Doomed to Fail

Ep 26: Brushstrokes of Tragedy: The Byford Dolphin, Kursk Submarine, and Vincent Van Gogh

Episode Summary

This week Farz tells two tales of the ultimate red flaggy relationship – humans & hubris. Hint - it’s been in the news! Farz covers two stories of man’s lust for dominance of the deep sea that ends in disaster. First, the Byford Dolphin Accident, which contains 0 dolphins, and many gruesome deaths. Then, the Kursk submarine incident, where Russia’s inability to get along with anyone, caused things to go from bad to worse. Then, you’d think this would lighten the mood - but it really doesn’t - Taylor takes us on a journey through the colorful, manic, and ultimately tragic life of Vincent Van Gogh. Who was the most famous painter of all time? Chances are you have something Vincent painted in your house right now. We all know that he wasn’t successful in life and that he cut off his ear. But why?? We’ll explore. https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/ https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod

Episode Notes

This week Farz tells two tales of the ultimate red flaggy relationship – humans & hubris. Hint - it’s been in the news! Farz covers two stories of man’s lust for dominance of the deep sea that end in disaster. First, the Byford Dolphin Accident, which contains 0 dolphins, and many gruesome deaths. Then, the Kursk submarine incident, where Russia’s inability to get along with anyone, caused things to go from bad to worse. 

Then, you’d think this would lighten the mood - but it really doesn’t - Taylor takes us on a journey through the colorful, manic, and ultimately tragic life of Vincent Van Gogh. Who was the most famous painter of all time? Chances are you have something Vincent painted in your house right now. We all know that he wasn’t successful in life and that he cut off his ear. But why?? We’ll explore. 

https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/

https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod

Vincent’s paintings, Vincent & Jo Van Gogh, & Byford via the public domain

Kursk via Wikipedia & Popular Mechanics 

Some Sources:

Van Gogh: The Life

Whatever version of Gardners Art Through the Ages that came out when Taylor was in college 

https://www.vangoghbrabant.com/

Episode Transcription

Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor

 

what you can do for your country [Music] so Taylor yeah it's our last week of

0:24

anonymity ah I just I just went out and went to Walmart you know just to

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be unrecognized in public for for once right for the last time I wouldn't

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trigger a stranger's hand to the grocery store perfect

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we'll go ahead and kick things off I'll make the intro welcome to Doom to fail

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the podcast where Taylor and I explored two relationships one historic and one

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usually True Crime although I promise tends to change all the time there are full of red flags I'm Forrest joined

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here by Taylor hi Taylor hi farz I'm so excited to be here I know it's Sunday and it's late in

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the in the weekend we usually record earlier but you had your parents in town and I had to work yesterday and it was

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just this week I've been more tired than ever been in my whole entire life so I feel like a human today so I'm glad that

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we're doing this today this time this moment like this is exactly what I should be recording I'm in the exact

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right head space because like yesterday I felt so rushed the family was here I had to take care of things and earlier

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this morning they were here and now it's like they've been gone for like an hour and a half or so nice and just like ease

1:36

my way into like normal life again you know so this is the exact right time yeah one my husband took the kids to the

1:42

park because I hate I hate the park [ __ ] hate it as boring as [ __ ] so he takes the kids to the park because the

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kids love it but yeah so it's nice I've been home for

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a little bit just kind of I was I'm at home for like an hour by myself and I haven't been listening to anything I've

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just kind of been like trying to like get my mind around what I'm talking about this week and I'm

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super excited to talk about it and to tell you but I've been like in a thing

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so as usual everybody knows Taylor and I never share we're discussing beforehand so I have no idea what Taylor's going to

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discuss but I don't know why I get the feeling that there might be like a through line there's always a through

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line for Mars literally there is always my stories are very unique though but

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we'll get to that in a second I think today I go first is that right yes so

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why don't you tell us where your signature cocktail is where your signature drink okay I also want to just I'm going to do

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that in a second I promise but I also wanted to say part of the reason that I feel like I've been this like crazy mind

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space at the moment is because like this whole week I've been reading this book on um on what I'm going to talk about

2:53

later and I listened to it because like everyone I have like a [ __ ] ton of stuff

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to do but it was like 48 hours so I was like in this book and I was like you know bringing the kids to swim lessons

3:04

and trying to get in my steps I was like walking around the pool listening to this book and like taking notes in my notes app and like trying to like really

3:10

be in it so and then I was reminded that I read this

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like dumb ass post on like Instagram or LinkedIn where some dude was like you know exercise as much to do this and he

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was like and read one book a week but audiobooks don't count and I just wanted to say [ __ ] that guy because hey that's that's

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the the advice and clueless that Cher says she says let's read one non-school book A Week remember that part and she

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goes that first my first book Is fit or fact you'll remember if you know and then also that's like super dumb but

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also at worst it's like really ableist like people some people can't focus on words people whatever so anyway that's

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I've been like I think listening to this book actually put me like a lot further into the story so that's why I've been kind of losing my mind so I just wanted

3:54

to share that with you and then also because we're here before you get started I had another friend of ours

4:00

that we know mutually try to mansplain whatever this to me and they were like oh so for every episode do you just like

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read a Wikipedia page and I was like no I'm reading like a whole box and I'm

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like learning a ton and I just feel like in the past six months I've learned so much and I hope that you have to and

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that other people have so yeah I have discovered that yeah there's a lot of

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stories that we've done before where I will look at the Wikipedia page and I'll read other content around it I'm like the effects just you're left up up in

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there in terms like what's true and what's not because you know I covered what was the guy last week the guy who

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killed um Versace in Harper's bizarre I mean I actually be grown a new

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Fascination and appreciation with magazines and the amount of like actual

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research that goes into publishing certain articles like Harvesters like that is the source of Truth for all this

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stuff there's another one I did the Atlantic was a source of Truth for like and and you look at the Wikipedia

5:03

articles for example and there's like taking these like bra swats and copy pasting over from like actual

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applications that are doing really legit research work which is really really interesting so and I think it sounds

5:14

silly but it sounds silly but like then I'm like oh well they got this from this article you're like oh I'm not that I've read more than one source on this thing

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I'm like getting things so anyway it's super fun so this week I am drinking

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cognac do you know what cognac is I've had Kanye is Hennessy cognac yes

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yes okay yeah because I was gonna it's like it's a brandy and Brandy is distilled wine which I

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didn't know or understand I I feel like I haven't had Brandy but I'm sure I have but yeah cognacs you might know are like

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Hennessy Hennessy and Courvoisier anyway so that's why I'm drinking it is

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not a taste profile that I particularly enjoyed because it's like sweet right like sweet dirt than usual anyway

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it's like a liquor liquor right one of those things

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so anyway I on the other hand have just discovered that our my local grocery store HEB for

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anybody that's in Texas has a passion fruit sparkling water I'm gonna be drinking that because it has nothing to

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do with my story but I just enjoy it so I'm gonna go and then drink my little uh passion fruit fizzly fizzy water good

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food and then I'll go ahead and kick us off and once again normally I cover true

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Prime this week is a little bit different actually it's a lot different it's totally different it's like exactly 180 degrees different so it has nothing

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to do with True Crime what's wrong oh my God what are you telling me Taylor consistently I think that we want to

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keep this show Mostly Evergreen so we try not to cover super topical things that are in the news

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and the reason why mine is different is something to something because what's been in the news this past week has

6:53

actually sparked my interest in curiosity and things so I can get a lot of research on stuff so much for the

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rest of the country I was following the Titanic submersible story very very closely and mostly it's because I'm one

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fascinated by the ocean two I always always a little kid I've always got a

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thing for the Titanic I when I went to Ireland like I went to the tattoo I deliberately detour to go to the Titanic

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Museum because I'm just like that into it and I find the story very very probably has nothing to do with Jack and

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Rose or James Cameron like this is like predates all that stuff good for you and the third one is that both the ocean and

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the Titanic the story and where the ship currently lies terrify me to no end

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so scary but as a lover of all things horror I'm naturally drawn to things

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that terrify me and this terrifies me okay so in the spirit of the

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ever-evolving premise here I'm going to discuss a red flaggy relationship that almost all of us have at some point in

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our lives and that is a relationship with hubris okay so whoa I know I'm not

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I'm getting super heady with it here so here's the word is right from the

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ancient Greek word for Pride insolence outrage it is defined as a care characteristic of one who has excessive

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Pride or self-confidence usually the red flaggy Parts about this

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are minimal in our day-to-day lives maybe a few words say you're the best looking person whether you're the smartest or that you made the right

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decisions whatever usually it's just it ends in being embarrassed or fired or losing a relationship it doesn't really

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matter sure when it starts mattering is when it impacts your life in the life of those around you and most of the time

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that happens when it happens in a consequential manner like it did this last week with Italian submersible and

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with the Titanic itself that happens in an engineering capacity where there is an immense amount of hubris towards the

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engineering prowess of humanity and then it leads to horrible consequential things that end up impacting people's

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lives the reason I brought the whole Titanic uh Titans commercial thing was because I heard

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something that James Cameron said this week about how ironic it was that the Titan is on the C4 next to the Titanic

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because neither leaders of those two vessels he did all the warnings and instead relied on their own hubris to

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move forward resulting in the death of others so I'm actually doing two stories today

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yeah I promise but they're gonna have to do with how Humanity skewers and

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Engineering resulted in horrible horrible tragedies awesome and these are gonna be a little

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bit rare like these are not gonna be like super obvious ones well one of them might but the other one I definitely don't think you'll know about

9:36

cool that sounds awesome I I am exactly the right age and the right sexual

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orientation for the movie Titanic to have destroyed my life I totally believe yeah first they

9:52

are vision of like this is romance this is how it destroyed my life yeah no unbelievable unbelievable the amount of

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times I saw the movie in the theater I like how many times I like would like record on the radio you know remember they play the Celine Dion song with like

10:05

words in it like from the movie there you go everyone my life they can't wait but the two stories I

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want to cover I'm going to cover the more obscure one first that one also tell just so you know a partner was like

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is he still gonna get mad at me for doing this because I'm not doing True Crime and so I don't know if you're mad at me or not but I'm already super mad

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at you I know I can see you squinting your eyebrows so the first one is an

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incident that is known as the Byford dolphin accident have you heard of this one no cool okay great then I got you

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wait wait stop read with us when we watch that okay we have that horror movie Club with with our friends and we

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watch scary movies and there's that movie with George C Scott where he trains a dolphin to kill the president United States I didn't see that one I

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skipped that one oh my God it's so bad and I love George she's got so much but

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um it's the whole thing so George's guide is amazing oh this has nothing to do with dolphins oh yes it's just called

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the bike for a dolphin incident but thank you I want to start with an old Mainstay of oceanic disasters which are

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oil rigs in the case of the Byford dolphin that is the name of a natural

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gas rig but it's essentially the same concept as an oil rig humans have been very unique or are

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generally very unique in our capability of going super above and beyond the laws of nature to get what we want and oil rigs are a great example of this

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researching this really reminded me like how incredibly easier lives are like

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people do the most insane labor and work so that we have gasoline in our car so

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we have plastic right we have like it's insane what people are willing to put their lives to doing to let us have the

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basic modern conveniences we have and this is a good example of that so in the case of the rig Byford dolphin

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this was positioned in the North Sea in November of 1983. the rig required work to be done at or

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near the sea floor and it required divers to do that given that the depths that we're talking

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about here are an incredible huge massive we learned all about that this week this type of diving that these

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people had to do on the bike for Dolphin is called saturation diving have you ever heard of this before okay it is I I struggled once and I was

12:19

scared guys go watch YouTube videos of

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saturation divers oh my God take your turn lights off and like just it is

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worse than any horror movie you'll ever watch okay tell me more saturation that means like highly highly

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highly technical version of diving so out of all commercial divers in the United States there's only about 330 or

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so that are saturation divers right now so it is these people get paid a lot of

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money and they take a lot of risks to do what they're doing as we learned with the time disaster the lower a person or

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an object goes in the water column the higher the outside pressures are that are acting on that body that's true for

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all parts of the body including oxygen and nitrogen in our bloods in our lungs the deeper you go typically considered

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somewhere around 130 feet the more those things get compressed and the longer you have to wait before coming to the

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surface right break of the bends where you get the bends so if you go straight from let's hypothetically say 500 feet

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below sea level directly to the top you get the bends you get decompression

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sickness which results you're in the nitrogen in your body expanding rapidly from all the negative pressure around

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you which results in damage to your blood vessels blocks to nausea confusion you lose motor you die like you almost

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certainly die as a result of this yeah to prevent this deep sea divers have to

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stop at certain intervals to go back to the surface safely the exact interval varies depending on the person the gas

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combination they're breathing how long they've been down there the temperature of the water in a host of other like

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this is not hard science like there's a lot of factors that go into this what I've read is that typically it takes

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between two and three minutes per 10 10 to 15 feet of depth to go back to the surface so it has to be like slow it's

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slow so for example for a 500 foot dive that would mean if it's like a short like you go straight down to 500 feet

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you do something you touch the ground and then you go back up it takes about two hours to go back up but these guys aren't touching the ground and going

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back up they're spending eight to ten hours on the sea floor working right mm-hmm

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obviously companies want to mitigate how much how much time is lost every day

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by people going down to the bottom where can they going back up because if you actually decompress every single day it

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would be a nightmare for the divers it'll be a nightmare for the companies the profit margins would be like all of it's bad like none of it's good so

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instead of doing that and decompressing every single day and wasting days of work what they do instead is they stay

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in a pressurized tube called a diving bell that maintains the outside pressure The Depths they're working at so if you

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can imagine it there's this like object like this spherical thing that

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gets dropped below the ship over the workstation on the sea floor it maintains the pressure of the C4 you

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swim out of it go to the place where you're working swim back into it and then the pressure maintains

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you go back up you dock with the ship and then you're good and they just stay there basically you stay pressurized I hate it so when they're done diving or

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when they're done working they go back to the diving belt that gets wrenched up to the surface of the dock or whatever it is and there is what is called the

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pressurized living system or a diving chamber that sits on the ship or the oil rig and that's where people the divers

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leave the dive Bell to go into to live sleep work you know do whatever and get

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back to the dining Bill the next morning and go back down it's all pressurized a pressurized place but like above the

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water yeah they're on the deck they're on the ship deck but they're shipping they're in a chamber on the ship deck that is pressurized as though there are

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a thousand people of the surface holy [ __ ] yeah it's crazy and the way it works is that typically if you're a

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saturation diver you can work about four weeks give or take in these conditions

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so you stay fully pressurized for for four weeks and then gradually once you're done with the job they start

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increasing the pressure slowly slowly and that rep is basically reflective of them swimming further up in the water

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column until they're in atmospheric pressure of one makes sense how do you guess but how do you do you feel normal

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yeah yeah your body gets adapted to it because you're breathing a special combination right like you're not actually like it's the oxygen at that

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level is so compressed that they have to mix with other stuff for you to be able to breathe normally but yeah it is you

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do feel normal wow on the buy for Dolphin there were four saturation divers I'm going to use our first stand

16:48

because two of them are Scandinavian and that is a lot of consonants in a row that I'm not going to even try and pronounce their names are Edwin Roy

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Bjorn and trolls guess which tour the Scandinavian ones Bjorn

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and Roy Charles Woodman trolls Charles no uh

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t-r-u-l-s she did Charles and I was like I don't know yeah yeah

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so the dining chamber on the Byford dolphin had two parts so there's basically one section that was a kitchen

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and then another section there was like a living area and a bedroom area so on this day in November 1983 two of

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the divers Roy and Edwin they were resting in the dive chamber they were sleeping essentially underground or on

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the boat on the boat okay yeah on that day so they're doing shifts right so

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Bjorn to go down they do the work they go back in the diving belt go back hook up the chamber and then they're up there

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and then the other two come back in and they go back down that's the way it works Bjorn and trolls came up via the

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Diagon doll their day was done they came up via the diving belt at this point all four men had been compressed to an

17:54

atmosphere of nine so their atmospheric pressure is nine times the pressure that

18:00

they would me and you experience at sea level essentially outside the diving chamber are two dive

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tenders whose job it is is to safely dock the diving chamber to the diving bell so make sure the two pieces are

18:13

connected make sure they're pressurized and usually the way they connect them is through this thing called the trunks there's a passageway the diving belt

18:20

goes up it fits onto this spherical thing it's called the trunk that spherical thing connects the diving

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chamber then the dive tender make sure the two all three are pressurized in the same amount that they can pass through from one to the other and okay all

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they're trying to do is equalize pressure it takes a lot of I feel like everyone needs to be real on in this job real on you really don't want someone

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drinking on this on the job here yeah so Bjorn trolls are in the dining chamber

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they get hooked up to the trunk the trunk gets hooked up to the diving bell and they make their way from the diving

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belt into the trunk to get into the diving chamber the two the two dive tenders had successfully pressurized all

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three areas and they make their way through this in the middle of the of them going

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through this so one is one is opening the diving chamber when it's your sleep

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the other guy is closing the diving bell because once that's closed then they're

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inside they can pull it away and then come back later on and reconnect it in the middle of this a dive tender released the clamp holding

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the dining Bell to the trunk I'm so nervous because I just I feel like someone's gonna explode and I like feel

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like I'm gonna throw up yeah that's exactly what's gonna happen you really you really stepped on the story

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I'm sorry I'm just like very nervous I'm like oh my God I feel like it's because you feel normal right but then like one

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weird thing happens and you realize that like you're not normal oh my God I can't feel my arms when this

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plant was released the negative pressure is nine atmospheres of pressure rushed

19:55

out of the chamber into the opening basically turned one of the guys into

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just confetti because the temperature the pressure is trying to equalize the only way it can equalize by going out

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right the other guys was right next to in trying to close the diving bell hash

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and got swish right through it with the force of nine pressure nine pressures of

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atmosphere wait how oh my God I'll explain I'll explain this because actually in case somebody's wondering if

20:23

I read just with pity articles uh go I'll I will be referencing their exact

20:28

autopsy report from 1983 here in a month oh God three of the divers were super

20:34

lucky because their blood boiled immediately but they were they were so

20:41

all of them died before you know it's like the time submersible situation they said that if it was an explosive decompression but at the time they would

20:48

have understood what happened it would have been over right same here like the amount of pressure we're talking about

20:54

was enough to where they didn't know what was going on nobody experienced any pain or anything like that their blood

20:59

boiled immediately one of the interesting things in the on temperature report I found was they found like a ton

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of fat in these guys veins in their arteries and around their organs and it was like what on Earth happened like

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because nobody's experiences this has never happened yeah history before nobody knew what was going on they

21:17

concluded that the rapid nature in which are blood boiled broke down and denatured the composite material of

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blood in ways that chemically I don't totally understand but I converted them into adipose tissue into fat they

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basically converted what was left their blood into just pure fat it's like I have no idea how it works chemically

21:36

that was the inclusion of the autopsy report oh my God the one that got it the

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worst was a diver who was beginning to close the diving belt door that was trolls she had his entire body shoved through a

21:48

tiny opening in the door which bifurcated him completely in half his organs except for his trachea and

21:55

small intestines in his spine well that's not your organ but they found his spine everything exploded basically

22:01

immediately so you were right he did explode wow those pieces plus his spine were spent about 30 feet out in the

22:07

other direction I found the autopsy photos so in the in the autopsy of um that they generated for these guys

22:14

there's pictures of them they so three of them are just like weird

22:19

looking like they just like they have like weird bruises over their body because apparently it just immediately flash fried them from the inside but

22:25

they look mostly normal this guy trolls he was confetti they they in the autopsy

22:30

report um it states that he was delivered in four sacks to the to the corner oh my

22:36

god there was a picture of his face there was no bone nothing like it was just like you just all you can make it

22:42

was like he had like a he had a kind of beer that I have and you could see that and like kind of where his mouth was and that was basically it it looked like it

22:48

looked like Leatherface were they inside inside they were inside suits no no okay

22:54

so the three guys that had their blood boiled immediately they were not wearing suits because the ostrich pictures were

23:00

taken when they were there and they were just in their underwear I don't know if trolls so what I remember reading about

23:08

saturation timing is that the typical protocol is you take all your gear off in the diving belt before you crawl in

23:13

uh-huh so probably not in the his suit oh my God

23:18

the ultimate cause of error was the ultimate cause of the issue is human error on the part of the dive tender who disconnected the diving belt before

23:24

trolls and Beyond were in the chamber so one of the dive tender that did that

23:30

actually died too because the dining Bell hidden with such force and pressure just like pancaked in completely the

23:36

other one suffered tremendous injuries but somehow remained alive the families of the divers ended up

23:43

suing the government of Norway who had approved this system there's a lot going on here that

23:50

I'm not going into because it'll take 17 more hours there was no outside ability to read the pressures from one from the

23:57

trunk to the chamber like there was right yeah we don't know why you disconnected

24:03

it like we don't know if he was just confused he didn't know whatever but basically there's family suits saying

24:09

that the government of Norway approved this process they approved these materials these Chambers to be used that was in the wrong and

24:15

apparently they only finally won judgment in 2008 which is 26 years after

24:21

the accident actually occurred and that's uh been probably the single worst

24:28

accident when it comes to pressurization and dining bells and diving chambers has

24:33

ever happened well I just want to warn everybody that when you Google this you're going to get a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger when he's on Mars in uh

24:40

what's that movie oh oh yeah yeah um oh God uh it's not running man it's uh

24:47

but you know what I mean I know what you mean yeah and that's definitely not what happens what happens is so immediately

24:54

and you know what Taylor like I was thinking about because like when I was because that's what fascinated me about

24:59

the whole Titanic thing was like Total Recall Total Recall because the pressure like the um the physics of what

25:06

happens to like to the human body in these situations is you just you can't believe it right like right

25:13

and it's not like that far away if you went like if I walked 500 feet you know

25:18

I'd be like oh I just are like whatever like you walk I could walk that far and nothing would happen to me when you go

25:24

down that far you know it just becomes so like crazy and then I always think about

25:29

always I mean whatever the Titanic is crazy but you know like all the other stuff like they were like

25:37

dishes and clothes and books and people and it's like everything is like it's like at one point getting soaked in this

25:44

freezing water and then also the pressure the pressure is just like changing everything it's crazy I mean also like if it was safe I would love to

25:52

go down there oh my God how cool is that so look at the appeal I don't think he

25:58

could ever be like where I would do it I'd go with James Cameron whatever he's doing I'd do no

26:04

one else yeah even that was here the hell I mean so that's the thing is like that's why there isn't an issue with the Titanic

26:10

and there's not an issue with the people the things that are down there because the pressure's equalized

26:15

right that's the issue the issue with this submersal was that inside had a vastly different pressure than outside

26:20

but the Titanic all the water and all the pressure's been equalized like there's no right right because it's all

26:26

better there for so long well it broke up when it went down so the the Titanic itself the inside was

26:33

equalizing as the outside was equalizing so that's why I never went through a crush experience but oh right because it

26:39

was like because it was like open yeah it was open it was open your problem is only when you're trying to

26:46

keep the pressure from outside from coming in but at the Titanic's case that was a conclusion right and that yeah I

26:52

mean obviously along with the rest of the world watched a bunch of videos of like steel drums being like vacuumed

26:59

clothes this week so yeah the second story is going to be a lot

27:05

more familiar but I also found it really really interesting and I actually paid this one specifically because of your past station with Russia do you know

27:11

what the k-141 is no do you know what the curse is no

27:18

so the cursed was a Russian nuclear-powered cruise missile class submarine from the early 2000s I

27:26

remember oh God it was called the k-141 that is a classification like back then

27:32

or um during World War II the U was used for a classification for German Nazi

27:39

boats the K is for Russian boats piece for American boats so on and so forth so every country every country has their

27:45

own classification essentially and the cursed tragedy happened in the year 2000

27:55

and that's an important part of what ends up playing out here because to put things into perspective on why things

28:00

happen the way they happen at 2000 is about nine years after the collapse of

28:06

the Soviet Union so Russia was coming out of their USSR

28:11

State and they were financially crippled they're militarily kind of embarrassed because that's what

28:17

crippled them they're not doing too good the com the exercise in communism didn't play out as expected the world's looking

28:22

at them a certain way and so they found themselves kind of this weird friendless State you know from the year 1991 on to

28:29

when the first disaster ended up happening in 1998 the entire world suffered a huge global economic

28:35

recession which resulted in dramatic increases in prices for Russia's main export at the time which was energy so

28:42

around late 1998 to early 1999 while the rest of the world was suffering from

28:48

this recession Russia began to actually feel a bit of resurgence they started filling some pride in themselves like oh

28:53

we are we're doing good now like you know this could be what we need to kind of turn this ship around

28:59

and that's an important factor in understanding why things happen with the curse the way that ended up happening in August of 2000 so Russia wanted to show

29:07

that hey we're still here we still got it so they put on the largest display of

29:13

military exercise in decades the country's history so they wanted to put together in this August of 2000 this

29:20

massive display of all of their Naval warship power and part of that was the

29:26

curse the k-141 Kirsch was considered the flagship submarine in the fleet it

29:32

had a reputation that again is another through line here fits with the Titanic perfectly because it was considered

29:38

Unsinkable nothing is it was considered Unsinkable because why would you even say that out loud I know

29:45

know seriously you're asking for to [ __ ] drown the reason that this was considered Unsinkable had to do with its

29:51

um double haul design which essentially meant that if one you could reach one part of it and then still not sink the

29:57

ship and or the submarines and until you reached the second Hall again there's no such thing as Unsinkable literally

30:03

everything which is literally what the Titanic said was like oh we have all these different chambers so if you like breach one chamber it won't go in the

30:08

next one or the next one and then it got sliced across the side and it's over yeah this goes back to my theory that

30:15

marketing people never talk to product people you're totally right oh my God never

30:21

and submarine construction on this morning in August of 2000 the

30:26

curse was authorized to fire off a dummy torpedo as part of this war game and kind of kicked things off something goes

30:32

wrong at this point we don't know which one um yet because I'm describing the events and as they're happening all we know at

30:39

that time is that Norwegian seismic seismic detectors detected a seismic activity measuring 1.5 on the Richter

30:45

Scale two minutes and 14 seconds later they recorded a 4.2 on the Richter Scale in

30:52

the exact same spot on the sea floor this time I'm going to describe what we

30:58

learned two years later about what ended up happening and the reason I'm going to kind of low pass is because that's not

31:05

the important part here basically what ended up happening was a torpedo they fired uses hydrogen

31:11

peroxide fuel source and with this type of fuel when it interacts with the catalysts such as copper which it also

31:19

coppers what torpedo tubes are made of the fuel source or the fuel denatures

31:24

and expands in volume by 5 000 times this particular torpedo was not well maintained it was actually 10 years old

31:31

which put it well past its service life that it should have been used anyways it also had cracks in the fuel cell so

31:39

you have a torpedo that's made of copper you have a fuel cell that has a combustible material that reacts

31:45

negatively when mixed with copper and that has cracks in it so that's the situation when the crew fired this torpedo off

31:52

they introduced the accelerant to light the fuel source which expanded the peroxide mixture by 5000 times exploding

31:59

the torpedo and setting uh 4 800 degree Fahrenheit fire which immediately incinerated the entire Torpedo Room wow

32:07

that was Richter 1.5 that's what was recorded the second blast detected was

32:12

the initial blast setting off five more Warheads which explains why I was like

32:18

four times stronger basically oh like by accident by accident and the blast basically destroyed the

32:24

command center it blew a hole in the hall and one of his compartments to ship basically just like filled with water and sink to the bottom of the ocean

32:30

floor it took a while for the government to realize what had happened in launch

32:35

response but the response I'm sorry underrp you but didn't we think it was like a missing for a little bit

32:41

so we didn't think it was missing okay we didn't think it was missing they thought it was missing I'll explain that

32:47

in here in a second too actually that's a really good point so they launched a response with the

32:52

response itself wasn't that great they actually had a submarine rescue vessel but it was a converted lumbar ship

32:58

called the Mikhail rudnitsky and it had a diving belt a crane specialized gear

33:03

all that good stuff that it needed but it didn't have the thing that obviously wouldn't have being a lumber ship which is automatic positioning basically the

33:10

way it works is that a lot of these ships that have you search and rescue missions and stuff like that they have to stay stationary over what they're

33:16

trying to do that's on the ocean floor right and the way to do that is to automatic

33:22

stabilizing so when waves hit you the ship is correcting itself it's like cruise control for the ocean you don't

33:28

have to be like Port bow Stern blow 20 12 none of that [ __ ] like the ship has a

33:35

little uh projectile um points on the bottom that are kind of doing it for you and actually what's

33:40

interesting is that the Arctic Rose or whatever that that um this the submersible one was that also didn't

33:47

have auto correcting and that was also an issue initially because I was the first uh ship that was on the scene so

33:53

anyways consistent pattern there 12 hours after the curse sank uh this ship the Mikhail brunetsky left port to go

33:59

help the sailors trap in the curse but at this point the feelings were going concerned but they've been told the sub

34:04

was Unsinkable so very similar to the time submersible they hoped that this was a loss of communication and nothing

34:10

more than that the day the curse went down even before

34:15

Moscow knew what had happened so this is before so back then Putin was

34:21

President well she will be forever and always the day it went down the US knew

34:26

was an accident they knew where it was they knew it hit the ground and on that day this is literally before Putin knows

34:32

what happened uh the U.S the UK France Germany Israel

34:38

Italy Norway all six countries reached out saying we know what's going on we

34:44

can help we have all the [ __ ] we have the material we can talk about Russia refused yeah they mounted their own

34:51

rescue which I will say it was admirable how many things they tried it really it really was they did the best with what they had but

34:58

given the nature of Russia coming out of the USSR stage it was just like amateur basically so yeah yeah they had one

35:05

submersible that found the curves can try to dock with it but it couldn't form a vacuole the escape hatch and it ran

35:11

low on batteries and so and they had no more batteries like that was the only they had to take this thing back up plug

35:18

it in for God knows how long before we could try to go back down again it's just like stuff like that the ship the

35:24

Mikhail whatever radinsky didn't have the auto positioning so the C waves and all that would just constantly move it

35:30

off position which was yeah they try to lower a dining Bell but couldn't actually position it over the

35:38

subs latch because of the non-positioning piece of it they tried to make a remote submersal back down

35:44

there to open it but they couldn't open the latch the batteries on that one submersible recharge enough so they

35:49

could relaunch them they freaking run ran the thing into a boom on the ship and destroyed it and so that had to go

35:55

back down and had to start getting worked on for repairs so it took five days after sinking before Putin finally

36:02

said yes I will accept help not for America I won't help take help from America I will take UK Norwegian help

36:08

though so that's what happened so the UK and Norway put together a task force a

36:14

plan to do this they used a Norwegian ship with a British submersible it was a joint operation and it took a couple of

36:22

days to assemble that so by the time they actually got to the curse the course has been down for seven days that rescue team decided to cut holes in the

36:28

Hall of the ship and compartments they knew were already flooded they did this and we're told that only Russians could go in the Russians go in they collect

36:35

all the classified material they collect some prices and come back out mm-hmm one thing I mentioned here that I really

36:42

love was learning like how big of a piece of shampoo is and how he consistently is a piece of [ __ ] so apparently during this entire time he

36:49

was out having an amazing time vacationing and this ended up turning into a huge PR disaster for him

36:54

eventually he came back and was like I'll meet with the families of the sailors who just like tore him a new one

37:00

the median reported that foreign assistance had been offered as early as the day after the ship the curse had

37:08

gone down and Putin had been like he was filmed doing this he told them no no they only offered help like two days ago

37:13

I accepted it two days ago in the meeting and the families that was a lie too at one point this lady whose son was

37:20

down there started screaming at Putin and somebody from the government like injected her with something I was gonna

37:26

say did they all get killed are they okay because I feel like once you yell at Putin in the face you jump off a building I mean that was it like this

37:32

woman was like swimming at him saying we're not gonna let you get out of here alive you piece of [ __ ] he was like she

37:38

was born on him and then someone just grabbed her back and just like injected her with something and she just went limp and they dragged her out of there

37:45

23 men on the curse gathered in one of the compartments as a compartment nine that was slowly filling with water but

37:50

was somehow somewhat survivable and it also had an escape hatch the problem was when the ship went down the nuclear

37:56

reactors were set to automatically shut off when those showed off the air purification systems that scrubbed CO2

38:02

from the atmosphere are also shut off so their oxygen spline was growing Limited in theory they could have opened the

38:09

hatch and made a break for it but they were in the Arctic sea so that's like

38:14

yeah yeah definitely cold so hey they could have drowned before they got the top they didn't have to worry they

38:21

didn't super have to worry about the bends because they were pressurized to the atmosphere of sea level because they

38:29

were at sea level when they went down right the problem was the compartment was seeping with water and so their

38:35

bodies were absorbing nitrogen and their bodies were absorbing more pressure being down there so there was a risk of

38:41

getting the bends but more importantly they're going to die out of big frozen adapt before they got to the top anyways

38:46

so that was the biggest issue and their assumption was look we're in the middle of like a massive military exercise of

38:52

course somebody's coming down here so that was the idea the contentious part about what happened with the curse had

38:57

to do with weather saving those 23 people was possible if Russia hadn't tried the same face and accept help

39:03

early on the answer is we don't know and it kind of doesn't matter because if

39:09

there was a 50 50 chance they could then they should have accepted the help and should have not tried to say face the

39:16

way they try to say face no silver recover from the sailors were timed and dated to about six hours and 17 minutes

39:22

when the ship went down but there's some assumptions that at least up to three to four days those men were still alive in

39:28

there there's reports that there was banging hurt on the hall yeah

39:35

that couldn't have happened because because again the ship was double hauled so like there was right

39:41

I feel like this week I've been hearing that about like remember about the heaven in Pearl Harbor where like people were banging on the

39:48

hall for like two weeks when they couldn't save them yeah which which could have been because those ships were Ironclad they're not

39:55

double hauled so like that could have been a possibility but in this case it would have been impossible because there would have been like this sheet of of

40:01

air between um between that and the outside of water so that part is not true we don't know how long the men were

40:06

alive we'll never know how long the men were alive is it is possible that they could have been

40:12

alive and saved if they'd accepted help from outside sources right so in the end

40:17

the families of the cursed Sailors received a total payout of 35 000 from the government 12 or so of the high ranking leaders the

40:25

Navy were fired and Putin went on to become you know the guy we all know and

40:30

love today so that is my little Tale of Two horrific ways of dying using

40:37

pressure water oceans and all that this is such a horrible ways to die there you

40:42

go it's unbelievable although I would rather die like to buy for Dolphin guys and die like the

40:48

sailors in that compartment 100 because it's also probably dark right oh yeah yeah is Pitch Black you're starving and

40:55

slowly losing all of your oxygen mostly oxygen you're gonna die of not having any oxygen and all you smell is kerosene

41:02

in the screen hear the screams of your Sailors next to you so oh my God that sounds terrible

41:08

and also yeah I covered a Russian story so look at me I'm like I do I I

41:13

instagrammed about Russia yesterday because there's so much Russian stuff happening in the world always and I just

41:19

I love talking about Russia happy to continue talk about it I'm having a an emotional crisis watching the last

41:25

couple episodes of the season of the great because it's so good and I'm so upset so like it's just a whole thing I

41:30

love it oh yeah it's so good there you go are you covering Russia today I'm not

41:36

but I have to pee can you hold on I can hold on thank you sure I can hear you

41:43

I'm muted I bet you could have heard me peeing but I just like to mute it just in case I pee in this totally different room but

41:50

just in case I thought there was a bucket next year computer oh God like you remember when you were like oh I

41:55

like a chamber pot I was like absolutely okay I'm ready hold on no I'm not

42:03

talking about Russia Today first but I am talking about something that does have a little bit of a true crime bit in

42:08

it in the end so that was unexpected so I'm excited to tell you about that

42:13

I was thinking we're talking about we talk about relationships it was a dramatic thing

42:18

that happened in a in a relationship and then I was thinking like do you remember how I have this extremely expensive

42:25

degree in our history oh yeah that I'm still paying for so like yeah so I'm

42:30

like what are some things in our history that seem super dramatic and what is the story that we think we all know so I

42:36

thought who was the person that caused Vincent van Gogh to cut off his ear oh

42:41

my God that is so cool yeah hell yeah and it's not at all what I thought this is a frenetic colorful tragic story

42:48

it begs a question like do artists have to be starving do you have to be mentally ill does something have to be

42:54

wrong for you to create like great art so this is a wild ride of Vincent Vincent Van Gogh's life yes it's gonna

43:01

be a cousin it'll be something gross cousin isn't it no it's not even a woman and it's not sexual weird so I'll tell

43:08

you more also I know that were I a Dutch speaker I would say Van Gogh and not Van

43:14

Gogh but I can't do it I'm not doing that I'm not doing it I can't no I don't it's like when people say when they're

43:19

trying to say well I said just take guacamole man like I I get that you speak a language I can't speak and I'm really proud of you but like you don't

43:25

have to dig up me you can't walk Molly I mean I think you know who I'm thinking about right Taylor no

43:31

tell me later yeah I'll tell you later I imagine but I do I do think that once Dan Carlin does a if he does anything on

43:37

on Van Gogh I'll say Van Gogh because I'll say whatever Dan Carlin says but until then I'm gonna say Van Gogh that's

43:43

what I came up with so I'm gonna tell you about the many failed relationships of Vincent Van Gogh starting with his

43:50

parents his brother Theo God a sex worker named Cien his cousin Kay the art

43:56

World in general an artist named Paul Gogan and ultimately himself so all fail all failed I also we are

44:06

both older than Vincent van Gogh will ever be he died when he was 37. wow and

44:12

we have things that he so desperately wanted and never had we have good

44:18

friendships we have loving families we have homes we have I have children someday you might have children who

44:24

knows but like Vincent van Gogh so desperately wanted this family and he will never have them but in 100 years no

44:31

one will remember us

44:36

so yeah no I just it's it's interesting and I think the tragedy that we all know was like he

44:43

wasn't famous in his lifetime sure you know and he was you know this tortured

44:50

artist and he totally was but he had this wild need to be accepted and loved and to express himself and like that was

44:56

what ultimately like led to his death in March 1987 Van Gogh's painting the vase

45:04

with 15 sunflowers was sold for an adjusted 94.21 million dollars

45:10

and that tripled the last painting ever sold before that so it was like a new era of art so like Van Gogh obviously is

45:17

like everyone knows him you can see his art you know exactly what he does you can think about it you like picture it immediately yeah I went to the van Gogh

45:24

there's in Austin they set up a van Gogh

45:30

I did it in Las Vegas yeah yeah it's cool yeah I mean he's everywhere and Wikipedia's list of the top 89 most

45:37

expensive paintings I remember as well 89 on that list ever sold 11 of them are his so 11 are like the top you know most

45:45

expensive paintings ever sold are his he only sold one in his last year of his life so he only saw one that he saw that

45:52

he sold there's a did you ever watch Doctor Who I've seen a few episodes I'm not like a

45:58

huge Doctor Who I know what a tardis is so perfect so there's one and I've only seen this clip but it's a beautiful clip

46:04

where they get van Gogh and they take him to a exhibit in like 2010 and they ask the the Dawson to tell them like you

46:11

know what is it about van Gogh and he goes off and he talks says he's you know he's one of the greatest artists that ever lived and Van Gogh starts crying

46:17

and it's just like beautiful and like very lovely but in his life he never knew so again like you know I spent this

46:24

week on a topic that people spend their whole lives doing so I'm definitely gonna like Miss things and there's definitely worth

46:30

a story but it's such a good story so the thing that I read was the book Van Gogh The Life by Stephen McAfee and

46:37

Gregory white Smith so that's the book that I read and then I also have some like art history books from when I was

46:43

in college that I looked at as well and then also just to mention this is post-impressionism if

46:50

you were like what where are we with this well one more thing that I don't maybe that's it

46:56

for the end but I just want to add now because it's fun is there is a missing Van Gogh it is called poppy flowers

47:02

um it was stolen from Muhammad Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo twice it was

47:08

stolen in the 80s and it was stolen again in 2010 and no one knows where it is pretty cool and pretty fun so let's talk

47:16

about him himself Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30th 1853 in Groot

47:22

zerndirt Netherlands so there's a lot of words that I'm not gonna be able to pronounce because they're Dutch and French coming at you just FYI you just

47:30

reminded me that I actually went to his actual Museum when I went to Amsterdam cool yeah it was really cool he doesn't

47:36

want to like lithographs there was like a lot of ways okay okay it struck my mind like I didn't know the guy and I

47:42

thought he's a painter only and I guess you know he did thousands of works there's so much then

47:48

go stuff it's crazy yeah his parents theodorus Van Gogh and his mother Anna

47:53

his dad was a minister of the Dutch reform church so they were Protestant in a very Catholic area

47:58

it was a very family first family his mom was very strict wanted the family to

48:04

be together and be happy this is also like a weird time in the Netherlands they are

48:10

think about nature a lot think about the garden they think about flowers they have this idea that

48:17

people have all the time that there is this glorious past that we have to go back to that we have to remember and

48:23

they're remembering times when the Netherlands Netherlands was really successful and they're Enchanted by that they're

48:30

Enchanted by the past and we talked a little bit about that in like the Tulip Mania episode you know when people were

48:35

like first becoming in to start becoming to be middle class and starting to like get money and people like had a lot it

48:40

was very prosperous time for them but also it was because of slavery that they were so successful so they know that by

48:48

this time you know they're like so easy when other people do all the work for you for free yeah exactly so they you

48:56

know have this memory of a time where things are great but they also don't want to remember the fact that they were great because they enslaved people right

49:03

himself was the oldest surviving brother of six children a brother was born the

49:09

year before him exactly a year before him whose name was also Vincent van Gogh but then the brother died stillborn and

49:15

then Vincent was born a year later which is like maybe weird or Frost and it was for them but still kind of weird I don't

49:21

love it yeah and uh his parents we're still mourning the dead it's like

49:28

started over to name this one that's a little weird yeah I don't love it

49:34

different times yeah so his parents kept having kids his mom actually had her last kid at 47 which I think is

49:39

interesting so his family read a lot they love reading Dickens they love

49:46

reading fairy tale books things like that they read a book this isn't really

49:51

important but one of the the authors that they liked was a man named Edward woolwor litten Leighton who I've never

49:58

heard of but he was the first person to ever write it was a dark and stormy night oh nice which is kind of fun you

50:04

know I guess someone had to write that for the first time and I don't know I don't know anything else about him but it's fun that's he was the first person

50:10

to read that another big thing in the van Gogh family is there to make each other gifts so they loved Christmas

50:15

imagine like you know a Dutch Christmas there's you know a lot of like candles and ribbons

50:22

and flowers and they would make each other presents so they would crochet things and collage things and always

50:28

just like really loving the dad's three mantras were Duty

50:33

decency and solidity so Fey has ups and downs choose the middle like just like

50:38

do the middle path which does not it's not at all what his children did but that's what he was like trying to force upon them

50:48

what does that mean and what I wrote is yeah Fate has ups and downs but you choose the middle but you stand strong

50:55

in the middle so like when a good thing happens don't forget that bad things happen

51:00

well to them yes so when a bad thing happens don't forget that something good will happen eventually like this too shall pass

51:07

stuff but also when something good is happening don't forget that something bad can happen at any moment she I typed salinity and I was like the

51:14

dissolved salt of content really salty water is our third family virtue I don't

51:20

know why it just is but that made it hard obviously for the kids to be themselves because their

51:25

parents are like failures always around the corner you're gonna have a weird a weird life right because him and his mom did not

51:32

get get along very well he did a lot of art he would send things to her she would throw it away she was like this is

51:40

a jerk kid of mine you know his dad was very religious and so that definitely

51:46

had an impact on Vincent's life eventually they sent him to a boarding school because he was a lot to deal with

51:53

he was very like he would read a ton and do all this art and do all these things but he never really fit in anywhere and

52:00

so his parents were like you're kind of making this family crazy so you know everybody else is like following the rules going to school

52:06

living like a relatively like normal life for for preachers children and Vincent like can't do that he's kind of

52:12

all over the place so they send him away he goes to several different boarding schools he still doesn't fit in so

52:18

they're trying to figure out what do we do with this like our oldest son who's kind of we're gonna have to like support him forever because he can't figure out

52:24

his [ __ ] out essentially I would encourage that and like the ones that don't fit are the

52:30

ones that do cool [ __ ] so yeah he's about to do cool for sure the van Gogh Family actually is very was

52:39

very successful in two ways they were successful in gold and successful in art so it's not crazy that Vincent would be

52:45

an artist as art as an art family his dad is is a preacher because his dad was

52:52

so it was like several several generations of like going right back to your exact

52:57

dad whatever like that line was creatures but but everybody else was like in in the art World his uncles are

53:03

art dealers so they're people who are like telling everybody what to like in art during this time in big cities like in

53:10

Paris in London like all over Europe his dad also to note did have a fun time in University before he got married and

53:16

then he decided to become more Pious so he at least at least he had like a little bit of personality in there but right now also there's this crazy

53:23

thing happening where there's a new book called the life of Jesus that came out and it for the first

53:29

time in these guys's life they're seeing Jesus as potentially a real person and

53:34

not like as the Son of God just kind of throwing a wrench into things so it's kind of a crazy time to to be involved in religion

53:41

but Vincent decides that you know they're like he needs to get out of the house we need to he won't go to school

53:46

he keeps walking home from school so his he had an uncle named Vincent van Gogh

53:52

and this Uncle was called scent so scent is this uncle's nickname for Vincent

53:57

and he's an art dealer so he made money in an art store he was a very fun guy he confused one his uncle was named Vincent

54:05

van Gogh the Vincent's in the family okay but the uncle's event go but his

54:12

name his nickname is sent so we're just gonna call him mom said okay cool yeah yeah and so sense is one of the first

54:19

people who started to see like you were saying with the lithographs like art that's like reproducible and people want

54:25

to see to get Prince so he would sell prints they sold prints in The Hague and he became very rich and Uncle scent was

54:32

not able to have children with his wife so his wife and him just like worked together and they brought Vincent on as

54:38

sort of like you know a family maybe a son figure who can work with them and visit with 16 when he went

54:44

to work and scent store in The Hague he's the worst at work did you ever like go into like a niche store and there's

54:51

like a nerd there that you just like don't want to talk to uh that would usually be me at my

54:57

GameStop I was gonna say like at GameStop like yes so imagine he's like the nerdiest dude

55:03

at the GameStop and people and people are like trying to go in and like buy our and like do these things that he's

55:09

kind of freaking out about everything he's like you should buy this because it's this and this is this and he's like this applies to this poem applies to

55:16

this book applies to this thing and he just has so much going on in his head that when you talk to him you're like overwhelmed and people are like uh no

55:22

thank you so the kind of like back out of the store slowly like don't want to buy anything so they sent him to the

55:28

back of the store because they're like you can't talk you're way too weird sorry sorry bro he moves around he's 16

55:35

by 19 he's in very very much in the scene of going to brothels all the time

55:43

he spends a lot of time with sex workers sometimes just to talk sometimes like other things but like something weird

55:49

happens during this time where they're just like you gotta cut that out like you can't do it anymore like it wasn't

55:55

like who's they the sex workers told him to cut it out no the hit Uncle scent and

56:00

like the people of the store because of something that happened in the brothels I don't know exactly what it was but

56:05

like everybody knew that he had like maybe like freaked out on someone you know what I mean like he did something and everybody was like uncomfortable

56:12

around him so like you gotta go so send him to London

56:17

yes he definitely absolutely there's so much mental illness that like we would think about differently and I'll tell

56:23

you actually like what they know he had later but yeah like someone's up his brother Hannah younger brother named

56:29

Theo Theo is five years younger than him Theo was sent to a similar job in

56:34

Brussels and he did great Theo's great he's personable everybody likes him he

56:41

is always the one that will financially support Vincent for his whole life so Vincent's whole life he will ask you for

56:46

money and Theo will send him money um while Theo is selling other people's art and he's like he's doing fine

56:53

Theodore's fine Vincent get sent to London to work in the same company but in a stock room and he was bummed he you

57:00

know didn't want to be in London London was like really dirty and gross and like so many more

57:07

people that he was used to seeing and like he didn't know if he loved it and he felt very isolated and alone another thing that happens during this time

57:13

which I think is crazy is he because he wasn't doing very well he was

57:18

about to get drafted into the military and the military was going to send him to Sumatra to like fight in

57:26

like a war there that they were having and he got out of it his parents paid 600 guilders which is a year's salary to

57:33

send a bricklayer in his place Jesus is that is privilege yeah and instead I

57:40

was kind of like hey it's almost money but also like yeah he wasn't going to send him to Sumatra to do that so he sent some poor bricklayer in his place

57:46

but Vincent will always be a financial burden to his family like always and he's always trying to find another like

57:54

that family feeling he had when he was younger before people started to try to like get rid of him in certain ways so I

57:59

was in London he meets a family like a woman and a widow and her daughter he's like this is my new family we're super

58:05

happy I like love it here he invites his sister sister was like it's weird like you're being weird like why are you so

58:11

obsessed with these people and there's so many relationships he'll have or like they only last a month

58:16

but the first two weeks are like this is the best thing that ever happened to me this is it this is my this is my thing

58:21

and then the last two weeks are awful and then he leaves and never talks about it again and it happens over and over

58:27

yes autism yeah like it's just obviously like he just has like a disconnect from

58:33

whatever we don't it's all good you'll discuss it but yeah no exactly like he has a disconnect like in his head he's

58:39

like seeing things differently than everybody else has seen right you know he's like absorbing all this literature

58:45

all these stories all this art and it's just like he cannot express it in a way that isn't

58:50

crazy you know people like yeah she's like people are like you gotta calm down like you we can't we can't do this he

58:57

decided that he was super lonely he didn't know what to do so he turned

59:03

to God he was like my dad is is a pastor preacher or whatever I want to do I want to do the same

59:09

um so during this time also he was in Paris when the Impressionists were making their move so like the ones that

59:15

you know like Monet is doing his thing and he missed it he doesn't write about

59:20

it because again like most of the people I talk about we know about him through his letters and

59:25

he missed it because he was going into this like religious fervor being like I can be the best preacher out there you

59:31

know and then he also missed it because Monet wasn't famous in when he was

59:36

no he wasn't a way that it was like they were trying to be disruptive so you would have heard of him you know like

59:43

maybe that people weren't like he's amazing and like they're putting water lilies in their house but they were like he's being disruptive so you should have

59:49

known yeah yeah so he also just like I put like Putin because you know I

59:56

guess speaking of Putin he had this romanticized idea of the past which Putin does as well so Putin looks at

1:00:03

Catherine the Great and says like there was this time in Russian history where we were the best and that isn't true

1:00:10

because things were horrible things were happening all over the country but he wants to like be a part of that past and

1:00:16

so Vincent always like I want to be a part of the French Revolution like I'm I was born too late so he

1:00:22

is very lonely he gets fired from his job in London he goes home for Christmas Christmas is again a huge deal people

1:00:29

complained about him they wanted to act like nothing had happened they just like kind of wanted him to go away so also I

1:00:35

guess also back to Russia of course I mentioned Russia like just like Rasputin Vincent went for a walk

1:00:42

for a really long time there you go they went for a walk for months he would walk

1:00:48

for days along the countryside just like walking around kind of preaching not doing much art but

1:00:54

like you know really like reading the Bible and becoming very very religious he finally got a small job at a church

1:01:01

in London so he's walking around England he gets a job in London he speaks English so he speaks English Dutch

1:01:07

French but his English is very heavily accented and he's super excited so people are just like what is this as

1:01:14

he's like preaching in the thing he's very passionate he's very strange no one thinks he's going to be a

1:01:20

preacher which is also really hurtful you know because Stanley's like yeah you're doing something that like a lot

1:01:25

of us have done but we don't think you're gonna you're gonna be successful it's also it makes him so much less cool

1:01:31

to me I didn't know he was trying to be a preacher like he like lost so many cool points by trying to be a preacher like okay

1:01:38

so he now he's like walking around he's smoking he smokes constantly he smokes a

1:01:44

big like a big pipe all the time and he studies and studies and studies but like he doesn't study the right way you know

1:01:49

it's like he does that thing that he always feels like he needs a teacher

1:01:54

but he never finds a teacher that he will listen to so he just like studies his own way which is sometimes which

1:01:59

doesn't give him the outcome that he wants you know so that's like someone being like I'm gonna read the Bible 15 times that's how

1:02:06

I'm going to become the most religious person of all time you know and you're like okay but you also just like talk to people and like do other things you know

1:02:13

I have a joke in the in the chamber and I'm not gonna no do it go ahead no I'm

1:02:18

not gonna do it well you can do it eventually do it

1:02:25

let's just say there's other things the Catholic churches done you know what I'm

1:02:30

not doing it okay what's that Catholic is Protestant but he he just he's an artist

1:02:37

an artist's heart an artist soul but he's like how do I express this he's trying to express it through religion he throws himself into 100 and it doesn't

1:02:43

work so meanwhile Theo his brother

1:02:49

even though he's successful in the art world and as a successful store and like is doing well

1:02:55

he falls in love with some not as reputable ladies and he gets

1:03:02

someone pregnant and his parents are like absolutely not so he has to get a prostitute pregnancy I think I don't know if she was a

1:03:09

specifically a sex worker but like someone who was poor but he's definitely sleeping with a ton of sex workers that's gonna be Theo's lot in life so

1:03:16

he was getting super depressed and that's what's happening coming in the background like he was successful in

1:03:22

work like he gets offered a job for like [ __ ] ton of money like more money than anyone had ever seen and he you know is

1:03:28

doing very he's very successful he goes to the Opera he dresses really nice because another thing that then goes the family was really into was like dressing

1:03:35

really nice and going for walks on Sundays and everybody see them and being like oh they look nice they have their [ __ ] together you know so Theo looks

1:03:42

like he has a [ __ ] together when he does not have a [ __ ] together now Vincent's 25 he's hoping he's hoping to become a

1:03:47

preacher he becomes a pastor to a poor mining Village in Belgium

1:03:52

um called the boronage and he's one of the people who you know reads the Bible and interprets it as like if you suffer

1:03:59

you're lucky you know like you're you're lucky because you're suffering and so that was good because there's a mining

1:04:05

town and on April 17 1879 there was a huge [ __ ] explosion a ton of people

1:04:11

died it was a [ __ ] mining town he tried to like Comfort people and they were just like absolutely not you know

1:04:17

like this is weirdo yeah like everyone we noticed exploded like we can't we can't with you so he was there he was

1:04:24

there a month and he kept trying to like be like I'm also gonna suffer he would he would like not eat for days you know he'd walk for

1:04:31

days he wouldn't take care of his body because he was like I have to suffer to like be religious so now he's like he's

1:04:37

trying way too [ __ ] hard you know and so he gives up he's like I'm not a preacher he becomes an atheist it's over

1:04:44

okay who knows whatever he really believed he just wanted to like do something with passions like I can put

1:04:50

my passion into this and that didn't work it was like too much so now he's like sorry I think he moves to Brussels

1:04:57

and he started taking art classes he spends money on nice clothes he you know

1:05:03

tries to start a print collection tries to make money from selling his collection but again like even if he is

1:05:09

in art classes he doesn't last very long and even if he you know dresses really nice people are like we can tell that

1:05:15

you're weird you know and like later there's all tons of stories of people who like you know they're asked

1:05:21

20 30 years later do you remember him and they're like yeah we remember him he was really [ __ ] weird you know yeah

1:05:27

it was a weird guy whatever and he became obsessed with several

1:05:33

um artists and he would like because I need to study under you I need to like be a part learn teach me everything and that would last like a month just like

1:05:40

everything you know it'd be like super high high super low over and then he would like never talk to them again

1:05:45

he became obsessed with his cousin K and he asked her to marry him and she said

1:05:52

no like absolutely not she said she's kind of onto something when I thought it was a cousin that did this to him yeah

1:05:58

but this I mean this I don't even know he was like oh I Really Wanna he asked her to marry him and she said never no

1:06:04

never which is very dramatic it's not what you want to hear and so he was like I really

1:06:11

want to see her like you know he like tried to go and talk to his uncles and be like I I need to see her and they were like no like it's absolutely not so

1:06:17

he had to like kind of like deal with that like he was still trying to find this like family he feels like he's a

1:06:24

late bloomer obviously he meets more artists an artist named mauve he meets for a while but he never has enough

1:06:29

money he always gets in fights with people he just like can't keep it together the big thing that Theo keeps

1:06:35

telling Vincent is you need to make salable art would you be able to sell your [ __ ] like in the book they say

1:06:42

salable art like 15 million times like this is the thing that you need to do but he just can't do it he knows art dealers he knows artists he

1:06:50

knows who people are buying and he just like cannot do it he approaches art like he approached being a preacher like he's

1:06:55

impossible to get along with because it's just like so into it and so in his head and produces this stuff that comes

1:07:01

out like garbles and people don't get it no you know so one thing that he loved doing is

1:07:08

he loved drawing people and he insisted on drawing people from um from a model like from having a

1:07:13

person there he couldn't really draw from his imagination it was not something that he did he stood in front of things and Drew them he would spend

1:07:20

all of his money on models a lot of time they were sex workers a lot of time they were really poor people that he would give like a couple coins to and then

1:07:26

they would like you know pose for him but people still thought that was really weird you know

1:07:32

they'd be like oh you're gonna go like stand in this guy's house and just like pretend to eat for an hour three hours he's gonna paint you like people thought

1:07:38

that would that thought that was really strange coming this strange yeah so he tried to master some things

1:07:45

um he struggled to paint perspectives he bought this like frame to help him do perspectives like he wasn't like perfect at really any thanks he was just so like

1:07:51

kind of kind of overwhelming in general he met a sex worker named Cien

1:07:56

and she was pregnant when he met her and he you know fell in love with her thought they'd have a family together

1:08:02

and he like loved her very passionately even though she was

1:08:07

gross so he we we have drawings of her we know

1:08:13

about her life said it was gross she has she was just s-i-e-n she was just riddled with STDs

1:08:22

and she was pregnant and she like you know was missing her teeth was like a

1:08:28

witch yeah she's not doing great and of course

1:08:34

he gets gonorrhea so it's actually like really bad and they're both in the

1:08:40

hospital at the same time while Suzanne is having her baby and Vincent is being treated for gonorrhea which I don't know the details but I did learn in the book

1:08:47

they tried to like get rid of it by inserting bigger and bigger catheters into him until it like fleshed out

1:08:54

sounds [ __ ] terrible and his dad came to visit him during this time and was like dude you can't stop talking to this

1:08:59

woman like you have to get out of this and Vincent was like no I love her I'm gonna go back to her as soon as I get out of here whatever you can see it

1:09:06

continues to be supported by Theo his family like kind of friends to take over and like put him under conservative

1:09:12

conservative ship and be like you know you have to you can't take care of yourself but he insists that he's okay

1:09:20

and this whole time he's kind of been drawing and now he wants to paint so

1:09:25

he's starting to get into painting and he's starting to get more money from his from his brother and he's still with with sand he thinks of himself as like

1:09:34

Robinson Crusoe like by himself on this island of passion that like no

1:09:40

one understands and he's always like I'm about to get like something that you can

1:09:46

sell I'm like this close to making something that everybody that everybody will want to buy everybody's patient

1:09:51

with me the consequences will be dire if you're not he'd rather die than quit like all those things he still really

1:09:56

thinks he can do this and in the in the book that I read this is where they say he starts waving the

1:10:03

red flag of mental instability he's like even more losing it than

1:10:08

before I'm gonna I'm gonna go on a limb here I will say

1:10:13

this might be a bit of a shock I am not looking very artsy person

1:10:18

I don't care about art that much I don't know what look I just know what looks good to me I don't really I will say

1:10:25

like I'm looking at his paintings in the thick brush stroke Line work stuff that

1:10:30

he does like it is objectively really really cool and awesome and also his family's right he is

1:10:37

unstable he should have been locked up he should have had conservative like would a pregnant prostitute comes

1:10:42

knocking on your door and you're like I want to be your baby somebody get this guy help like yeah

1:10:49

it's like if any of our brothers do that you'd be like it's like we used to make Christmas

1:10:54

cards at home and like make Mama cake for and now you got like this woman

1:11:01

pregnant and you have gonorrhea and you don't know what you should we talk what are you doing

1:11:06

it's not a diamond on her or whatever we all come from different walks of life there's like sometimes it's okay there's

1:11:12

no overlap yes totally and you yeah you would you would also tell your brother to cut this

1:11:18

out yeah if asked exactly so I mean this is such a such a long story there's so

1:11:24

many things but eventually he's living in Trenton uh with his brother he leaves CN siad's

1:11:30

story ends later but she eventually throws herself into a river and dies by Suicide so her life is continues to be

1:11:37

awful and gross for until it's over and so he lived with his brother for a

1:11:42

little bit his brother has a mistress and he wants them to like all live together he's like we can live together

1:11:48

like he really needs he wants his family unit back but he remembers when he was younger but Theo won't won't live with

1:11:54

him at this point um his mom Falls and he moves back to Belgium uh to the Netherlands to take

1:12:00

care of her and he you know got a got a patron got a painting teacher he ended

1:12:07

up meeting a woman named Margot and she was 43 and he was younger so he must

1:12:12

have been like 35 or 34 at this point but she's like super in love with him so she falls in love with Vincent and she

1:12:21

is a woman who's a daughter of a neighbor and the neighbor died and his three daughters live in the house alone

1:12:27

like what have happened to Lizzie Borden and her sister they lived in the house alone and her sisters are such [ __ ]

1:12:33

they're like you're too old to get married you can't marry him and like yes he's crazy and all the things but

1:12:39

like give me a break like you just like told her she can't get married she can't be happy so poor Margo isn't that she's

1:12:44

too old the problem is that he's an unhinged Maniac who has VD from prostitutes like what am I 100 no you're

1:12:52

totally right that's definitely a lie that history is told they've been like you're too old they've been like dude that guy's dirty yeah that's the problem

1:13:00

you're right you're right but his sisters were like her sisters were like are you pregnant like what the hell

1:13:05

she's like no I just love him and they're like no absolutely not so she meets him in a field

1:13:12

in like the middle of the night and she's like I love you so much I don't know what to do and then she faints because she had taken strychnine to try

1:13:20

to try to kill herself he made her throw up took her to the doctor and just felt

1:13:25

terrible after that but he eventually did did leave and they did not obviously did not get married but she's maybe the

1:13:31

only person who really did love him like unconditionally maybe that one woman sound done I guess that's all sad so he

1:13:39

has all these relationships he has this like beautiful imagination it's 1885 he's still at home but he's sad he's

1:13:46

taking care of his his mother after her injury she fell and Theo is still in

1:13:52

Paris and he's like he told he tells Vincent he makes him think of old people

1:13:58

who think their youth was better he's like you're acting like we have this idiotic childhood you have to go back to eventually he's still with his parents

1:14:06

and his dad dies so his dad's last day he goes out and

1:14:12

repairs some fences does a long walk in the snow home and then later after he should have been home a maid here's a

1:14:20

sound on the door opens up the door and the dad is has leaned against the door he's had a massive stroke and he's dead so he made it all the way home like in

1:14:27

the snow by himself but then died at the end which reminds me of my great grandpa who

1:14:33

went to the doctor one day and the doctor said you're doing great you're absolutely perfect he went home and chopped some wood and then had a hard

1:14:38

deck and died so now his sister Anna is such a [ __ ]

1:14:44

and she's like you killed dad like it's your fault that he's dead because you're here and you're stressing him the [ __ ] out and so he's

1:14:51

feels terrible he's with his parents he doesn't know what to do he is acting

1:14:56

weird his brother is like you have to sell some stuff what do we do he's so close and so he makes this lithograph

1:15:03

like you were saying so he learns how to like do this new form of art where you can like quickly reproduce stuff he's

1:15:09

lithographs and he does one called The Potato Eaters oh yeah I'm looking at that right now yeah so it's like a

1:15:16

family eating and he was obsessed with like the peasantry and like poor people in their lives and people saw it and

1:15:21

they were like what is this it's weird like where are their organs

1:15:26

this is not like uh I'm gonna look at this and feel Jolly in there I'm not gonna put this in my living room

1:15:33

really and it ends up in someone's living room later in the story but at this point people are like this is weird like we don't know what it is

1:15:40

um so nothing sells he's pretending that like everything is is okay but nothing is going well he moves to Antwerp and he

1:15:49

also now this is where he can track syphilis so it's just like again tons of STDs so the medicine for syphilis was

1:15:55

Mercury which has its own problems so it would

1:16:01

make you crazy obviously like you know like the Mad Hatter you know yeah because like Hatters would be mad

1:16:06

because of the Mercury do you remember that so like that and then it made you lose your hair it made you spit a lot

1:16:13

because like the Mercury I don't know whatever super like his hair was falling out his teeth were falling out he had

1:16:18

sores in his mouth like he was just like not good and he was trying to spend all of his money

1:16:25

on like getting models we could start painting them and he was learning how to paint taking classes and just was like never working out for whatever reason

1:16:32

things start looking up and he moves to Paris to be with Theo and he gets wooden Dentures he starts eating he starts

1:16:38

dressing nice spends a few months at school but it doesn't work like he goes to school where there's like the teacher

1:16:45

is like okay today we're gonna paint pears like a still life and everybody else is like dude I'm gonna paint normal

1:16:51

and Vincent is like covered in paint there's paint dripping down his arms he's like slapping pain on the thing

1:16:57

he's like talking to himself all these things and people just like don't get it they can't handle it and

1:17:03

they're like he can't do it so he doesn't stay in school very long and then Theo meets a woman who's going to be

1:17:09

really important later named Johanna gesnia and he is like he met her in

1:17:15

Holland he's like I love her he goes ask her to marry him she's like I don't know you like what are you talking about so

1:17:21

she like turns him down and Theo goes back to Paris very very heartbroken so

1:17:27

her name's Johanna we're gonna call her yo if not spelled Joe but pronounced Yo

1:17:33

which is super cute um yeah yo because Johanna you know they're

1:17:38

apologize so CEO is starting to get sick as well because Theo was also riddled with STDs

1:17:46

so okay sorry I'm not reacting anymore I

1:17:51

get it everybody has syphilis everybody has gonorrhea it's [ __ ] awful so he I

1:17:57

don't even know what those things Studio but I imagine it's awful but it's like you know the source why do you keep

1:18:04

going back to the source that's what caves my head in like I don't know anyways but like

1:18:11

emotionally he keeps going back to the sources of things that hurt him you know so it's like just it's true yeah you're

1:18:18

right the whole thing so Theo is starting to get get uh tired

1:18:23

of of vincenter living together which has been Vincent's dream to live with his brother but it's just it's not

1:18:29

working out Vince is obsessed with like this this Madame of this Cafe called The Cafe tambourine

1:18:35

um he's [ __ ] that up he's [ __ ] up every relationship that he's in and Theo is actually now in charge of buying all

1:18:42

the Impressionists and selling it so like he's one of the reasons that impressionism is even such a big deal is

1:18:48

because he was in charge of buying it for the store and selling it just like after they were like the avant-garde thing and now they're like the the

1:18:54

meeting stream Vincent is still not selling the OSL is none of his work

1:19:00

he is doing some cool things some things that I didn't know that he was doing like he became obsessed with Japanese

1:19:05

art so it's like Japanese inspired things that Vincent van Gogh did he would draw like he would copy Japanese

1:19:11

paintings and then draw borders and just put like gibberish Japanese symbols around it because he like didn't speak Japanese or

1:19:17

Japanese but he would like try to like learn from that so a lot of like those like deep colors come from that art in February 1888 he leaves Paris he leaves

1:19:24

living with his brother which was his dream because he does that for Theo's health because Theo is like getting sick from syphilis like super sick and can't

1:19:30

handle having medicine around it's just too much so he leaves and he goes to his town in France called aural

1:19:37

a-r-l-e-s Carl this is where a ton of stuff happens so RL is a place

1:19:43

where Vincent paints his most known works of art he goes to this town it's

1:19:50

like a beautiful Old Town it is it has Roman ruins it has like Renaissance ruins it has like so much history it was

1:19:57

something where like you know the Romans went through it to get the rest of Europe it's just like a beautiful beautiful place and he rents this house

1:20:04

it is yellow and it's called the yellow house and that is where he does a lot of his work that you may have heard of one

1:20:10

thing he says during this time is he says I use color to express myself forcefully so he's like really painting

1:20:16

a lot oil paints are new at this time too so it's like a whole thing he spends a lot of time in late nights in a cafe

1:20:23

he stays in a room he calls it a free love Hotel obviously we know what that Cafe is but but it's like a lovely

1:20:31

thought to be like oh look we're out late at night with like artists and people that kind of don't care this is

1:20:36

an opportunity to start over you know so he's like who can I have come here with me and like actually do art with me so

1:20:41

if he asks another painter named Paul Gogan to come live with him so it takes

1:20:48

a it sounds familiar so look it up so Gogan had spent a lot of time traveling

1:20:54

the world he'd just been in South America and he paints a lot of like native people so there's a whole thing

1:20:59

about like the cultural appropriation of Gogan painting these native people and all of that but he paints like a lot of

1:21:04

things his his colors are very deep but they're also very like matte or Vincent's are very like shiny yeah but

1:21:10

Gogan is older he's 40. so he's like older everybody else he's married but his wife he doesn't he doesn't give [ __ ]

1:21:16

his wife lives somewhere else and people [ __ ] love him like he's starting he's

1:21:22

really um charming and people just like like being around him where they do not like

1:21:28

being around Vincent and also Vincent is starting to get starting to get older and he can no longer have sex because of

1:21:35

STDs so that's like a big thing

1:21:46

but like like you know what you know what I think like every human in their life has like a counter

1:21:52

and that counter takes down how many sex workers you can hook up with and he just

1:21:58

hit his limit S I mean it sounds like it was a lot

1:22:04

more than 15 but no no no at 15 years old I mean way over yeah no he I mean

1:22:10

yes he that was bad he shouldn't he is it ruined his body for sure Theo was

1:22:18

giving Gogan money also and and Vincent money to be like a patron so now he's like both live together it's gonna be

1:22:24

wonderful it's gonna be like it's a beautiful place and they move into into the yellow house Gogan is like

1:22:32

I'm gonna counter your argument because I'm actually looking at gogan's or how is

1:22:37

misappropriation this is like lovely lovely like this like I I don't know I depicted in like a bad way at all this

1:22:44

is like 100 and I don't know I didn't that's like the last things I read and I don't know anything about it I can talk about cooking later but I don't know all

1:22:50

right I just wanted to bring that up because it's like in the news but also like if you look up like a photo of Gogan he

1:22:56

doesn't scream super sexy to me but people loved him [Music]

1:23:02

he has a ton of stories you know maybe that maybe their exaggerations who cares people like love me wrong again so

1:23:08

they'll be like oh I'll post for you go again and then they'll go to go to the house and be like oh [ __ ] Vincent lives here too you know and then like he'll

1:23:15

paint a picture of someone and Vincent will paint picture the same person at the same time but that person's hand will be in front of their face because

1:23:20

they don't want Vincent to look at them oh wow because they just like don't like him you know another thing for for

1:23:27

cooking I wrote this must have been in the book or he has hypnotic sensuality don't know why but his stuff is like

1:23:33

really really selling but they also are like they're battling in their personalities Gogan is very slow very

1:23:40

like specific with his painting Vincent obviously is not Vincent spends all their money on like random things Gogan

1:23:46

is like we need to have a budget like we need to have we need to clean like you can't live like this and Vince it just

1:23:52

like can't do it but at the same time go again starting to get praise and Theo is selling his stuff which [ __ ] sucks because it's like oh you sell his stuff

1:23:58

and not mine yeah you know super upset about it please like pretending this isn't happening he's trying to to rent

1:24:05

more rooms than the yellow house like build his commune it's just him and go again go again's trying to leave he's

1:24:10

like I gotta get out of here so he's like writing letters to people being like I have to get out of the space like I just came to live in the sky but he's

1:24:16

crazy I gotta go on December 23rd 1888 Gogan goes for a walk and Vincent is

1:24:21

like he's leaving like I don't know what to do he's leaving me and he they're in the time in that time there had been

1:24:28

like a murderer we should not look up but there's like a murderer in France everybody was like worried

1:24:34

about and there was a paper and the paper said the murderer has fled so it was like there's murderers out in the

1:24:39

out in the world so this newspaper clipping Vincent follows Gogan as he goes through this walk hands him this

1:24:45

newspaper clipping that says the murderer has fled and then he runs back home and Gogan is just like okay and

1:24:51

goyan goes off like onto his night that's when Vincent goes to a bar he's drinking absinthe

1:24:57

he's [ __ ] up he's overwhelmed with anything of everything he's being rejected again and again Theo has

1:25:04

actually gotten yo to marry him so he was about to get married he sees gogan's room is empty he's like he's gone I'm

1:25:09

all alone and that's when he cuts off his ear wow

1:25:14

that's what did it yeah wow yeah so he's

1:25:19

like I have to do something Grand to like hurt myself you know she's

1:25:25

like an abuser she's an abusive relationship he's like a gas letter I'd say it's like you made me do this okay it's like one of those things so I'm

1:25:33

gonna show you it knowing this is this is the visual part of this podcast so he takes his ear I'm moving my headphone he

1:25:39

pulls it out by the earlobe and takes a straight thing a straight uh razor and

1:25:44

cuts it up like this the whole thing off

1:25:50

then he's bleeding profusely and he wraps it up he wraps his head and he

1:25:57

wraps up the ear in like paper or whatever if he goes out to try to find Gogan

1:26:03

and he's like where can I find him and he goes to a brothel where he knows

1:26:09

Gauguin is but they won't let him in they're like get bleeding you're crazy

1:26:14

you can't come in okay it's like dude this is what I'm talking about exactly 100

1:26:22

so he hands his ear to like the receptionist at the brothel and says

1:26:28

remember me and goes back home so when they say like the thing that I

1:26:33

had heard was that he like gave his ear to a sex worker but he didn't he gave his ear to a sex worker at the brothel

1:26:38

who's trying to find Gauguin to be like look what you made me do don't you love me

1:26:44

yeah I don't blame everyone for beating this guy as a [ __ ] weirdo like this is like yeah but again his brain's

1:26:51

riddled with [ __ ] syphilis like in Mercury it's just like so I can okay so

1:26:58

so far I I assume there's autism ADHD involved there's probably going to be like a little bit of something else mixed in there as well as part of the

1:27:04

cocktail but even worse than that his VD is eating holes in his brain and then what's and that's being filled in with

1:27:10

mercury poisoning it's just like all that it's all it's all bad 100 percent

1:27:16

now he has to go to a mental institution like to an asylum like he has to and they

1:27:25

Theo comes to visit him he only sees a day he takes all of his paintings back

1:27:30

to Paris and kind of leaves him in this institution where

1:27:36

Vincent like yells Miss Peter he says pajamas yelling the whole time you know people wake up

1:27:42

and he's in bed with them like he's just like doing weird stuff like dude can't

1:27:47

be in bed with me Nancy this has to be put in a comedy

1:27:52

movie Vincent I mean I know it's sad it's sad because it's mental illness you shouldn't be laughing at people that are

1:27:58

suffering again you know but it's also like it's such a crazy he's such a crazy historical figure and he's like Vincent

1:28:04

van Gogh was in my bed

1:28:10

this crazy [ __ ] artist was like in my bed again with the hell you know ludicrous ludicrous so he he's in the

1:28:19

hospital he leaves for a little bit and goes back to the yellow house and are all but the people 30 of his neighbors

1:28:24

signed a petition to have him go back they're like we don't want a mirror put him back so he goes back because he

1:28:30

was like walking around drunk you know just like doing weird stuff he couldn't budget he couldn't do anything he's in and out of the hospital

1:28:36

Theo does gets married to Yo and um they're blissfully happy as far as

1:28:42

everyone knows Vincent is on his way to go back to Paris to live near Theo and yo but then he's like

1:28:49

in the Moment of clarity he's like no I gotta go back to the institution she goes back to the institution she's like

1:28:54

because he's like I can't I don't want to hurt you and I don't want to hurt your new life that you have so

1:29:00

he goes back Theo takes all of his art including sunflowers like when Vincent went to finally pack the yellow house it

1:29:06

had been it had been flooded everything was kind of moldy so a lot of his work he had to throw away but a lot of it was

1:29:12

like some of the stuff that we know today like the sunflowers and the really famous things The Potato Eaters were in there as well so he sends that all back

1:29:17

to Paris with with Theo and then also just to note on June 25th 1944 an Allied

1:29:23

campaigned to destroy the bridges Over the Rhone river bombed the area and the yellow house was destroyed so

1:29:30

are you gonna get to like the most famous painting yes okay and coming up today sorry it's happening

1:29:36

really soon now Vincent is in a beautiful asylum in the mountains of France

1:29:42

and this is when they discover that this is what he has he has epilepsy he has

1:29:48

latent epilepsy which means he doesn't have physical seizures but they happen in his brain it causes him to have anger

1:29:56

and mood swings and to work furiously and have exaggerated activity it's like an epileptic Fury that's like only

1:30:03

mental and doesn't really come out in like the physical shaking that you think of like a seizure but it's happening in

1:30:08

his brain that's a lot of what's happening to him the things he's seeing are like all things in his brain like this fire that like other people don't

1:30:15

see that's why he's so like besides other things I'm sure of ADHD of the the

1:30:22

gonorrhea the syphilis the mercury poisoning but it also has epilepsy which makes sense because there's actually a

1:30:27

lot of epilepsy in his family he has an uncle who's epileptic and it totally

1:30:32

syncs with what he does because like if you're having this like late in epileptic seizure that's in your mind you become totally manic you forget what

1:30:39

you're doing and then later you have like serious serious remorse and that's what happens to him all the time

1:30:44

so this in this asylum in France is where he does paint a starry night that

1:30:50

you're talking about yeah I also want to point out that late stage syphilisk also causes seizures and

1:30:56

epilepsy so as we as we try to like paint brush over

1:31:03

these are not congenital the effects the man was born with he [ __ ] his way into epilepsy is what happened

1:31:10

it's also in his family so I don't know it could be it could be both sure sure

1:31:16

we are not doctors we're not doctors go get tested be careful everyone I was thinking about

1:31:22

Starry Night Vincent as I've said didn't paint from memory or from his

1:31:28

imagination he painted from looking at things that's why he was like obsessed with having models except obsessed with

1:31:33

having people actually there when he drew them but a starry night he would stand in his room in his with barred

1:31:40

Windows looking out at the night all night long looking at the stars and then

1:31:45

in the morning they would let him go down into a studio at a paint by day and that's how he painted a starry night

1:31:51

which is like the only thing he ever painted from memory and from his imagination so he the town that's in the

1:31:57

starry night is sort of like there was a town that he could have seen from his room it's not that town but it's like

1:32:03

similar and they made it a lot smaller and more quaint and then on the left there's obviously like the Big Cypress trees and he could have seen those from

1:32:09

his bedroom window as well so that was like the view there should have been more from memory because that one's like

1:32:15

I don't know that's obviously the best one I think well I think also that's so interesting because it's like people were telling

1:32:21

him you have to like go to school and like learn these like concepts of Art and he was like yes but he would try and he couldn't do it so he was like kind of

1:32:28

forcing himself to tone it down for everybody else you know but when he was like I'm just gonna go ahead and do it

1:32:33

then he makes the Starry Night wow yeah which I've seen it's in the um in the

1:32:38

MoMA in New York city so I saw that yeah lovely um which is

1:32:44

yes is that huge but it's not like small bigger than my ways uh yes it's bigger

1:32:51

than the Mona Lisa yeah yeah so this is the first time he's ever done that it's like you know maybe potentially this

1:32:57

like firework of electrical impulses in his brain who knows all these things but he's painting starry night he's doing

1:33:04

these artistic things but also he's like eating his paint and drinking kerosene

1:33:09

from the lamps so it's not great so they're going to be like you can't paint anymore you're not gonna have you can't

1:33:14

have sharp objects because you're starting to go crazy people started to see a sunflower paintings and kind of like them now there's an article about

1:33:20

him in the paper and people started to be like oh isn't it interesting that this artist is institutionalized you

1:33:26

know like I don't know it's kind of cool so it's hard to like do that which is like super unfair that people pay

1:33:32

attention to him once he'd already been like hospitalized first problems so Vince Theo and yo have a baby how many

1:33:39

other baby Vincent van Gogh oh that's cute there's another one so the baby Vincent and Vincent hasn't met yo yet

1:33:48

but he like right they write letters she's very nice to him um when she meets him for the first time she's like he looks great he looks

1:33:54

healthy like he's not what I expected like he looks fine actually Theo looks worse you know because of his syphilis but whatever yo actually did not get the

1:34:00

flips so lucky duck on that one there's like piles and piles of art around

1:34:07

around them he's sending it to Theo like frantically he gets out of the the

1:34:12

institution and he goes to a town that I absolutely cannot pronounce it's Aver sir ois why is he sending is it because

1:34:20

his art was finally being recognized and valuable and he's trying to monetize no I mean he that was that's what he always

1:34:26

wanted but he's just like producing a lot at this point so he he let him out of the institution for whatever reason

1:34:32

and he goes to the small town and he's painting a lot he's looking at Gardens he's asking Theo and yo to come back and

1:34:39

live with him he's like we could be a family we gotta live here we have this Garden they do come and they bring the baby and he like shows

1:34:46

the baby the yard he said look how lovely it could be like he's like I'm feeling better like he's

1:34:51

all accounts he thinks he's feeling better and so on July 27th 1890 Vincent went

1:35:00

out to paint the fields just like he always did he wore his little hat he brought his easel he brought his paints

1:35:06

he brought him to the field hours later he came home after walking like

1:35:12

a mile like literally up a hill up a cliff to get back home he is walking

1:35:17

home because the people in town see him his jacket is buttoned and he's limping his landlord looks at him and says like

1:35:24

Vincent what happened and he says I wounded myself and opens up his jacket and he has a bullet hole in his ribs

1:35:29

people then forever were like he died by

1:35:34

Suicide he shot himself he died like 29 hours later it was like super painful

1:35:39

like super oh he didn't shoot himself in the head or like the heart it was like in his ribs like a really weird spot

1:35:46

and there's all of these things that are like well he had talked

1:35:51

about suicide before um he was very like he was eating the paint he was drinking the kerosene but we talked about suicide he would talk

1:35:57

about it as like drowning or like he never mentioned guns there weren't really guns around at this time they

1:36:03

were very very rare the official story was that he shot himself and he died a few days later and he actually said like

1:36:09

I wounded myself and Theo came to be with him and he said Theo

1:36:15

let me die this is where I want to die like this is fine so he never like so

1:36:20

they just assumed that he had that he had killed himself and that that was that was the end of Vincent Van Gogh but

1:36:27

there's also in this like I said a truth sex worker he was with a sex worker no

1:36:33

no um wow here's what I think it was and this is in the book and then like an article

1:36:38

in Vanity Fair where the authors from the book talk about this but it sounds like there were these [ __ ] punk ass

1:36:44

kids in town who would make fun of him all the time and they would be like they'd like put sugar put salt in his

1:36:50

coffee and they like found him masturbating in the woods and made fun of him because like obviously

1:36:55

he was also masturbating syndrome and they're not wrong Taylor no but they were mean to him like they were mean to

1:37:01

him they found someone they could bully and they bullied him and the leader of this gang of bullies whose name Renee

1:37:07

secreten and he was 16 years old but he [ __ ] loved the old west of the of the United States

1:37:13

so he had this fake cowboy costume that he would wear to be like Buffalo Bill Cody Wild Bill if you wear this fake

1:37:21

costume around and he would borrow a gun that The Innkeeper had and pretend to be

1:37:26

a cowboy so it sounds like the kids accidentally

1:37:32

shot him playing cowboy and Vincent didn't want them to get in trouble so said that he had hurt himself

1:37:39

did they find a gun on Benson no they never from the gun never found they found like a gun much later

1:37:45

I never found his um paint or any of the things he brought with him so it sounds like the kids took it and threw it away

1:37:52

there was no suicide note there was no painting stuff like yes he was depressed and yes he was all these things but he

1:37:58

hadn't like said anything was gonna happen which also like that happens to you know people who seem very very happy

1:38:03

die by Suicide and you don't know but that is like a thing that is suspicious so the authors of the book who what that

1:38:11

I read they in the I don't know 2 000 somethings they had a forensic person

1:38:19

look at it look at the autopsy reports look at Vincent look at everything and

1:38:25

the person who did it was named Dr Vincent demaio and he was actually the forensic analyst who worked on the

1:38:31

George Zimmerman case so he's like a real like forensic guy like in the news

1:38:37

and his conclusion is quote is my opinion that in all medical probability the wound incured by Van Gogh was not

1:38:44

self-inflicted in other words he did not cheat himself okay it could have been an accident but

1:38:50

that's like a whole thing he was super sick panko was not going to live to be 100 you know like he was going to die soon anyway but he was always like I

1:38:58

will accept death when it comes but I'm not gonna like necessarily stick it out and then when it happened he was

1:39:03

probably like this truck's out my only thing is like if you're trying to describe logic to it the guy [ __ ]

1:39:09

slows his ear off and gave you to the receptionist of a brother yeah

1:39:14

he wasn't going to live much longer what you know because your argument is like what normal person would try and kill themselves by shooting them in the rib

1:39:21

well you're not dealing with a normal person totally right you're totally right yeah but we just

1:39:27

like we'll never know there's always rumors around town the rumor in town was that some boys killed them by accident but they didn't say anything they

1:39:33

weren't able to get in trouble that that that boy ended up growing up and becoming kind of a like a famous not

1:39:38

famous but like a politician in the area so they just didn't talk about it anymore so like it could have happened it could have been him we'll never

1:39:44

really know but it's not like black and white you know Theo his brother is obviously devastated that Vincent has

1:39:51

passed and he you know is like I want to make make him famous he feels very guilty

1:39:57

he's obsessed with it but he can't do it because of lucyphilis of course so Theo actually dies six

1:40:04

months later he gets sent away to an asylum as well because his like mind is crazy with the syphilis whatever it does

1:40:12

it's like not great and he ends up dying like really young uh Vincent was 37 when he died Theo was 33.

1:40:19

so um he died pretty pretty young and he

1:40:24

ended up being like a padded cell that's how crazy the syphilis made him and then I mean the van Gogh family like you know

1:40:30

without going into all the things like another brother he died by Suicide another sister was actually sent away

1:40:36

for 40 years she lived in an institution so like the kids were not great yeah in

1:40:41

general but Vincent was the one who like did it by like you know how this

1:40:46

actually actual output from his like his mental instability so yo remarried and

1:40:53

she made sure that Theo and Vincent were buried together and

1:40:59

that could have been sort of like the end of his his legacy but then you know

1:41:04

the question is why do we know about him like why would

1:41:10

we ever know he never sold anything in his life you know his whole book one painting of him is like last year of life people ridiculed him he was always

1:41:16

like on the outskirts of everything like there's no reason for us to know about him but the reason we do is because of yo

1:41:23

because she inherited everything so in her so she moved back to the Netherlands and made a

1:41:31

um like a boarding house she would have like people stay at her house it was her and Vincent van Gogh the kid the baby

1:41:36

and she had the potato ears in her living room she has Starry Night in her dining

1:41:41

room she had this crazy yeah these like she had they were 800 million dollars

1:41:47

worth of paintings no it's more like one of the there's a kid like a great great grandson of of Theo was talking about in

1:41:55

one of the articles I read like going through closets of of Vincent's work and he's like it's tens of billions of

1:42:02

dollars that we were going through like in the closet you know and the van Gogh Family actually doesn't own any van

1:42:08

original Van Gogh works anymore they've all like donated it and sold it and given it so like the world's gonna have it it's like their their thing but yo

1:42:15

had all this art and she had all of the letters that Vincent wrote Theo she had all letters all the paper that Vincent

1:42:21

kept so she read it all she was so smart she she would translate books from Dutch to English she was like a teacher she

1:42:28

like knew kind about Linguistics so she was like people need to see this and they will understand it if they

1:42:34

understand how tormented Vincent was in his mind so she and in

1:42:40

was the first person to really say like the torture artist like she was a person to like make it say like you have to

1:42:45

look at his work in context of his life so she did that and you know one thing

1:42:51

is like in the article that I read like she would go to an important Gallery with her baby she's holding her baby

1:42:57

she's a woman no one takes women seriously and she would be like you have to look at this you have to read these

1:43:02

letters you have to look at this art it is something and so she would rent

1:43:07

galleries she became the person who championed this across Europe she actually spent a couple years in America

1:43:12

having people look at his work as well in 1905 the largest Van Gogh exhibit that ever happened happened in um in the

1:43:19

Netherlands it had 484 of his works on display and she rented the galleries

1:43:26

printed the posters invited the people bought bow ties for the staff her son Vincent wrote up invitations like they

1:43:32

made it happen wow and then the question is like why why did yo do that

1:43:39

she only was married to Theo for like less than two years but her journals and her life

1:43:45

she wrote a journal when she was younger saying that I want to do something with my life is important then it stopped She said I'm moving to Paris and then two

1:43:51

years later she picked up her journals again and the rest of her life was like those two years in Paris were the best years of my life and she was trying to

1:43:58

like recreate and share that like huge artistic Journey with the world and so

1:44:03

that was like her motivation was like this is the thing that I want everybody to know we know about him because of her

1:44:08

because of all the work that she did otherwise we would never have known and one thing that he wrote in the letter to

1:44:15

Theo which is a quote from another artist but it's something that he felt very deeply is he said no results of my

1:44:22

work would be more agreeable to me than that ordinary working men should hang such prints in their rooms or workplace

1:44:29

which is exactly what happened yeah and I I cut this out of my my art book I

1:44:36

I just framed the night Cafe to hang up at my house no it's awesome yeah I'm looking I'm looking at is so apparently

1:44:44

the um the estimated value of Starry Night is 100 million dollars

1:44:50

it's crazy crazy it's one painting

1:44:55

and Arts Press you know Arts like whatever you who knows like what makes something stick and something doesn't

1:45:01

but his stuff is very special he's it's first yeah I'm not like an art guy but

1:45:06

like I look at it and I'm like man it like evokes something yeah you know isn't it for

1:45:12

common people like you and me I will say this I will say that nobody

1:45:20

in the world will ever convince me that Pablo Picasso was an artist or good at

1:45:27

painting or good at his imagination or good at thank you it is

1:45:33

got it is like an acid trip on paper like is all it is like it is not good

1:45:39

I have a couple thoughts um Picasso was actually like a really good like

1:45:45

technical painter that he could he could paint things that were very like realistic like Van Gogh could not but he

1:45:52

moved past that and was like I could do this forever but I don't want to do so they moved on to like the next thing which was like because it was like

1:45:58

something use that NYU degree tell me what give me a giving it like a realistic possible painting

1:46:05

oh the look of his blue period Picasso Blue period

1:46:10

thank you NYU thank you that was a hundred thousand dollars

1:46:15

but this is when he was doing like starting starting to get weird but like

1:46:21

it's good but it's not like you know you look at a da Vinci painting and you're like whoa like rice you know what I mean

1:46:28

but that's a different but that had been done and it's different

1:46:34

I need more time to think about this but yes stuff wasn't detailed but it's just like

1:46:40

wow like the brush Strokes like weird like how did how did you you know now

1:46:46

I'm I'm so foolish because this entire time I thought it was just like

1:46:51

a genius mind filled with curiosity and endeavored for truth and style and

1:46:57

painting when really it was just a VD World brain full of holes filled with mercury poisoning like that's what it

1:47:04

takes to do I think a good Van Gogh but I don't know Picasso yeah uh probably

1:47:10

probably one of those guys who the sheer force of Personality made him super

1:47:16

super fast sitting in real life and people just like were like oh then you must be a genius and I'm sure Picasso

1:47:22

had a CDS I don't want to be a dick but like um did you ever watch what we do in the

1:47:28

shadows no I was so good but there's one where they have Guernica is one of

1:47:33

Picasso's most famous paintings and it's like black and white and it's after like the the um like a bombing of the town of

1:47:39

Guernica in Spain and it's like a horror thing but it's weird it's weird if you don't like it you wouldn't like it but

1:47:46

um anyway one of the vampires she says that she's in it and she calls him Pablo Picasso funny

1:47:52

they get to that you've you're the first person to ever recommend what we do in the shadows to me

1:47:58

it's amazing like forever ago like we were so good well because even before the even before the TV show that's like

1:48:05

three seasons now there's the movie from like 10 15 years ago so the movie is the

1:48:10

one that you recommended oh my God I mean I love it I love it um yeah it's crazy there's I feel like

1:48:16

the the thing that that rocked me is I was like oh he cut his ear off for a woman and he absolutely did not

1:48:22

it wasn't a better reason a woman would have made more sense no but the but the but the the answer is every relationship

1:48:28

that Vincent van Gogh had was was red flagly and [ __ ] and doomed he couldn't do it he just could not do

1:48:35

it and like that that um that beautiful two minutes from from Doctor Who but

1:48:40

you're just like would he it'd be lovely to be able to tell him no you know like it it'd be nice to be like you know

1:48:47

people know who you are I think that he'd like that yeah that was a good one that was a

1:48:52

really good one I am good there's a lot this this will be a long episode yeah

1:48:57

we're pushing just shy of two hours yeah whatever we had a lot to say we got

1:49:03

three stories and I I do like how you know when we consider our topics you cover

1:49:11

like this Giants of creativity in Insanity mixed

1:49:19

with Beauty and the movement it's like you like that guy in American mind who like films the sack in the wind you know

1:49:26

and then no one's ever thought it was deep and I'm like this guy's guts got

1:49:31

[ __ ] shot out of her Cannon 30 feet oh my God it's so gross I made some beautiful things on mid-journey of Van

1:49:38

Gogh doing a diving bell that I'll share with you oh my God oh my God okay well I have some listener

1:49:46

mail oh yeah let's hear it which is not listener Mel because zero people have emailed us but it's friends who text who

1:49:51

texted me so that counts um I have a couple I have what three stories so Beth from North Carolina

1:50:00

she called to tell us that um when Pat Robertson died Robert Pattinson was

1:50:05

trending on Twitter because people were worried that he had died

1:50:12

oh it's so good

1:50:21

movie but still um and then George from New York my friend George reminded me about

1:50:28

um Talk speaking of the habsburgs um the last Crown Prince of haps of Austria actually died in 2011 at the age

1:50:34

of 98 and he was the one that was in a wheelchair do you remember that 30 Rock where Jenna almost marries the Habsburg

1:50:39

no um they do like a really great thing I think it's the guy I can't remember his name oh my God they gotta plays TV Herman and he's like in a wheelchair and

1:50:46

like but a prince so it's really funny it's like definitely watch that um and then my last one is Blair from

1:50:53

Austin right now um she said that

1:50:58

um when you had mentioned has anyone ever mixed whiskey and wine in a cocktail

1:51:04

um she said that she used to work at a restaurant in Las Vegas and they would make Sangria but it was just a bottle of wine and a bottle of brandy and a ton of

1:51:11

sugar and people would get shit-faced God so I mean man I guess if you're trying to

1:51:18

get [ __ ] space that's one way to do it exactly so um that was Blair's suggestion for you

1:51:23

know mixing whiskey and wine just put together add some fruit and some sugar I'm sure that sangria is probably I mean

1:51:29

no one would notice after the first half a glass that's true this is delicious yeah eating the fruit with a fork oh God

1:51:38

it's all just gonna taste like it might as well be nothing at that point exactly like mouth is numb and you can't

1:51:45

remember where you parked thank you listeners thank you everyone writing in

1:51:51

yeah for texting me personally and you know I love it I'm so it's I really I

1:51:56

truly do love that my friends are like we love it thank you and soon with our

1:52:02

advertising that's coming out everybody will love it as well we're gonna be world famous and

1:52:08

um yeah that'll be our cost of air hopefully yeah strangers find us on the

1:52:13

internet we're at Doom to fail pod Instagram Twitter Facebook YouTube put everything up on YouTube so you can

1:52:19

watch it there that's what you do but we're on all of the podcast platforms please like And subscribe tell your

1:52:24

friends this is our 26th episode so we have tons of episodes to go back on let's talk about Russia a lot that's the

1:52:31

True Crime laws of History please listen thank you thank you all um and I think I'll go ahead and cut it

1:52:38

off there