The Kursk Submarine Disaster of 2000 | Episode 106

I believe the most frightening vehicle to travel from point A to point B in would be a submarine – and I am including cable cars, and rocket sleds, and tightropes, and wingsuits, and early diving bells, and high-altitude balloon gondolas, and luge sleds, and the kind of fixed-wing plane where you have to walk on the wing, and human cannonballing, and ziplining over a volcano in that analysis. Let’s see if today’s story changes my mind.

On today’s episode: you will learn why the history of victory in human warfare favours how much you resemble your own anus; you will to understand how your brain actually craps itself worse than your bowels when confronted with something enormous approaches unseen from underwater; and if you ever had a particularly bad day at work and felt really underserved by your employers desire or ability to do anything about it, this episode is doing that thing where it points back-and-forth between you and itself and nodding strongly.

And if you were listening on Patreon… you would learn why the first recorded military submarine mission sounded like bad porno; you would see why life in a confined space can get you full-body duct taped to a chair with a gag in your mouth; and you would hear cautionary and sobering observations about the aromatic and claustrophobic life of a fellow listener who spent years in the silent service.

I’m going to have you imagining everything from what a Roman solider would have thought watching a tank shell remove your co-workers head, to what it feels like to be slowly pulled into the spinning blades of a submarine, to the experience of free-balling it from the sea floor to the surface in a pressure suit which is said to be one of the most frightening emergency procedures in the world.

I spend no small amount of time figuring out new and terrible ways for you to experience fear in a vehicle. There’s just something about going through a horror when you’re trapped in a moving conveyance that doesn’t obey or respond to your panic. I think a submarine is a perfect example, considering if you pull over and try to get out, everyone on board dies terribly. That said, it was my sincere pleasure to be able to bring this story to you today. It straddles the line between bad-day-at-work episodes and my-boss-sucks episodes.

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THANK YOU. Most shows survive at the whim of production companies and corporate sponsors, built from the top down. Doomsday doesn’t exist because some network exec believes in it – it