Talking The Titan with Dr. G; Psychology Professor and Master Scuba Instructor
I am going to present some questions below and then you are going to reply to those questions individually. Thanks so much for being here. Look forward to getting started
She knows all things Titanic, dressed up as Molly Brown one year for Halloween. And she had a lot of strong feelings about this particular issue with respect to the submersible going around the ship and kind of being a voyeur on where lives had perished. So I want to get your perspective not only with your personal feelings about the risks involved, but also with respect to the ethics of this type of sea exploration
When I would get up and get out of bed and face that risk, it was with the knowledge that one thing going wrong in some type of study or some sales issues, some regulatory issue, anything of truly 1000 factors could tank the company that day. And this was over about a ten year period. So yeah, I think you get used to taking those risks
Particularly his hired safety expert who worked for his company, who tried to warn him of the risks of the submersible and was met with being removed from the company and a lawsuit filed against him for I believe it might have been defamation, although I should probably check on that. To which his previous safety expert used the defense of being a whistleblower that basically just means, hey, I was alerting to the public to a danger, and he has no right to file suit against me
In the sense that one of the images that I came up with was that of almost being like a James Bond movie where I guess the antagonist in the movie, the bad guy who always turns out to be a megalomaniac psychopath, you and I can have a nice personality disorder discussion on that. But their obsession seems to grow throughout the movie. And while I'm not by any means saying that the CEO was like that, some of the similarities just struck me
And with respect to money, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Does money become an addiction that leads us to seek the highs of things like high risk exploration? Or are these men successful because of their willingness to take risks, like Stockton Rush did? And I have a second part to that question. What about you, Dr G? Have you ever questioned your own personal risk tolerance in relation to wealth and perhaps even ego?
They make money, and maybe it's a good thing if they help people along the way, but that's not really what they care about. I had a very successful, world renowned financial colleague who once told me one of his best quotes for mentoring individuals as startup companies was, don't ever talk to an investor about saving the whales
And Dr. G, my final question is personal also. I love the personal questions. So, being an undersea aficionado yourself if you had been offered a free seat on the Titan next to Stockton, rushed, not knowing its ultimate fate, would you have joined these men on this mission that day? And if not, why?
Others would anyway, or others may not be as informed. But given what I know about leadership, leadership styles, what's good, what's bad, what happens with poor leadership styles, the type of errors that get made and just overlooking things because you think you know more than everyone else around you, those are disasters in the making, narcissists ultimately destroy everything around them. Whether it's a business, whether it's a relationship, whether it's a nation, narcissists destroy everything around them
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:33
Hey, Dr. G and Renee. This was really fun to listen to. What a great experience. And it is interesting to kind of braid together the relationship that you two have with the book on Narcissism and talking about risk taking and this ocean exploration
How many people died in traffic accidents on the holiday weekend, how many mass shootings were there over the holiday weekend? Because sadly, those events are so common that they don't take up big spaces in our memory. And an event that is played and played and played. And that comes out as, oh, a surprise tragedy that we all get engrossed in ends up having a bigger space in our memory. And it's easier to recall it long term
