Nathan Radke

I didn't watch it until much, much later.

So I missed out on sort of that big pop culture moment, but I have seen it.

Well, the one that I hear most often from people, and the one that probably sounds the most ridiculous at first, is the idea that the Titanic, despite what we saw in the film, didn't sink.

That film was in a documentary?

I mean, it was close enough.

But this idea originates with a British author named Robin Gardner, who wasn't claiming that there was no shipwreck at all that night, but that the ship that sank wasn't the Titanic and that it didn't hit an iceberg.

So instead, and this has got a lot of moving parts in it,

The ship that sank was secretly the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic.

Okay, but if it sank- Let me walk you through it.

Okay, so the Olympic was built first, launched a couple years before the Titanic.

But then in 1911, there was an accident in which the Olympic and a British Navy cruiser collided, causing a lot of damage to the Olympic.

And so after an investigation by the British Navy, the Navy determined that the crash wasn't the Navy's fault.

That meant that the owners of the damaged Olympic, the White Star Line, they wouldn't get any kind of insurance settlement to cover the damages.

So now the White Star Line had an extremely damaged ship that was likely beyond repair and no insurance payout to make up for the loss.

So according to Gardner, they hatched a plan to quietly and secretly rebrand the damaged Olympic as the Titanic, switch all the names around, and then the rebranded Olympic, which was now called the Titanic, would be sent out on her first voyage and deliberately sunk for the insurance money.

Well, I know what Gardner says happened because this meant that the White Star Line would be able to collect the insurance money and they'd still have a brand new undamaged ship in the real Titanic, which would still be in port and rebranded as the Olympic.

I mean, there is, I guess, a motivation there.

At first, you're like, OK, maybe it seems reasonable.

What Gardner said was that they would sail the Olympic slash Titanic out to sea.

They'd open up a bunch of valves and they'd slowly allow seawater to leak in.