Hey Benjers, welcome back to the pod and I'm just going to jump right into it.

Have you all been following this story of the Titan submersible?

I certainly have and for me it's been the most compelling non-crime news story in years

and what's weird on our end is we had planned today's episode over a month ago before the

Titan and Ocean Gate were on anyone's mind.

And the intersections between that story and this story are pretty eerie because today's

story also involves a Maverick inventor and his homemade submarine.

So let's part in the pun, dive in.

Peter Madsen was quite the character in the Danish media.

He was like a termite version of Elon Musk and he was known around Denmark as Rocket Madsen.

Madsen had made a name for himself internationally in the late 2000s as an inventor and as the

founder of a non-profit called Copenhagen Suborbital which was sort of like Denmark's answer

to SpaceX.

Except unlike SpaceX, Copenhagen Suborbitals was entirely crowdfunded and all of its members

were volunteer amateur space enthusiasts like Madsen.

Their goal was to send a human into space on a homemade rocket ship.

It was a novel concept and Peter Madsen seemed to have a clear passion for science engineering

exploration of space and of the sea.

He built his first homemade submarine in 2002, the UC-1 Freya which was the first ever

private submarine in the Kingdom of Denmark, a history making vessel.

In 2005, he made history again when he constructed the UC-2 cracker which was a midget submarine

and yes, it's okay to use the word midget in this context and only in this context.

...