 My biggest fear is knowing that they are trapped without the ability of receiving help. This is my biggest fear. You just heard from Yannick Mickelson. She's a friend of billionaire Hamish Harding, who is one of the five rich people that paid $250,000 per person, by the way, to willingly enter an unregulated submarine-like death trap reportedly put together with off-the-shelf parts. Also, they could see the Titanic up close and personal, despite warnings from even previous clients who said, this is really not a good idea. For example, the Daily Mail explains, a German adventurer who paid to see the wreck of the Titanic on the missing Titan submarine two years ago has called the voyage a suicide mission. Arthur Leuble, 60, dived down 12,500 feet to the Atlantic wreck site in August of 2021 and says he was incredibly lucky to survive. Speaking to German tabloid Bill, Leuble recalls the first submarine they tried didn't work and a second attempted dive had to be abandoned. He said parts fell off and the mission went into the water five hours late due to electrical problems. Now, I feel like it's pretty obvious that this is not safe just by looking at the craft that they're going in. But if that wasn't enough, well, the owner has basically said explicitly that he's not very concerned with safety. For example, he told CBS journalist David Pogue in 2022 that there was a limit to safety telling Pogue, you know, at some point, safety is just pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed. Don't get in your car. Don't do anything. At some point, you're going to take some risk and it really is a risk reward question. Now, on top of that, New Republic obtained legal documents exposing how an ocean gate pilot was punished for sounding the alarm about safety concerns. The tourist submersible that went missing while exploring the Titanic wreck was previously the target of safety complaints from an employee of Ocean Gate, the parent company that owns the sub and runs tourist expeditions of the wreck. The employee complained specifically that the sub was not capable of descending to such extreme deaths before he was fired. And in addition to that, another employee reportedly spoke out as well. But regardless, this company still kept offering rides and these rich people kept paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to go on these very dangerous rides. So as a very famous philosopher once said, Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Where's the lie? I mean, if you jump out of a plane without a parachute, you should expect you're going to die. If you stick your dick in a toaster, you should expect to be burned. So there are things that you do where the risk is so high that doing them, it doesn't just make you, you know, an adrenaline junkie. It makes you pretty stupid in my opinion. I know that that sounds crass, but this is what they went down on. That sounded bad, but you get what I'm saying, right? But regardless, even though they were doing this, knowing the risks, the media has been absolutely obsessed with this story, which begs the question, should you care? And I'll put it this way. The son of the billionaire himself doesn't even seem to care. As Mediaite reports, according to the New York Post, SAAS posted on Monday via Facebook in a since deleted status update that while the search was underway, he had decided to still attend the Blink 182 concert for which he had previously purchased tickets. Quote, it might be distasteful being here, but my family would want me to be at the Blink 182 show as it's my favorite band and music helps me in difficult times. SAAS wrote, accompanied with a picture of him posing in front of the merch table. Yeah, so it seems like he doesn't really care. And while he was at the concert, I'm sure that this line in particular went really hard. No, not going to say anything else. Not cool, Mike. Anyways, as you could probably tell, I'm pretty distraught over the story and I'm sure that my audience also cares deeply about these rich idiots who decided to enter a death trap all because they were bored. I mean, there's a lot of things that you can do with that money, but they chose to enter an underwater coffin just to see the Titanic. It just really, I mean, some people have too much time on their hands. Now, the billionaire Hamish Harding in question, he kind of is seemingly an adrenaline junkie. He's gone into space. He does these kinds of things. So, I mean, even his friend said he knows the risk here, right? So that's why I'm not necessarily too distraught because, again, this comes back to the Ben Shapibo quote, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. But regardless, the media has focused on this story constantly over the course of the last week. And it's interesting how stories like this occupy our collective consciousness while ongoing crises actually get ignored. Nobody talks about them. And I think that this says something about the media's priorities and our priorities as a society that we care more about this than actual crises hurting regular people. For example, Matt Walsh, who advocates for policies that will literally result in LGBTQ plus people dying called ambivalence towards the rich people on the sub-vessel quote, sick and depraved. I mean, if it makes you feel any better, Matt, I wish that you could trade places with all five of them. So there's that. I'm joking, obviously. But I mean, I bet that Matt's tune would change if you told him that there was just one LGBTQ plus person on board. Then all of a sudden, he'd hoped for all of them to die. But I mean, like this is the response that we get, right? Bootlickers like Matt Walsh cry at the sight of billionaires who put themselves in danger. But when it comes to just normal crises affecting the American people, where's the outrage? Anthropogenic climate change affecting people right now around the globe and just crickets. So that's why it's a little bit infuriating to see this story get sensationalized to the point that it has been. But I mean, I understand that just from a human standpoint, why normal people find this story captivating, right? Because this really is one of those worst nightmare situations and it's easy to sympathize with someone in that predicament because you can imagine how terrified you'd be if you were in their position. But the thing about this is you're never going to be in that position. First of all, you're not stupid enough to do that. Well, some of the YouTube commenters might be stupid enough. But most of you watching this aren't stupid enough to do that. And second of all, even if you wanted to do that, you're not rich enough to put yourself in that predicament. But there's other terrifying realities that Americans are facing currently that you should care about more because you yourself could be in the same predicament. As Jessica Burbank put it, Hi, why are we stressed about rich people lost on a joy ride in a goddamn submarine? Over 45,000 Americans die annually because they don't have health insurance. So how about we shut the fuck up about the submarine? And she's absolutely correct about that. A pre-pandemic analysis published in The Lancet found that Medicare for All would save 68,000 American lives every single year. And researchers say that that estimate is actually conservative since they didn't account for underinsured people. But since the pandemic, that number has probably increased. And it's reasonable to assume that that is indeed the case because as Jake Johnson of Common Dreams points out, state figures obtained by the Associated Press show that at least 1.5 million people in roughly two dozen states have been removed from Medicaid since April when state governments were given a green light by Congress and the Biden administration to resume eligibility checks that were halted during the coronavirus pandemic. Eligibility checks come with paperwork and other requirements that are often confusing and difficult to navigate. The process is made even more difficult by the failure of some states to sufficiently inform Medicaid enrollees about the resumption of eligibility checks and the steps they must follow to keep their coverage. And as a result of this, so many people are being unnecessarily harmed right now. This is affecting working-class Americans. Where's the outrage for that? Take Florida, for example. A quarter million Floridians have been kicked off Medicaid since March and in about half of those cases, Common Dreams reports that those people were eligible but they were removed for procedural reasons. See, this wouldn't be an issue if we had Medicare for all because healthcare would be free at the point of service and we wouldn't need to provide proof of insurance or pay upfront. We just go to the doctor and get the care that we require. But because we live in this late-stage capitalist hellscape, that isn't the reality. And seeing hundreds of thousands of people in a single state lose their health insurance, it isn't as captivating as the sub-story, for example, because it's really difficult to visualize that number because it's just so large, right? When you start looking at numbers like 100,000, 150,000, a million, that's a lot more difficult than just seeing five people in this predicament, right? Psychologically speaking, it's easier to visualize the pain of the rich people on the submarine than it is to visualize how hundreds of thousands of people in one state, mind you, are currently suffering and scared for their lives. But let's make it more familiar. Let's put some faces to these stories. For example, 87-year-old Shirley Harberger lost Medicaid even though she's eligible. And as a result of her losing Medicaid, she hasn't received home visits from her home health aide which has made her life extremely difficult because as you can imagine, at 87 years old, there's going to be issues with mobility and traveling. And now she lost that even though she qualifies for it. Also, a Florida mom named Liz Adams was notified that she'd be dropped from Medicaid just one day before her seven-year-old son whose leukemia went into remission was scheduled to have a biopsy which is very, very important, mind you. But now her child cannot get that care. Neither can the rest of her children. These are the tragedies that should terrify all of us and captivate all of us because most of us are going to be statistically more likely to encounter that than the sub, right? We can all relate to that. That could be a reality for us, but the sub will never be a reality. It's stupid people paying consequences for making a very, very poor decision. So if you personally don't give a shit about rich people who may die as a result of their own stupidity, don't be too hard on yourself because there's far more tragedies going on in this country that media never even thinks about. So if you are worried about tragedies and crises in this country, then think about the ones that are occurring right now and they're by no fault of the folks involved, right? You can choose if you're rich to pay $250,000 to get on a coffin and go underwater to look at the Titanic, but you don't choose if you're poor. You don't choose to be poor for one, but you don't choose to just all of a sudden lose the healthcare coverage that your son with leukemia and remission relies on. So that is something that I wish the media would sensationalize more because that's actually necessary. It's something that Americans should be concerned about because it affects them. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Play stupid games, fight. Trans rights are human rights. It's necessary to push trans on the kids. Fight.