. On the water. Yeah. Like all of a sudden shit changes on a dime and you're like, wow, this didn't think this would affect us this much. Right. And so I imagine that the same thing would happen on, I think I'm, I worked on Captain Phillips and I remember there being like, even on the battleships, it's like, we just can't really shoot right now. It's too, even with, does it, even with Paul Greengrass is shaky camera.

[00:25:15] [SPEAKER_05] It was still like, it's just difficult to work. Everything's rolling everywhere. Yeah.

[00:25:18] [SPEAKER_04] I can't imagine that would be a particularly easy shooting experience.

[00:25:22] [SPEAKER_05] No, I've never been, I've never been. I don't think that there are, when I think of cruises, I don't think of them as a floating apartment complex. I think of them as a floating Petri dish, which is the only thing that would keep me, I don't know how good your refrigeration is. We got a lot of shrimp and stuff here. Like the food thing freaks me out. And I only know one or two people who are real into cruises and they're fucking the worst. My who's a piece of shit is shout out. Fuck this guy.

[00:25:47] [SPEAKER_05] And I guess I'll bleep the parts I need to bleep, but so he's a piece of shit and he loves cruises. So I'll go ahead and say names. We don't know which our family will know. The one that's always like, I'm going on a cruise again. And then there's also those people, I don't know, with like old people who are like, I'm spending my retirement to be like a year at sea instead of getting an apartment or something.

[00:26:10] [SPEAKER_04] I guess I would say I've never really seen the appeal of a cruise. I've never been motivated to go. I've never thought, oh wow, I can't wait until I can go on the carnival cruise line one day. I wouldn't turn it down.

[00:26:22] [SPEAKER_05] I wouldn't turn it down. My issue, the second issue I'll say before we get into the episode proper is I don't, I like to travel, but I do, do, do not like tours. And I do, do, do not like anything in a group where my cousin, Comic Steve, he loves that shit. Like every time he would go with his girlfriend someplace or going to go snowmobiling or whatever, they like would do a group tour. And he likes that shit. I do not like to be involved in a group. And I think any of that, like you dock at different ports and you get like three hours off and you can fucking break your leg and the boat leaves, all that shit.

[00:26:52] [SPEAKER_05] So I don't want to go there, but I also just don't want to be seen as like part of a big group.

[00:26:55] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. I think for me, it's similar to that. It's less about not wanting to be a big part of a group and more when I go somewhere, I like to, for me, the experience of going somewhere is the being there and the going and doing stuff. So the sitting on a big ship where you're just like seeing the city from the water. No, I think you go in. No, no, no. You go on land. But you don't, you don't get a lot of time and it tends to be guided. And like, I prefer if I'm going to go somewhere, I'd rather just go somewhere and open up Google

[00:27:24] [SPEAKER_04] maps and be like ice cream near me and see what's like, that's how I like to explore. Okay.

[00:27:30] [SPEAKER_05] Well, so now we are both right now talking about, I don't know, a cruise lines tour of the Alaskan glaciers or something. So we're, you know, we have these set stops. Here's where the ports are. Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. But you are a train guy. You like to travel across the country on the worst rail line in the known world. Yes. And, you know, you get a room for one of those days. You get to enjoy your time. Does that, there's no appeal, the boat version of that, where it's like, I'm going to steam

[00:27:55] [SPEAKER_05] ship to England and I'm going to like have a room, like a steam, whatever the fuck the rooms are called, you know, sun facing room and I'm water facing room and I'm going to write and I'm going to like go to dinner and enjoy meeting new people. Like that sounds interesting to me. If you're looking at it as a strictly mode of transportation where I'm not going to get off in the fucking Bahamas and have to ride a moped. And then anyone I brought with me has braided hair now. Yeah.

[00:28:21] [SPEAKER_04] I, if it were offered, especially as a mode of transportation, that's sort of, there's an appeal to that relaxing point A to point B, but I don't want to be on there with a bunch of people in Hawaiian shirts who are half drunk the whole time. And that doesn't sound like a good time to me, but you had the idea. Maybe someday we'll do vacations from hell and cover more of that. Although I guess that's kind of what this is. Vacations from hell part one, cruises from hell.

[00:28:47] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. But also I guess really all that talking was just to let people know that we're, I'm at least entering this episode with not really being afraid of it. So I might end up at the end of this episode, realizing that I was naive. Yeah.

[00:28:56] [SPEAKER_04] You might have, you might have some new thoughts by the end of this episode. We'll see. Oh, that is the other thing I wanted to mention. Although there's not really a great transition to it. So maybe you can just cut this out. But when this podcast gets huge, I would be open to doing a scared all the time cruise. Oh my God.

[00:29:11] [SPEAKER_05] The way that Impractical Jokers does a cruise. It's gotta be the most, the amount of work you'd have to, for potential litigation. I don't even, I just see, I can already see the headache. To be clear, not because of us. No, it's just anything. It's like, oh, well I'm only here because scared all the time told me then I slipped on some ice. That wasn't our responsibility. And now we lost the show because somebody didn't look down.

[00:29:33] [SPEAKER_04] No, we'd have to, if we try to do a scared all the time cruise right now, it would probably take place on that lifeboat from the Hitchcock movie.

[00:29:39] [SPEAKER_05] I think it would just take place in one of our friend's pools, indoor pool. Each person gets a ride with us on a dinghy across the pool and that's the cruise from one side to the other. We're going to call it an Olympic sized cruise. We'll crack open Miller High Life for everybody from one end to the other and call it a day. That's the kind of cruise we can get behind. The kind that if anything goes wrong, I can pull you with a rope back to the edge.

[00:30:08] [SPEAKER_04] Well, lots of things go wrong on cruises and the fear of cruises is really so much more than the fear of boat disasters. Like Ed mentioned, it's the fear of being trapped in a floating Petri dish or on a floating city with no way out. Remember COVID? Yes.

[00:30:24] [SPEAKER_05] We're all stuck on cruises. We're going to get to that. We're going to get to that.

[00:30:28] [SPEAKER_04] I knew one of those guys. I was feeding his cat. Well, you'll have to share more when we get there. Sure. It's the fear of being surrounded by strangers who you have to hope are all in their best behavior. And it's the fear that we've returned to many, many times on this show of very, very deep water and the horrors lying in wait just below your feet and the help that won't come if something goes wrong.

[00:30:48] [SPEAKER_05] That's why they don't name cruise lines like Kraken Cruise Ships and Stranded Boatworks.

[00:30:54] [SPEAKER_04] Well, the first one actually sounds like kind of a fun cruise that I might take. The second one sounds just like a bad idea way to happen. Yeah, you're tempting fate at that point. Sure. Lone Island Cruises. Some of these fears are ancient and guttural, but fears around what can happen on and to boats are the reason that cruises are a pretty modern invention. For centuries, boat travel was pretty miserable. The food was bad. The quarters were cramped. Unless you had lots of money, your experience was going to be rough.

[00:31:24] [SPEAKER_04] And even money couldn't do anything about seasickness or storms, which kind of reminds me of how we talked in the elevators episode, how elevators just were used for like grain for the first thousand years of their existence because no one wanted to risk getting on one. Exactly. And that's kind of I mean, people obviously have used boats for a long time, but the idea of it being a fun vacation to get on a boat and go somewhere is relatively new.

[00:31:51] [SPEAKER_05] Boats were pirates. I don't even mean pirates attacking your boat, which is also a thing. I mean, like you were either a pirate or you've been Shanghai'd and you woke up on a boat going to your new horrible life. Yeah. Like boats were never a good thing. No. They carried rats in the Black Plague. They're made of wood mostly, which rots in water. Falls apart. I read something once that was kind of like when you read about biblically accurate angels and you're like, oh, this is not how I explain to me at all. Cluster of eyeballs. Yeah.

[00:32:17] [SPEAKER_05] It's kind of like if you read anything that is the non sanitized treasure island style, like what a pirate ship or kind of merchant marine chasing pirates. Yeah. What was that movie with Russell Crowe that I never watched because it's eight hours long?

[00:32:33] [SPEAKER_04] Oh, Master and Commander.

[00:32:34] [SPEAKER_05] Master and Commander, which I think is probably. Another movie you've got to watch. It just seems so impressive. And back then it was long. Movies are much longer now. It rules. It doesn't feel nearly as long as it is. My buddy, Steve Vaughn, RIP God bless. I'm pretty sure he was the still photographer on that because he did a bunch of that guy's movies and the footage. His photos look amazing, but it sounded like a nightmare.

[00:32:54] [SPEAKER_04] Is that a Peter Weir movie?

[00:32:55] [SPEAKER_05] I think it's a Peter Weir movie. Yeah. Yeah. So I only bring that up because I had read something a long time ago about, you know, the unsanitized version of what life on those boats were, why scurvy and shit matters. Yeah. Well, it was every made up surgery where I had to like put a needle into your dick hole to like get rid of some fish out. Yeah. Like all this weird shit where you're like, that was their solution. It was fucking brutal. Well, a pirate ship was basically Skid Row in the middle of the ocean. Oh yeah. Yeah.

[00:33:23] [SPEAKER_05] But I mean, it didn't sound too different from like the Royal Navy at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Also had the same weird techniques. They just had to wear nicer shirts. I'll try and find that dick stuff and post it in the show notes.

[00:33:32] [SPEAKER_04] Please do. The audience loves dick stuff. Yeah. So then cruises proper as we think of them started in 1835 when a man named Arthur Anderson invented the modern idea of the pleasure cruise when he placed a dummy ad to fill space in his newspaper that he owned, the Shetland Times. This fake ad promoted an imaginary cruise of the Scottish Isles. But I don't know that this was so much a dummy ad as it was a sort of trial balloon to the public to see if anybody would respond to this idea.

[00:34:01] [SPEAKER_05] Like you thought he actually had this idea for real and wanted to see if it had traction and not the newspaper is not doing that great. I have to just fill this ad space with people who seems like they bought ad space.

[00:34:10] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Because just a few years later, the mail ship company that Arthur Anderson also co-founded, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company or PNO as it's called now, introduced... It's good to hide the oriental part in an acronym these days. This company, just a few years after he placed this fake ad, introduced the sale of leisure cruise tickets on board these PNO ships. Okay.

[00:34:38] [SPEAKER_04] So he floated this ad and then all of a sudden he starts selling tickets for that very thing, which makes me think... It's the original fire festival. He was a few steps ahead. Yeah. Tourists took to the idea and cruises like the ones he was offering became more and more popular over the course of a couple of decades, helped along by notable folks at the time like Mark Twain embarking on them.

[00:34:58] [SPEAKER_05] Well, he was already riding around on those... What the fuck are the... They have casinos on them. They had the big paddles in the back. The fuck are those called? Steamboats? Are they just steamboats? No. Steamboat Willie. Yeah, they were steamboats. They have a name. They have a name like from the movie Maverick. Those have a name, that type of boat with the big paddles in the back. Riverboat? Just riverboats? Riverboat cruise? A paddle steamer. All right. So we use every word to... Paddle... Yeah. We use every word.

[00:35:26] [SPEAKER_04] Steamboat paddle steamer. We're in the right vicinity. Yeah. But now I guess when I really think back on it, it's just riverboat cruise. Well, his... Twain's famous trip in 1867 was on a wooden paddle steamer named Quaker City, which sounds like a really boring fucking... Doesn't sound like a lot of gambling happening on that ship. We've named two... Or fighting. We've named two things after these people.

[00:35:46] [SPEAKER_05] Oatmeal and this boat. Yeah. So... Well, there's also the Quaker UN, right? I don't know. It's like outside of the real UN. It's like near the real UN where the Quakers who are, I believe, nonviolent, they... Yes, they are. They offer the ability for, I guess, other countries to come and find nonviolent solutions using the Quaker UN. Is that a real thing? Yeah, this is a real thing. Holy shit.

[00:36:10] [SPEAKER_04] I'm being a co-host and producer at the same time here. I'm looking this up. And yeah, they do have About Us on the Quaker United Nations office.

[00:36:19] [SPEAKER_00] Chris read the entirety of the About Us page and no one has the time for that.

[00:36:23] [SPEAKER_05] All right. So when I inevitably cut out the 17 minutes you just read from their website, what's the like three sentence version of what you learned?

[00:36:29] [SPEAKER_04] The Quakers work through the Quaker United Nations with the regular United Nations to try to achieve peace and justice throughout the world. Yeah.

[00:36:38] [SPEAKER_05] So pretty wild. I think a shout out Erin Wagner. I think she told me that on a show we worked on together.

[00:36:42] [SPEAKER_04] Anyway, in 1881, P&O decided to convert one of their ocean liners, the Ceylon, into what is now recognized as the first ever cruise ship. Oh yeah, after they hosed the blood and fucking pus out of it. Yeah. Cruises. Cruises. That means officially this first ever cruise ship, 1881, for those of you who are going to win at trivia night. That's the date you want to remember.

[00:37:03] [SPEAKER_05] It's actually tracks. It doesn't even make sense because that seems like some fucking gilded age. We have people making way too much money. And so you got to give them something to do. Well, they're exhausted after the wars. Well, this was in Liverpool. So I don't know how many Americans... Well, Liverpool was the largest port, I think, in the world at that time. And that's why they hate Manchester, like football teams. The two football teams hate each other because I think like Manchester built a new port that undercuts them. So now they're competing to be the most racist soccer fans.

[00:37:32] [SPEAKER_04] I don't know if they're the most racist, but I mean, there's... But I don't think they're... Are they known for being racist? I don't believe they are. I feel like I'm generalizing, but I feel like English soccer fans tend to fall into a sort of rough... Yeah, but not necessarily Liverpool. Not necessarily Liverpool. This boat was divided by class with the upper decks and nicer rooms reserved for the wealthy and the poor relegated to bare bones amenities known as steerage. Sort of like Jack in Titanic, like we discussed earlier, the passengers in steerage were often

[00:38:00] [SPEAKER_04] piggybacking on these ships as a method of travel and were usually expected to even bring their own food. So they had to pack whatever, you know, dry bread and a bottle of beer they could bring and that was it. Jack didn't know that. He just won the... He won the tickets in a poker game minutes before it left. Supposedly, these early cruise ships are where the word posh comes from. According to cruisedialysis.com, which is our weird website of the week, it is a website

[00:38:28] [SPEAKER_04] that promotes cruises on which you can have your dialysis treatment as you cruise. That seems... That seems rough. There is a history of cruising section on cruisedialysis.com that tells us, quote, On long journeys, particularly those between the UK and India, wealthier passengers would demand cabins that were shadier in the afternoon so they would be cooler by bedtime, which would

[00:38:52] [SPEAKER_04] be the port side going out and the starboard side coming back or port out starboard home. Oh, so they're always in... They're never really being beat up by the sun. Yeah. The abbreviation for this, P-O-S-H, posh, was stamped on the ticket.

[00:39:07] [SPEAKER_05] Oh, because they're too posh to be any kind of inconvenience, including just a warm room.

[00:39:12] [SPEAKER_04] No, port out starboard home. Yeah. So posh.

[00:39:16] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Posh. So they will take the port on the trip from, let's say, this place or that place, but then the sun's now on the other side when you're traveling the opposite direction. Yes. So they're never hit by any harsh sun. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. So they're too posh to be inconvenienced by even just warm weather. Yes. Like a warm room. Yes. But this is where the term comes from. Yeah. Which is why you would call someone posh because they're too fancy. They're too... We're saying the same thing. I know. But for some reason, you think I'm not. No.

[00:39:41] [SPEAKER_04] We're saying the same thing. I know.

[00:39:42] [SPEAKER_05] I'm just talking for... I'm just saying I understand.

[00:39:44] [SPEAKER_04] I... With all the words. Gotcha. Unfortunately, no one's ever been able to find one of these posh tickets. So the story might be bullshit. I don't know. Or apocryphal. It sounds pretty good. But it's a little bit of interesting lore. It's believable. It sounds... It sounds... It sounds kind of like that story... I've heard it before. You haven't heard this before.

[00:39:59] [SPEAKER_05] I absolutely have heard this. I think like... What was that? That movie that I hated as a kid. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has a song about port out... Starboard home. Starboard home. Oh.

[00:40:08] [SPEAKER_04] So then in the 1890s, German shipping magnate Albert Ballen had a vision for the kind of business that pleasure cruises could become and started retrofitting his company's ships to offer tickets to places like the Caribbean in the winter. According to Smithsonian Magazine, one colleague told him... Do you miss your slaves? Do you want to see them again? Would you like to hand deliver their forgotten items from home? Yeah.

[00:40:36] [SPEAKER_04] According to Smithsonian Magazine, one colleague told him... Germans will travel out of necessity, but they would surely not submit themselves to the hazards and discomforts of a long voyage just for the incidental fun of it. But Ballen persisted. Tickets sold, but not at the rate he'd hoped. And Ballen realized that part of the problem was that his ships weren't really built for comfort. And that became his great insight. They're pragmatic people. In 1899, he commissioned the first purpose-built cruise ship the world had ever known, the

[00:41:05] [SPEAKER_04] Princessin Victoria Louise, which was named by Ballen after the German emperor's only daughter. The Victoria Louise boasted a large gymnasium, a social hall, a library, a smoking room, a palatial art gallery surrounding the dining room, spacious promenade decks, a ballroom for dancing, a dark room for amateur photographers, and 120 unusually commodious first-class only state rooms, each equipped with elegant European furnishings, brass beds, and double light

[00:41:34] [SPEAKER_04] portholes that were opened when the ship was in warm climates. That sounds awesome. Damn, put that in the brochure. Yeah, I'm sure you did.

[00:41:40] [SPEAKER_05] In other words... You've seen an old newspaper. They put everything in stuff.

[00:41:44] [SPEAKER_04] They saved that paper. Type set one. Ballin' was ballin'. There was no steerage on this ship. It was rich people only. And it worked. The ship was a huge success and sailed for years. Until, in what might be the first cruise disaster, it ran aground while on a Caribbean cruise in December 1906. Again, according to the Smithsonian, the ship, quote, crashed against an uncharted ridge off the coast of Jamaica.

[00:42:10] [SPEAKER_04] Captain H. Brunsweg had tried to enter the harbor without aid and had incorrectly identified the Plum Point Lighthouse for the lighthouse at the port he was due at, the Port Royal Lighthouse. To make matters worse, the shape of the seabed off Jamaica had been changed by a recent volcanic eruption, so the charts the captain depended on were wrong. Now, no one died. And everyone was rescued by the following morning.

[00:42:34] [SPEAKER_04] But that didn't stop the captain from being maybe one of the most overdramatic men in cruise ship history, from retreating to his cabin and blowing his brains out for causing the accident. Okay. I know captains... I think he had his other stuff going on. I know captains are supposed to go down with the ship, but even cruise company executives at this time were pretty baffled by Brunsweg's behavior. One of them's quoted as saying, quote, I cannot account for his act except on the theory that

[00:43:02] [SPEAKER_04] his pride was crushed by the accident and that he believed only death would wipe out what he regarded as his disgrace. Because this is a maiden voyage, and so it's shameful. No. It wasn't even... This is a regular fucking... This is a regular voyage. You know what? It's probably the last day they issued guns to the captains, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I don't... I'm sure this man had other things going on because it seems awfully intense to say, hey, I'm glad everyone's okay. We're going to get the ship back out on the water. I'll be right back. Yeah.

[00:43:31] [SPEAKER_04] Just off in the distance.

[00:43:33] [SPEAKER_05] Fucking killed himself. Yeah. He had his own stuff going on. He shouldn't even been a captain.

[00:43:37] [SPEAKER_04] No, he shouldn't have. And really, if he knew what kind of disgrace was coming for cruise captains just a few years later in 1912, maybe he wouldn't have been so hasty because that's the year the Titanic set sail. Sure. You knew this was coming. It has to. The sinking of the Titanic is the jaws of cruise ship disasters. It's the psycho of boat horror. It's the thing that makes you never want to do the thing because of how horrifying the end result can be. Mm-hmm. And most people know the story of the Titanic.

[00:44:06] [SPEAKER_04] I feel like it would be irresponsible of us to attempt to do a cruise ship horrors episode without touching on the Titanic or at least doing a quick rundown of what happened. But since most of you do probably know the story. New boat, bad marketing, didn't have enough lifeboats, hit an iceberg.

[00:44:22] [SPEAKER_05] Pretty much. That's pretty much all you need to know.

[00:44:24] [SPEAKER_04] But I thought we'd tell the story from the perspective of the Titanic's second officer, a guy named Charles Herbert Leitholler. Who wished that they still distributed guns to them. Yes, because he would have taken himself out quick. No, he's a fascinating guy who lived through a lot of history from Titanic to Dunkirk and survived not one but five shipwrecks. Wow. And the way that he survived the Titanic, we'll get to in a minute. At a certain point, you got to start thinking, is it me? Yes. You just got to apologize to everyone when you get on board.

[00:44:53] [SPEAKER_04] I know you hate to see me here, but... So, Charles was one of the last officers to make the rounds on the deck of the Titanic before disaster struck. At 1140 p.m., just as Leitholler settled into his cabin for some much-needed rest, a jolt ran through the ship. A soft, eerie grinding that was barely perceptible. There was no deafening crash from his perspective, no shuddering impact, but he knew something was wrong. So, he bolted upright, dressed quickly, and rushed topside.

[00:45:21] [SPEAKER_04] There, he met third officer, Herbert Pittman, who had also been disturbed by the vibration, and they concluded that the vessel had hit something but could see no signs of anything, never mind the famous iceberg that we all know they hit. Part of that's because, in my research, I found that even though the Titanic in the movie, obviously the moon is out, and we can see everything. In reality, it was a pretty moonless night. So, once they scraped past that iceberg, they really couldn't see much of anything.

[00:45:49] [SPEAKER_04] I'm sure they had a spotlight or something, but...

[00:45:51] [SPEAKER_05] For sure. You know... It had electric light. I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson is still fucking mad about the stars in the sky in that movie, so... I'm not having a moon probably sent him over the edge.

[00:46:01] [SPEAKER_04] For those of you who are unaware, one of Neil deGrasse Tyson's more vociferously anal of the actual opinions and is a problem he has with Titanic, which is that it is historically accurate in so many ways, except Cameron got the night sky wrong. He didn't use the proper arrangement of stars for that time and place on that night, which he's the only man on Earth who thought about that or noticed it. Yeah, but it is of public record, so he could have looked it up. It's true.

[00:46:29] [SPEAKER_04] I think he had other things on his mind, like whether or not he was going to bankrupt an entire movie studio trying to finish the movie.

[00:46:36] [SPEAKER_05] I think if you made that movie today, it would absolutely bankrupt the studio, but it was a monoculture then. I remember there were girls in my middle school who went to see it eight, nine times, and it was three hours long. Every weekend, there was a... You could not get a ticket to Titanic.

[00:46:51] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. So anyway, Herbert Pittman and Charles Lightoller were on the deck and knew that they had hit something, but there was no sign of alarm on the bridge, so they returned to their cabins to await orders. Ten minutes later, fourth officer Boxhall entered Lightoller's cabin and informed him that the water was up to the F deck in the mailroom. Lightoller pulled on his pants, a pullover, and a bridge coat over his pajamas and went back out on deck. And at this point, he was convinced the situation was serious.

[00:47:21] [SPEAKER_04] But as we noted, he'd already survived a number of shipwrecks. Yeah. And he did not believe that the Titanic was going to succumb to the same fate that the other boats he'd been on had.

[00:47:30] [SPEAKER_05] Also, as I alluded to with my seven-word rundown of this event, the bad marketing I'm talking about is it so famously, which everyone knows this, but it so famously was touted as an unsinkable ship, an unsinkable ship, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And it had a fucking, one of the smokestacks wasn't even real. Everything about this ship was weird. I didn't know that. One of the, one of the. It's got like three or four smokestacks. Yeah. One of them is like not even a real stack. It just aesthetically looked better.

[00:47:55] [SPEAKER_04] Interesting. Yeah.

[00:47:56] [SPEAKER_05] So everything about this ship was about form over function, including not having enough lifeboats.

[00:48:01] [SPEAKER_04] I mean, I think the way that it was designed to not sink was probably why I know that they did it. It was built like ice trays, right? Like if one compartment fills up, then a wall comes down and keeps it from sealing the next. But they hadn't thought through what would happen if something cut through what the side of multiple ones of those. Yeah. Something like that. And that's what happened with the iceberg. Seems like a pretty big oversight.

[00:48:25] [SPEAKER_05] You probably just learn with bridge accidents is you learn from that. We're not going to build that way again.

[00:48:30] [SPEAKER_04] You could say they learned from the Titanic. Mistakes were made. Yeah. And not just in the night sky a hundred years later. According to Wikipedia, Lightoller then spent the next several hours filling lifeboats with passengers and launching them out into the dark, cold night. And he's actually the one responsible for interpreting his superior's order for the evacuation of women and children as essentially women and children only rather than women and children first.

[00:48:58] [SPEAKER_05] Well, if you didn't, they don't have enough lifeboats. You'll probably fill all the lifeboats with women and children before you even get to. So luckily he did interpret it that way. Well, according to some of the research I did. Billy Zane would be on that fucking boat otherwise.

[00:49:08] [SPEAKER_04] And I don't quite understand this. But as a result, Lightoller lowered lifeboats with empty seats if there were no women and children waiting to board and planned to fill them after they had reached the water.

[00:49:19] [SPEAKER_05] Oh, so that's dogmatic and terrible.

[00:49:28] [SPEAKER_04] It was going to fill them once they reached the water unless people were jumping into them

[00:49:32] [SPEAKER_05] from the deck. Water, I think the movie does get right. I mean, it's got icebergs in it for Christ's sake. The water was incredibly cold. Yeah. Like froze. You don't, you're not going to last long enough to get eaten by a shark and that shit.

[00:49:42] [SPEAKER_04] There's a, one of the museum exhibits for Titanic somewhere in the world, I forget where it has it. They have a tank that is kept at the temperature of the water that night and you're supposed to put your hand in it and see how long you can keep your hand in. That's a fuck. You got to sign a waiver. Yeah. I mean, cause your handle freeze. You should throw Felix in there and fucking make a man up Felix.

[00:50:00] [SPEAKER_05] No. Make him strong.

[00:50:01] [SPEAKER_04] I do feel like the jackass guys could probably have fun with that tank though. Yeah. They could find something to do with it.

[00:50:06] [SPEAKER_05] David Blaine's been in there for four days.

[00:50:10] [SPEAKER_04] Anyway, Lightoller's wild plan to fill lifeboats from the deck later aside, we're told that quote around 2am all the lifeboats had been lowered save for the four collapsible Englehart type boats with canvas sides. Collapsible's A and B were still lashed upside down to the roof of the officers' quarters. Collapsible D was lifted, righted, and hooked to the tackles where boat 2 had been. The crew then formed a ring around the lifeboat and allowed only women to pass through.

[00:50:38] [SPEAKER_04] The boat could hold 47, but after 15 women had been loaded, no more women could be found. And now Lightoller finally allowed men to take the vacant seats.

[00:50:48] [SPEAKER_00] I'm sure some women were like, I vote we fill up all the seats in here before you lower us down. And Lightoller was like, sorry ladies, you don't get a boat for another eight years. Now why don't the three of you go and enjoy this lifeboat?

[00:51:01] [SPEAKER_04] While loading this boat, Lightoller was ordered by his first officer to go with it, and his reply was a very British, not damn likely. Oh wow. And he stepped back on deck. While that collapsible was lowered to the ocean, two more men were seen to jump into it from the rapidly flooding A deck.

[00:51:18] [SPEAKER_05] Some see that as cowardice. I see that as the smartest move you can make.

[00:51:21] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. And this is where Lightoller's survival of this incident gets insane.

[00:51:27] [SPEAKER_05] His journal gets real wet at this point.

[00:51:30] [SPEAKER_04] All of him gets very wet at this point. As the Titanic began its final descent into the icy waters, Lightoller still had the collapsible B boat to get off the roof of the officer's quarters. So as the waters rose on the boat deck, he climbed to the top of the officer's quarters and using a borrowed pen knife, stripped the covers and cut away the ropes. And he was able to send the boat down from the roof to the flooded deck.

[00:51:57] [SPEAKER_04] And just as that happened was when the Titanic, I believe they don't say this in the research exactly. Fully submerged. They say it took a great plunge forward. So I assume-

[00:52:06] [SPEAKER_05] Oh, from the movie. You see it in the movie.

[00:52:07] [SPEAKER_04] This is where it broke into. Correct. Yeah. Lightoller turned to face the sea and dived in. And this is where his guardian angel was present and accounted for. As the Titanic went down, one of the ways, as we see in the movie, I think that many people were killed is- They just slammed into fucking shit. Well, slammed into shit, but once they were in the water, the boat going down created a vortex as all the air rushed out of the ventilator shafts and was filled with water, which then sucked people in.

[00:52:37] [SPEAKER_04] So that's nearly what happened to Lightoller. But according to a biography I found of him online, quote, He had started to swim clear when he was sucked against the grating of one of the large ventilator shafts and taken down with the ship. Yeah. So pause. You're Lightoller. You're swimming. The water is negative 10 degrees or whatever. Your blood's freezing in your veins. You start getting yanked by an invisible force beneath the surface of this water. Not his first rodeo.

[00:53:03] [SPEAKER_04] You're back pinned to a giant metal ventilator shaft getting sucked down to the depths of the North Atlantic. He said, not fucking likely. He said, not fucking likely. And as the water hit the still hot boilers of the Titanic. Now we got steam. The blast blew him back up to the surface. Holy shit. So essentially the water like insta-steamed against the hot boilers and he just like, like getting shot out of the top of a wheels blow or something. Oh my God. Flew up out of the water.

[00:53:31] [SPEAKER_04] He found himself alongside the capsized collapsible B, which he had cut free at the last second. That's where they can just pull him in. And toss him the water. As he was trying to climb into that, the forward smokestack or it's known as a funnel broke loose and toppled down just missing him. Wow. He crawled on top of collapsible B, managed to survive the entire night wet, frozen, and became the very last survivor pulled aboard the Carpathia when it arrived the next morning.

[00:53:58] [SPEAKER_05] That is a crazy story. This guy's life is insane. And thank God he didn't get steam blasted into one of the vacant seats on the women's boat because he would have to get out of it by his own. He's like, no shit, I can't be a man on here. Yeah. And he would jump out and die in the water. Sorry, ladies. This guy rules.

[00:54:17] [SPEAKER_04] I found an epilogue. Well, sort of an epilogue to Lightoller's story. I guess technically it would have happened before all this. Or no, I guess just after. No, it is an epilogue. So I found an epilogue to Lightoller's story on a Reddit thread called What's the Scariest Titanic Fact You Know? Where user lividad141 says, quote, Yeah, I bet. Like every other person in that war, he may have committed a war crime or two or three.

[00:54:45] [SPEAKER_04] Final chapter ends with him being ordered by the Royal Navy to hand over his sailing vessel for the Dunkirk evacuation. He refused and sailed over there himself with his sons. That's great. It's in the movie. That doesn't even mention how he started sailing around the world at like 13. Dude had an absolutely insane life, would love a biopic, but I guess Titanic and Dunkirk will have to do.

[00:55:04] [SPEAKER_05] I think this is why the Guardian Angel is hanging out with him because he keeps doing... Look, what he did in the war? That was war, I guess. But what he did when it's not under like that, they show that in the movie, the people who just took up like normal public vessels and went and tried to help. Sounds like he was one of those guys.

[00:55:21] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. No, I mean, he...

[00:55:22] [SPEAKER_05] So he keeps doing heroic shit and he's rewarded for it. Yeah.

[00:55:25] [SPEAKER_04] He's on... He's sitting at the right hand of God. Yeah, I think so. He's the chosen one.

[00:55:29] [SPEAKER_05] This guy should have ran for prime minister or something.

[00:55:32] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, he's got... And I didn't... Because I was researching cruise disasters, I didn't go too deeply into his life. But it does sound like there's a lot there if you're interested in this period in history. Charles Leithaler seems like a great chap.

[00:55:44] [SPEAKER_05] This guy reminds me of someone who's interestingly... I kept thinking of this guy and I'm not gonna give all the info. He wrote a book. But there was this guy who just hated communism so fucking much that he was... I'm trying to remember the three countries. Oh, yeah. He was like a Swedish guy or something who fought against communists in whatever battles. Then joined the Nazis after that war as we can keep fighting communists. Then joined the American army and fought with the American army in Vietnam as an old person to fight communism.

[00:56:14] [SPEAKER_04] What did the communists do to this guy?

[00:56:16] [SPEAKER_05] I don't remember now. But I won't put it in if I can't remember it. I'm gonna wager today. But there's a wild life story of just a crazy dude. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say killed his family. That's probably what they did. He couldn't go home. So it's like...

[00:56:28] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, there was... He was a ronin.

[00:56:29] [SPEAKER_05] We'll end up talking about him at some point for sure. A ronin against communists.

[00:56:32] [SPEAKER_00] The guy Ed's thinking of was Finnish, not Swedish. He fought in the Winter War first, which was a war between the Soviet Union and Finland, and then went to Germany to fight for the remainder of World War II, becoming a Vaffen-SS captain, and then eventually to America where he served as a U.S. Army major in the Special Forces during the Vietnam War. He is the only card-carrying Nazi soldier to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Make of that what you will.

[00:56:57] [SPEAKER_00] But as far as crazy lives of people who should have died 10 times over goes, I can see how Ed got there.

[00:57:03] [SPEAKER_04] Anyway, I started to scroll through this thread then. What's the scariest Titanic fact you know? Because that seems appropriate for this show. And boy, did it deliver. So this scary Titanic fact, it's not really a fact, but it's definitely a way of thinking about this disaster that is scarier than the way I just described it. This is from Sir Catsworth III. Oh my God, these names. Sir Catsworth says, quote, Going to sleep in a cabin on the Titanic, the floor is the floor.

[00:57:32] [SPEAKER_04] It's a wood or tiled deck a few feet below your bed. The reality is the ocean doesn't care about your fake human floor. The real floor is dark, cold, and alone over 12,000 feet deep. That's the real floor. And while you were asleep, the ship struck something. And your first realization, since you missed the steward's brief knock, that something is wrong is sliding off your bed and onto what you think of as the floor and into the freezing water.

[00:57:59] [SPEAKER_05] That's an interesting way to look at it.

[00:58:00] [SPEAKER_04] Now you are wide awake, heart beating rapidly, disoriented. You hear the sickening sound of tortured metal creaking, breaking, wood that can fight no longer. The lights flicker and then go out. You make it into the hall, but no further before falling to your knees as the back breaks. But you don't know that. It's dark, loud, and freezing cold. If you're lucky, debris will knock you out. If not, down you go until the water finds you and covers you completely.

[00:58:25] [SPEAKER_04] But not before a sickening, descending elevator feeling and pressure in the ears going down, down into the dark when all you were doing was sleeping. That's like some tsunami shit. People who wake up to a tsunami like completely covering them. Yeah. So that's a horrifying way of thinking about dying on the Titanic. Also, I love that it's told from like choose your own adventure first person perspective. Like you missed the knock on the door, the end. No, I immediately go back to that page and be like, no, I didn't miss the fucking knock.

[00:58:55] [SPEAKER_04] And then there's this fact from Rice Casper. Imagine giving up or refusing your spot on an early lifeboat before realizing too late that you should have taken it as the seriousness becomes very real. Maybe it felt safer on the big boat. Maybe you thought everyone was just taking precautions or overreacting. Maybe you couldn't be inconvenienced. And then the sinking realization quite literally that you made the wrong choice. Maybe you convinced a friend or a family member to stay on the deck. Maybe you had your kids with you.

[00:59:23] [SPEAKER_04] I cannot imagine the terror and guilt of knowing you kept your children from a lifeboat that could have saved you and them. And now you've sentenced them to a terrifying death that you have to witness as you die too. Wow. And it is that creeping horror in a disaster like this that is one of the things I find so upsetting about cruise ship disasters because they're not like plane crashes. There is an illusion of control on the boat. You know, the experience is basically like going to a resort.

[00:59:50] [SPEAKER_04] You forget about the natural forces that are at play if something goes terribly wrong. Yeah. And then finally, there's this terrifying Titanic fact from Bitto Brit. I often think about the time it took to sink completely and the terror that ripped through everyone aboard. But I often think about the survivors in the boats, especially those who left their partners aboard the ship, to row away, paralyzed with fear about going back and being capsized by survivors in the water, but listening to the screams in the night.

[01:00:19] [SPEAKER_04] Cold makes sound travel further. Removing a sense makes the others more attentive. Without light, without sight, the sounds must have been haunting loud, and especially thinking one of those screams might be the love of their life or their mother or father, I'm sure those in the water would be yelling for their loved ones as well. What if you heard your name from the dark, cold abyss? The stories abound afterwards, outlining a horrific and mistaken decision to not turn back. Death is terrifying, yes, but there was an end for those souls lost at sea.

[01:00:49] [SPEAKER_04] Living a life with the guilt, with the screams, with the loss of love, with the continual barrage of new knowledge of the ship's maiden voyage and ultimate demise would be years of torment, and that truly terrifies me. Okay, I think the survivor's remorse is a bigger fear.

[01:01:03] [SPEAKER_05] If you think of that as Rose's backstory at the beginning of Titanic, basically. And how does she reward anyone coming around to ask her about it? She throws the fucking shit in the water. What a piece of shit.

[01:01:12] [SPEAKER_04] I guess the moral of the story here is just be glad that you never got anywhere near the Titanic.

[01:01:16] [SPEAKER_05] Sure, yeah.

[01:01:23] [SPEAKER_04] Now, Ed, I think you had an interesting Titanic fact you wanted to share.

[01:01:27] [SPEAKER_05] My most interesting Titanic fact, I started watching a TV show earlier this year, called One Step Beyond from January of 1959 it premiered. It was actually Alcoa Presents One Step Beyond, and the tagline was like, your guide to the supernatural. And they're just really interesting episodes. The first episode's really interesting, but the second episode is about a woman who books a ticket on the Titanic, or her husband books a ticket, and keeps having premonitions that it's gonna go down, and she does not want to go, does not want to go,

[01:01:56] [SPEAKER_05] and her husband's like, stop being a little fucking loser or whatever. Like, I bought you these beautiful tickets, six months' salary, and all this shit. We're not not going, blah, blah, blah. And she just is deadly afraid of it, and she's just like, oh, my man said I have to go. Anyway, turns out, as we all know, Titanic fucking crashes and sucks for her. But the thing that's most interesting about it is the episode, the old shows used to do this, and I kind of miss it, where they would just have this thing where, like, the Twilight Zone would do it, this show would do it, other shows would do it, where they would just be on set and be like, this is Josie's bar.

[01:02:26] [SPEAKER_05] Tonight, we're gonna see a story that took place in Josie's bar, and then they introduced not just people, but, like, places. So at the beginning of this Titanic episode, he introduces this book. He's like, this is a book. It was written in 1898. We'll come back to that later. And then I completely forgot about it, and then at the end, he's like, you may remember it earlier in this episode. I brought up this book. Well, here it is. And so he shows this book, and it's called Futility, and it's a fictional story of a cruise ship that was called the Titan, which is described in the book as the longest and fastest ship in the world

[01:02:55] [SPEAKER_05] that is considered unsinkable. The cruise ship, the Titan, finds its demise in the ocean by hitting an iceberg, and the way the iceberg causes damage is very similar to exactly why it didn't work out for the actual Titanic. So anyway, he was like, tells all these things about their similarities, and before the RMS Titanic was even conceptualized as a ship, these are some of the uncanny similarities between the fictional and real-life versions. The Titanic sank after wrecking on an iceberg in April in the North Atlantic Ocean,

[01:03:23] [SPEAKER_05] and there were not enough lifeboats for all the passengers. So those are the same. I'm not going to get into the fucking dimensions. They were basically the same fucking dimensions, the same speed, the same accident type, and the same life-saving equipment they didn't have enough of. This was written in 1898, so 14 years before the Titanic sank. I'm watching the episode, and I'm just thinking, you're fucking making this up, buddy. Like, there's no way. And so I fucking Googled it. Yeah. And it's all real. And the book Futility did exist.

[01:03:51] [SPEAKER_05] It followed the Titan, which hit an iceberg exactly the same, in a similar part of the ocean, with a similar reason for why not everyone survived. And that's just crazy. And so he's like, thematically, the episode is about, like, this woman's premonitions no one listened to, but even before she took this fateful trip, someone else had a premonition about the Titanic, which was fucking cool. It was a cool episode. But that's my most interesting Titanic fact, is that apparently it was foretold that the Titanic would not survive this maiden voyage.

[01:04:19] [SPEAKER_04] That's awesome. We got to see if we can find the text of that book online or something and put it in the show notes.

[01:04:24] [SPEAKER_05] We could probably read the whole thing. It'd be shorter than me trying to remember it there.

[01:04:27] [SPEAKER_04] Probably, yeah.

[01:04:27] [SPEAKER_05] And if you're hearing this and you're like, well, that wasn't that long, it's because I cut a lot of it down.

[01:04:31] [SPEAKER_04] These Reddit comments, I think, speak to the central horror of so many cruise disasters, which is how relatively slowly these disasters take to unfurl. There's something about that escalating dread, about realizing how doomed you are over the course of minutes or hours that is particularly nasty, as opposed to a plane crash or something where the terror is over relatively quickly. In the case of the Titanic, it was the crash that most people didn't recognize the severity of until it was too late.

[01:04:59] [SPEAKER_04] But in other cases, it might be something as simple as hearing that a couple people got sick in the food court. And that's exactly what happened in late 2024 aboard the Queen Mary 2. Oh, shit. I want to take a brief detour here to say that I actually do have a fear-based history with the original Queen Mary. The one that's in Long Beach? The one that's in Long Beach. It's a retired British ocean liner. It's been parked in Long Beach since the 70s. We're going to loop back around to her before the end of the show. But the Queen Mary 2, I guess her sister ship or her sequel ship or whatever,

[01:05:29] [SPEAKER_04] was built decades later by the same company that built the original, the Cunard Cruise Line, to serve as their new flagship. Queen Mary's 2 construction was a massive undertaking due to not just being one of the largest passenger ships ever built, but also the fact that it had to handle the rigorous conditions of the North Atlantic crossing, which is a route historically known for its challenging weather and sinking of ships such as the Titanic. During construction is when the first tragedy struck. On November 15, 2003,

[01:05:59] [SPEAKER_04] a group of shipyard workers and their families were invited to visit the impressive undertaking when a gangway collapsed beneath them, setting the entire group plunging nearly 50 feet into the dry dock.

[01:06:09] [SPEAKER_05] Oh, no.

[01:06:10] [SPEAKER_04] 16 people were killed, and another 32 people were injured. It's not the most suspicious start for a ship. Usually, you smash a champagne bottle against the hull, not 48 people. So maybe the Queen Mary 2 was just cursed in the jump, but fast forward a bit, over two decades later, the ship faced a very different kind of crisis. We're talking a gastrointestinal crisis. Oh, jeez. The all-shitting, all-puking, all-contagious little bastard known as norovirus. Oh, wow.

[01:06:40] [SPEAKER_04] While rarely deadly, norovirus symptoms include diarrhea, vomiting, stomach cramps, and typically last between one to three days.

[01:06:47] [SPEAKER_05] Norovirus, I think, doesn't respond to hand sanitizer. It has to be proper, like, you know, two happy birthdays with real soap and water to get norovirus off your hands.

[01:06:56] [SPEAKER_04] I'm sure many of you listening have had experiences or know somebody who's had an experience with norovirus. It's extremely difficult to avoid in a Petri dish setting, like a cruise, because it's contagious for up to two weeks after your symptoms subside, and it can be spread very quickly and easily through direct contact, consuming contaminated food or drinks, or touching contaminated surfaces, kind of like handrails on a boat or a buffet where a thousand greasy kids are coughing and not washing their hands. Yeah.

[01:07:26] [SPEAKER_04] According to the New York Post, writing at the tail end of 2024, this year, quote, marked the worst in over a decade for stomach bug outbreaks on cruise ships docking in the U.S. With one day left, 2024 recorded the highest number of stomach virus outbreaks on board cruises since 2012, with both years tying at 16 total outbreaks. Last year, there were just 14 gastrointestinal outbreaks. Oh my God. You gotta bring your own food like fucking people in the lowest class. In December alone, the CDC reported five separate outbreaks

[01:07:56] [SPEAKER_04] on four different ships, which resulted in more than 800 people getting norovirus. I'm glad we bailed them out. And I don't know, all this is making 2024 sound like to cruise ships what 2025 is for airplanes, which is just, you could not catch a fucking break. There were actually two outbreaks back to back on the Queen Mary 2, one from December 14th to December 21st, and then again from December 21st to January 3rd of 2025.

[01:08:22] [SPEAKER_05] It's a hell of a Christmas gift.

[01:08:23] [SPEAKER_04] The second outbreak was the worst, spreading to nearly 400 people on board. And according to CDC data, 346 of the 2,565 passengers, or 13% of the passengers, and 71 of the 1,233 crew members, or 5% of the crew, all came down with norovirus. Many of our listeners are ship plumbers.

[01:08:46] [SPEAKER_05] What the fuck were the pipes doing on this floating, you know what I mean? Backing up. Backing up. Sinking the ship. No pipes. Land pipes aren't built for this. You have to just start shitting out your port window or whatever the hell, porthole window.

[01:09:00] [SPEAKER_04] All of that puking and shitting pales in comparison to the disaster that unfolded on the Diamond Princess luxury liner in the winter of 2020. Because as Ed noted earlier, COVID ran amok.

[01:09:13] [SPEAKER_05] It did, yeah. Yeah. And people on cruise ships, like, didn't believe it. There's a lot of, like, COVID just wasn't a thing yet, so people didn't believe it. They were like, I'm being inconvenienced for no reason.

[01:09:22] [SPEAKER_04] Yes. And as bad as it would be to get crapped, crapped, Freudian slip, as bad as it would be to get trapped on a cruise ship oozing norovirus from every open hole, it is definitively and assuredly even worse to get trapped on a ship with COVID, which is exactly what happened when the Diamond Princess set sail from Yokohama, Japan on January 20th, 2020.

[01:09:45] [SPEAKER_05] From Wuhan?

[01:09:46] [SPEAKER_04] No. Yeah, yeah.

[01:09:48] [SPEAKER_05] I'll get to that.

[01:09:49] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Which is exactly what happened when the Diamond Princess set sail from Yokohama, Japan on January 20th, 2020 for a 14-day cruise through Southeast Asia. Among the 3,711 people on board was an 80-year-old passenger from Hong Kong who had unknowingly set off one of the most terrifying disease outbreaks in modern cruise history. So at this point, the world knew about coronavirus. Sure. The day the ship set sail was actually the same day that the CDC confirmed the first case in the States,

[01:10:19] [SPEAKER_04] January 20th.

[01:10:20] [SPEAKER_05] Okay.

[01:10:20] [SPEAKER_04] But concern had not yet reached the, no pun intended, but fever pitch that it would reach a few weeks later.

[01:10:28] [SPEAKER_05] And this is the boat that had the fucking Wuhan coronavirus labs. Team building exercise was being done on this boat. This was part of their team building retreat. Yeah. Shit, man. Just weeks earlier. Can't even believe it. What are you guys here? What line of work are you in? We work in labs?

[01:10:46] [SPEAKER_04] Can't say much about it, but we have a lot of safety protocols that we ignore. Yeah. Because we had to get on this boat. So some things in the world on January 20th, 2020, like cruise ships, were still functioning fairly normally. Then on January 23rd, travel was shut down in and out of Wuhan. It wasn't until two days after that, that the old man disembarked in Hong Kong with mild symptoms.

[01:11:12] [SPEAKER_05] Okay.

[01:11:13] [SPEAKER_04] By February 1st, he tested positive for COVID-19 and the Diamond Princess was told to speed back early from Okinawa to Tokyo Bay so that the passengers and crew could be screened. But by then, it was already too late and the virus was loose inside the ship. On February 4th, after 10 passengers tested positive for the virus, Japanese authorities ordered the entire ship to be quarantined in Yokohama. That meant no one was allowed to leave. Not the infected, not the healthy, no one.

[01:11:42] [SPEAKER_04] There is a great article about this case in Wired Magazine that if you want to revisit how scary those early days of COVID were, I highly suggest you go back and read the whole article. It's really long. So we're just going to quote from it a little bit here. I thought this passage really captured how scary things must have been. Quote, Captain Gennaro Arma had spent more than 25 years at sea. Just five months earlier, in these same waters, he had faced his most arduous trial yet, white-knuckling the diamond's helm against Typhoon Faxai.

[01:12:13] [SPEAKER_04] He held the bow straight into 100-mile-an-hour winds lest they catch the cruise liner's massive flank and fling it around like a toy boat in a jacuzzi. Oh my god. Which, new fear unlocked, that's not something I knew a typhoon could do to a cruise ship. I think, yeah, anything that could get hit from the side, right? Anything big and heavy. I looked around a little bit and found at least one report, again, on Reddit, this time from the subreddit r slash terrifying as fuck. Beneath a truly nightmarish video of a cruise ship

[01:12:43] [SPEAKER_04] getting tossed around like a toy boat in a jacuzzi, user Gadriel Sword says, quote, My wife and I were on a cruise ship in a storm back in 1998. The storm had beyond gale force winds and the waves were 40 feet high. The ship was 11 stories high and when they crashed on the front of the ship the waves splashed up seven stories. Wow. The ship's captain said it was an uncharted storm. Aside from feeling the ship move while we walked, it really wasn't that bad. People did get seasick and they were handing out Dramamine.

[01:13:12] [SPEAKER_04] The ship had different in-room TV channels where you could watch the outside of the ship via video camera and it was wild watching the ship hit those huge waves.

[01:13:19] [SPEAKER_05] That's interesting. It's like, you're watching that and you're like, I think that's us. Yeah. That's like when a high-speed chase goes by your house and you're watching the news. Yeah. Oh. I think that was OJ.

[01:13:28] [SPEAKER_04] This boat is fucked. What movie's this? Oh my God.

[01:13:31] [SPEAKER_05] We are the Poseidon Adventure?

[01:13:32] [SPEAKER_04] Go check out the link in the notes, Doc, if you want to truly make sure you never get on a cruise ship. You can watch the video and read more about it there. But anyway, back to the death and disease portion of the program. I want to go back to this fucking crazy captain who's just like fucking full send into a wave. We were talking about Captain Gennaro Arma sailing through Typhoon Faxi. He quote, accepted the sea's hierarchy saying, you can't beat Mother Nature but you can come to a compromise. That's awesome. This guy rules. So all night, he negotiated gunning the engines and thrusters to keep the

[01:14:01] [SPEAKER_04] 115,875 ton behemoth in place. The nautical version of running on a treadmill. You didn't hear about a Princess cruise ship slamming into a cargo vessel or capsizing last September because he succeeded. We got through Faxi. We'll get through this, a staff captain told Arma upon hearing of the virus aboard the ship. Arma preferred Faxi.

[01:14:24] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah.

[01:14:25] [SPEAKER_04] This new coronavirus wasn't something he knew how to navigate.

[01:14:28] [SPEAKER_05] Can't negotiate with it.

[01:14:29] [SPEAKER_04] And that line brings me right back to the terror and uncertainty of the early days of COVID. I mean, I know it's still out there killing people but at least now we know more about it. We know how to prevent it. We know how to treat it. In those first couple of weeks, it was a science fiction nightmare basically.

[01:14:44] [SPEAKER_05] I was still going to work. The economy collapsed. Yeah. We're fucking bailing out companies. The stock market's going crazy. And then like within three weeks of that everybody's wiping down their groceries.

[01:14:52] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. But to find yourself on a cruise ship with it must have been insanely nerve-wracking especially once the Japanese government decided that no one was getting off the ship.

[01:15:01] [SPEAKER_05] I mean, I think the Japanese maybe handled it a little bit better. The guy I know who was on like an 80s rockin' cruise thing like 80s week and his cat for him and he had all this stuff he had laid out before he left so he looked like he was dressed as Lost Boys characters essentially. So now you got a bunch of people dressed like Lost Boys characters being like I don't want to spend one more day on this 80s cruise. Let us go home. And then you have American ports being like you gotta stay right where the fuck you are. Yeah. And I remember him being like you gotta watch my cat longer. This is bullshit.

[01:15:31] [SPEAKER_05] They thought it was a psyop or something.

[01:15:32] [SPEAKER_04] There's no way everybody on the boat at that point thought that they were being fucked with.

[01:15:36] [SPEAKER_05] No, because he said that if I remember correctly as part of the you know we're not gonna refund your ticket but we're gonna make you happy he was like all the booze just became free all the amenities became so it's like everyone was fucking drunk in the sun yelling about how they can't go home but they were all hammered drunk.

[01:15:54] [SPEAKER_04] Well that I could I could see people being like there's no fucking disease they just don't want to refund our tickets. Yeah, some weird shit.

[01:16:01] [SPEAKER_05] I'm not saying that everyone on there was what weirdly would become people who don't believe in shit but I'm just saying like from their perspective I can see the shore it's 300 yards away Yeah. Why can't we go home and there's like there's a issue and in their minds that only exists in sub-Saharan Africa or the movie Outbreak or something so they're like there's no way that's happening.

[01:16:23] [SPEAKER_04] Well, right I mean I think honestly one of the I can find the text one of the cruelest things about COVID was it it lived in this space where it was very very dangerous but it was very dangerous in a way that's not what you see in a movie it wasn't like you looked out your window and saw people vomiting blood in the streets it was quietly dangerous which made it really easy to be like well it can't be that bad right like I don't society isn't falling apart and I don't see riots outside and I don't see people

[01:16:53] [SPEAKER_04] dying in the streets so it can't be that bad yeah anyway I do think there must have been a cold fear that set in in Japan and on your buddy's ship when you realize they're telling you there's a disease on board and not to worry but also you can't go off the ship is pretty

[01:17:10] [SPEAKER_05] concern inducing I'm not great with that stuff in the sense that I'm very social contract e accuracy like people be like you can't do it I'd be like we can't do it yeah that's how I am I'm very like a rule follower in that sense even knowing I get angry as can be about so many things all the time they said no man on the lifeboats yeah I would be not a chance I wouldn't make that rule but I would definitely be like oh sir they said I'm definitely and that's probably why I really enjoyed you know having uniforms and stuff in school

[01:17:40] [SPEAKER_05] and I always like just being like you got it I'll do what you say if it's for the betterment of whatever's going on here and so in many ways I feel like that does make me patriotic because I I want I do care about the people around me but I also get mad as shit about stuff all the time where I'm like we should take to the fucking streets

[01:17:58] [SPEAKER_04] yeah so it's weird you would have been one of the people who one of the passengers on this ship who spent two excruciating weeks trapped inside their cabins while the virus spread through ventilation systems that at the time like in the movie Outbreak were just recycling the same air throughout the ship yes just like in the movie I'm saying yes I absolutely would have been that person who quietly coughed yeah tried not to disturb anybody just like the rest of the world at this point miscommunications and bad information ran rampant

[01:18:27] [SPEAKER_04] on board the ship crew members still expected to serve meals in sanitized rooms had no protective equipment leading to mass infections among the staff passengers were told to stay inside their tiny rooms many with no windows or fresh air leading to a psychological and emotional breakdown for many food deliveries slowed medical resources were stretched to the breaking point and according to Wired the crew started to rebel quote a crew member flung his ship access card from a deck onto the pier below in what the company

[01:18:56] [SPEAKER_04] called an act of rebellion a group of workers from India posted a video to Facebook pleading for Prime Minister Narenda Modi to evacuate them saying please save us from this swamp three days later a 24 year old security officer named Sonali Takar appeared on CNN saying she had a cough and fever and had been isolated but not tested a Japanese vice minister of health conceded to the network that treatment between passengers and crew is quote not all equal the Filipina cook admired the Indian crew members

[01:19:25] [SPEAKER_04] for speaking out they have balls unlike us we are silenced by our fears of losing our jobs that's how it usually goes at the height of the outbreak on board this ship more than 700 people which is almost 20% of everyone on board became infected and at least 14 passengers died the ship had the highest concentration of COVID-19 cases outside of mainland China hey you know what sucks to be you

[01:19:49] [SPEAKER_05] but it definitely should stay right where the fuck it is then at that time that was the right move to be like you know what put them in the world's worst scenario

[01:19:56] [SPEAKER_04] yeah I mean I think it was the right move I think the real dereliction I don't even know if it was a dereliction they couldn't bring

[01:20:02] [SPEAKER_05] some shit to the side

[01:20:03] [SPEAKER_04] and like swap some things out put on some hazies well yeah I don't think it was in that phase where no one really knew exactly how it spread

[01:20:11] [SPEAKER_05] and it sweeps it's the contagion was so much higher than even like the neurovirus or whatever yeah you're all

[01:20:17] [SPEAKER_04] gonna get sick right now so I think yeah the decision was made that sort of brutal you know for the sake of the Japanese population we're gonna keep these 700 people on board here it would be

[01:20:28] [SPEAKER_05] for the sake of fucking carnival cruise lines reputation and the board or whatever but there I would like to think it was for

[01:20:33] [SPEAKER_04] the population

[01:20:34] [SPEAKER_05] of Japan yeah

[01:20:36] [SPEAKER_04] and in your there were bands

[01:20:42] [SPEAKER_05] and stuff there yeah it was like the I mean I might have to bleep a lot of it out but it is already the dumbest thing to be on and then now you're yeah and the thing was I remember now that I'm remembering it better I'm thinking about it I wanna say that cruise was not like patient zero it was something where people in his life were already like people are talking about this coronavirus thing are you sure they didn't cancel it oh so he got on the ship knowing yeah he's like paid my ticket man it's my favorite I go to this every year and so I think it was that I'll have to find the text

[01:21:11] [SPEAKER_05] but I think it was genuinely like within days of rumblings not in America we have to remember people were already in Singapore filling up their houses with toilet paper and shit before it ever landed on our shores

[01:21:24] [SPEAKER_04] this will be this will be a good trivia botch you can read the text when you find it yeah

[01:21:28] [SPEAKER_00] he didn't find them

[01:21:29] [SPEAKER_04] as our pleasure cruise today comes to an end I wanted to loop back around to a ship I mentioned a few minutes ago the original Queen Mary sure my grandparents took me to visit Los Angeles when I was five years old and one of the stops we made was at the Queen Mary which is a as we mentioned nearly century old ship docked in Long Beach

[01:21:48] [SPEAKER_05] I think it's hard docked too like it's like yeah it's like stuck to the ground

[01:21:52] [SPEAKER_04] they don't yeah it doesn't move it doesn't move as lots of nearly century old ships do this one has a violent deadly history one that it turns out they like to play up to tourists or at least they did when I was there in 1991 do they still do like ghost tours and stuff? I think they still do ghost tours what I remember from visiting was they screened an Unsolved Mysteries episode what? as part of the tour it scared the absolute shit out of me I'll link the episode in the show notes I found it on YouTube it's not as scary now

[01:22:21] [SPEAKER_04] but Jesus Christ did I have I mean this was the same trip where I was too afraid to not just go on the Haunted Mansion at Disney sure I was too afraid to look at the page in the Disneyland like memorial little souvenir book that has photos from the Haunted Mansion so I was already too scared to look at those ghosts to then go on a ship where they're like hey by the way a guy got smashed to pieces by a door and he's gonna be standing right behind you

[01:22:51] [SPEAKER_04] terrified sure my grandparents did not know I don't think that it was going to be that scary and then Robert Stack's voice enters the equation yeah so according to the official history on the Queen Mary website on May 27th 1936 the Queen Mary departed from Southampton England embarking on her maiden voyage she boasted five dining areas and lounges two cocktail bars and swimming pools a grand ballroom a squash court and even a small hospital the Queen Mary had set a new benchmark in transatlantic travel

[01:23:20] [SPEAKER_04] which the rich and famous considered the only civilized way to travel she quickly seized the hearts and imaginations of the public on both sides of the Atlantic representing the spirit of an era known for its elegance class and style from the time her construction began in 1930 in Clydebank Scotland Queen Mary was destined to stand in a class all her own despite suffering economic setbacks during the Great Depression which stalled construction on the ship for several years Cunard Line spared no expense on building the Queen Mary which was originally

[01:23:50] [SPEAKER_04] known as job number 534 but based on how many fucking people this boat killed I think job number 666 might have been a more appropriate number the deaths related to the Queen Mary start during its construction on June 5th 1934 a construction worker named Malcolm Aitken fell from the scaffolding surrounding the ship and died on June 8th 1936 crew member Arthur John Francis Golding who has too many names died after fracturing his skull during the ocean

[01:24:20] [SPEAKER_04] liner's return to the UK following its maiden voyage well maybe he left some of his names to people who needed names during the ship's final voyage to Long Beach in 1967 crew member Leonard Horsberg developed heatstroke and died from a cerebral hemorrhage as the ocean liner passed the coast of Rio de Janeiro geez Lucia this place is cursed between these tragedies that's not even the meat of the issue between these tragedies of the people who died building it and the people who died bringing it to Long Beach sounds like a Middle Eastern

[01:24:50] [SPEAKER_04] fucking World Cup you're trying to make over here between these tragedies the Queen Mary was drafted into military service which is where the real carnage occurred beginning in 1939 she was pushed to the limit often cramming 15,000 soldiers into spaces designed for 2,200 passengers neither of us are great at math

[01:25:10] [SPEAKER_05] no but we also were pretty broke on the road moving here I think we had apartments that had similar ratios

[01:25:14] [SPEAKER_04] way too many people in that small of a space the Queen Mary was stripped of her fine decor and amenities in order to create more space her bright smokestacks were painted navy gray and her portholes were blacked out and welded shut the transformation earned her the nickname the gray ghost oh that's cool Britain believed her size and speed would keep her safe from German U-boats and they were right it's rumored that Adolf Hitler himself offered a $250,000 reward to any submarine captain who could successfully sink her

[01:25:44] [SPEAKER_04] and of course none did no one cashed in on that reward but the Queen Mary's efficiency came at a cost in the summer soldiers slept shoulder to shoulder above deck and took turns sleeping in bunks below deck the lack of airflow made the cabin suffocatingly hot and some soldiers died from heat exhaustion others just jumped right off the fucking ship they couldn't take it well at least they had that option it's like the Amistad for describing it as the fucking Amistad the Mary was no longer a luxurious cruise ship it was hell legend says

[01:26:13] [SPEAKER_04] the staff went half crazy too and one rather gruesome rumor that they talk about on the ghost tour and I believe in the Unsolved Mysteries episode is that the galley crew locked the chef in his own oven one night and cooked him alive why because they were going crazy they were going stir crazy there's other rumors here that's crazy that is that is full on who's gonna make the food well he is

[01:26:37] [SPEAKER_05] the food at that point only one meal you teach a man to cook you have 100 meals you eat the cook you're out of meals

[01:26:43] [SPEAKER_04] famous a famous saying for a reason yeah as if all of that wasn't enough in October of 1942 the ship accidentally collided with the HMS Curacao a much smaller cruiser that was escorting her around the Irish coast to show it was boss the Curacao was zigzagging in front of the Mary hoping to throw off any potential missile attacks when the 82,000 ton ship mistakenly plowed into it breaking it in half you gotta be a faster pace car you gotta be a faster pace car hey why aren't you going fast because I have to fucking zigzag

[01:27:13] [SPEAKER_04] you're going in a straight line and I have to be bait when it broke in half some of the crew died instantly others drowned or succumbed to hypothermia in the freezing water and the Mary never stopped to rescue them I was just about to say like how do they die in the freezing water if they threw out a life preserver I don't know exactly the thought process here but the research says that it would have compromised the thousands of soldiers on board if they stopped so I guess you have to keep moving if they were sitting duck for you boat yes then someone would have cashed

[01:27:43] [SPEAKER_04] in on Hitler's prize money but in any case an estimated 329 men died in those waters as a result and the truth about what happened wasn't even told until three years later after the war ended you're not

[01:27:55] [SPEAKER_05] telling people that that's how you win wars you have to keep shit like you're not going to win a war with Twitter like you have to like do shit in the dark unfortunately you might win a troll war you win a troll

[01:28:06] [SPEAKER_04] war which is as effective as a trade war yeah by the time the truth about this came out the Queen Mary had once again undergone a large renovation that to erase any remnants of military life so paintings fine china art deco furniture were returned to the cabins and dining rooms she was ready to dazzle the rich famous and powerful once again that's unbelievable to me I would have sworn they'd be like oh you wanted that back we that's gone

[01:28:31] [SPEAKER_05] people just took it

[01:28:33] [SPEAKER_04] all the expensive decor in the world couldn't bury what had happened during the war the Queen Mary was now a haunted ship over 100 different spirits are said to haunt the halls of the Queen Mary with the most frequent paranormal activity taking place in stateroom B340 where the activity is so frequent and intense that some members of the crew supposedly still refuse to go inside I would think the kitchen would have

[01:28:58] [SPEAKER_05] the most ghosts or like the most like crazy activity but no this random suite

[01:29:02] [SPEAKER_04] well so here's here's part of why there's a so there's a lot of rumors I couldn't find a ton of information backing up a lot of these stories so I will phrase this as Queen Mary scholars don't exactly agree on the nature of this haunting but what we do know is that the stateroom B340 actually originated as three different third class rooms each with their own rumors of death and suffering in one of them we do know that in 1948 a third class passenger named Walter J. Adamson

[01:29:32] [SPEAKER_04] mysteriously died in his sleep some on the internet would tell you he was killed by a ghost in that room I would debate that interpretation do we know where he was from no RIP God bless RIP God bless another story claims staff once again the staff is well I guess staff's not really as responsible here this story claims staff locked a man in another one of these third classrooms after he murdered two women on board the ship in the 1960s it's the least you can do during the night

[01:30:02] [SPEAKER_04] he began beating on the door screaming to the guard outside that something was in the room with him wow when they opened the door in the morning they found his bloody mangled body separated from his entrails which had been splashed across the room wow I thought that was gonna be like a tactic to get them

[01:30:17] [SPEAKER_05] to get them to open it and then he'd run by but so you can't your brain has to go to that like I'm not gonna let this prisoner out he's probably lying but then to find him cut in half now

[01:30:26] [SPEAKER_04] that's scary I could not find an official report I mean I mean fuck if you killed two people but I couldn't find an official report for that I couldn't find this passenger's name I couldn't find a report of these two murdered women his ID was probably in his pants and that that's separated from his body I was gonna make a joke about the Aswang but most people probably haven't heard that

[01:30:43] [SPEAKER_05] I was thinking that I immediately went to Aswang Aswang Aswang Aswang the rabbit Aswang yeah because it's kind of like Oswald okay anyway if no one's listening to that episode of Cryptid Cocktail go give it a listen you'll know

[01:30:55] [SPEAKER_04] what we're talking about now what I did find were variations of this story that have emerged over the years a man killed his family in that cabin or a woman killed her husband or a husband killed his wife or a lone passenger's throat was cut there's a whole bunch of kind of urban legends about this other one and that was one of the

[01:31:13] [SPEAKER_05] cabins that they've combined the three cabins into this new big cabin that's extra haunted

[01:31:17] [SPEAKER_04] yes what's definitely true is that when the ship was retired in 1967 and dry docked or whatever they call it when they locked up I called it dry that's not what it's called but yeah

[01:31:26] [SPEAKER_05] I called it hard docked I don't know if that's a real thing

[01:31:29] [SPEAKER_04] brother might as well be what is definitely true is that when the ship was retired in 1967 these three third classrooms were combined to create stateroom B340 not long after that guests began reporting odd things now you'll notice none of these things are as odd as my husband was ripped in half in the middle of the night that's true yeah one woman said she was woken when the bed covers were ripped off her in the middle of the night she then saw a man looming over the end of the bed others heard phantom voices and complained

[01:31:59] [SPEAKER_04] that the faucets turned on by themselves

[01:32:01] [SPEAKER_05] I'm sorry both of those sound absolutely hand in hand with the other incident where it's like hey I need this sheet I just cut a guy in half I gotta get rid of it hey run some water we're gonna have to clean up all this fucking blood he's like all these ghosts are just like

[01:32:14] [SPEAKER_04] working together that would be hilarious if a man was ripped apart by a demon in this room on the Queen Mary but the ghosts that haunted the room were just the ghosts of the guys who had to clean it all up yeah fuck

[01:32:25] [SPEAKER_05] yeah exactly that's what I'm thinking that's why they all worked hand in hand excuse me ma'am I need this sir run some water yeah steal soap from that guy in the

[01:32:33] [SPEAKER_04] shower yeah the ship received so many negative reports throughout the 1970s that B340 was closed to the public for over 30 years and was reopened as a quote haunted attraction in 2018 wait so what was it in 67 it got

[01:32:47] [SPEAKER_05] taken out of commission in the late 60s yes and then what we're calling hard docked so it just immediately became an attraction or was it a museum or a hotel I think it's a

[01:32:57] [SPEAKER_04] combination of both I think to this day it's a you can stay there you can sleep there yeah I think okay it's a hotel

[01:33:03] [SPEAKER_05] museum so basically they made it like a hotel yeah back then so then it would get all these complaints while living

[01:33:09] [SPEAKER_04] its life as a hotel yes gotcha okay and then the room was closed because so many people complained and then it was reopened as a haunted attraction in 2018 and the key comes with a fierce warning that even the current captain of the ship which I guess they still have a captain yeah he's not going down with anything it seems like the easiest captain job yeah you don't have

[01:33:27] [SPEAKER_05] to know how to do anything ship related yeah it's like that Denzel Washington movie flight where he like he rolls the plane he's drunk yeah you're like that's his next job is you're now the captain of the ship that goes nowhere

[01:33:40] [SPEAKER_04] other haunted areas on the Queen Mary and some of these again are included in the unsolved mysteries episode include the former first class swimming pool boiler room number four and a doorway where and I will end on this one because I remember this is the one that scared me so badly as a kid where a worker named John Petter was tragically crushed during an emergency drill Petter's ghost is often spotted wearing blue coveralls sometimes he'll run behind people whistling as if warning them other times he'll ask

[01:34:09] [SPEAKER_04] guests if they've seen his wrench which sounds like a dirty uncle don't answer him kids

[01:34:18] [SPEAKER_05] he wants you to ask I feel like

[01:34:21] [SPEAKER_04] he wants general good advice for kids if you see a man in blue overalls running around the boiler room of an old ship and he asks if you've seen his wrench yeah don't answer his name already is suspiciously close to Petter asked

[01:34:33] [SPEAKER_06] yeah

[01:34:34] [SPEAKER_04] I don't want to slander John Petter but he has a lot of check marks against him

[01:34:39] [SPEAKER_05] yeah but I guess this is why we do drills we now know to switch out how we're gonna do this that guy died yeah let's make

[01:34:45] [SPEAKER_04] some adjustments the sheer amount of ghostly activity aboard the Queen Mary has earned it the title of most haunted ship in the world and like we said it is still docked at Long Beach to this day where it attracts as many paranormal fanatics as it does history buffs and maybe someday we'll do a scared all the time field trip yeah I'll

[01:35:03] [SPEAKER_05] happily do that that can be fun yeah at least go to a there's a Hooters in Long Beach it's one of the last surviving Hooters so maybe we'll just look at the Queen Mary from Hooters we should tell John we should tell John Petter that if he shows

[01:35:15] [SPEAKER_04] us his wrench we'll take him to Hooters we'll take my Hooters his wrench might be at Hooters we should bring the Hooters girls on the ship I don't know

[01:35:21] [SPEAKER_05] that's not where we're going we're going there for other reasons but we're well we can just say we're going to find his wrench

[01:35:27] [SPEAKER_04] that's true John Petter we're coming for your wrench

[01:35:30] [SPEAKER_05] watch out we'll we'll buy your wrench back from the inevitable liquidation sale of the Hooters franchise yeah

[01:35:36] [SPEAKER_04] well that brings us to the end of our horrible twisted tales of cruise ship disasters ghosts in assorted bad times so Ed that means I have to ask you this question where on the fear tier would you put cruises pretty low still I

[01:35:55] [SPEAKER_05] think yeah and not even and not even because I'm just going to avoid them because at the end of the day I still feel like whatever I go okay sure

[01:36:08] [SPEAKER_04] yeah I would still do it this is a fear you know a lot of times we're like man the fear is scarier hypothetically than it is in reality because I'd never do xyz and this is one where it's like most of these disasters and horrible things really they're gross but they're mostly like annoyances I guess if you got trapped on a ship with like Ebola instead of COVID that would be pretty bad even with COVID I'd be furious yeah

[01:36:33] [SPEAKER_05] I think yeah I guess I would be afraid

[01:36:36] [SPEAKER_04] but I think cruises might be our first one on the fear tier have we ever put anything in a one never put anything in a one I think cruises might be the first one I think

[01:36:45] [SPEAKER_05] it's a one it's yeah I think now you have to have enough lifeboats and stuff like I think I should have looked that up 100 years later someone must be like that's the one thing we can definitely address yeah at least life preservers maybe although I bet you with these fucking companies especially after being bailed out they're like oh there's a life lifeboat tax in order to get enough lifeboats part of your ticket is 28 extra dollars and every ticket goes to making sure we don't have canvas lifeboats

[01:37:13] [SPEAKER_04] well yeah it's just there's probably tiered tickets where you know the bottom tiers you don't notice that they don't come with access to the executive lifeboat suite or whatever they call it a lot

[01:37:25] [SPEAKER_05] of asterisks on this terms and conditions it says here that I go in the oven I become the food on day four

[01:37:33] [SPEAKER_04] wow listener you heard cruises our first

[01:37:37] [SPEAKER_05] number one you know what I think I will put cruises number one and I'm gonna put getting stuck in a conversation with someone telling me about their cruise at a three god damn you're right yeah I don't want to hear about your fucking cruise I don't want to be sold on the idea of going on cruises so I'm gonna put being stuck in a conversation about cruises at three being on a cruise at one

[01:37:55] [SPEAKER_04] that said if you've had a crazy cruise story please feel free to email it to us or post about it on the facebook group just don't corner us at a party just don't corner us at a party about it but we do want to hear about it as long as we can turn and walk away when we're done listening to it with that the show is scared all the time I'm Chris Kallari and I'm Ed Vicola and we will see you next time bye bye

[01:38:17] [SPEAKER_05] scared all the time is co-produced by Chris Kallari and Ed Vicola written by Chris Kallari edited by Ed Vicola additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel our theme song is the track scared by perpetual stew and Mr. Disclaimer is and just a reminder you can now support the podcast on Patreon and get all kinds of cool shit in return depending on the tier you choose we'll be offering everything from ad free episodes producer credits exclusive access and exclusive merch

[01:38:43] [SPEAKER_04] so go sign up for a Patreon at scared all the time podcast dot com don't worry all scaredy cats welcome

[01:38:50] [SPEAKER_03] no part of the show can be reproduced anywhere without permission copyright astonishing legends production

[01:38:55] [SPEAKER_01] night we are in this together together together