Today's Wisdom - OceanGate, Forgery and Edgar Allan Poe

Welcome back to A Little Wiser. Friday's edition kicks off our new interview series that gives you an authentic glimpse into the lives of unique guests, all in just three questions! First up: Daniel Danés Valenzuela of Titin Evoo on what it actually takes to build an olive oil import business from scratch. Today’s wisdom explores:

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

On the morning of June 18, 2023, five men climbed into a small submersible called Titan and began a two-and-a-half-mile descent toward the wreck of the Titanic. Aboard were OceanGate’s chief executive Stockton Rush, the veteran French Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British adventurer Hamish Harding, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood with his nineteen-year-old son Suleman. Roughly ninety minutes into the dive, at a depth of around 3,500 meters, the vessel lost contact with its support ship. What followed was a frantic four-day international search that gripped the world, with rescuers listening for mysterious banging sounds and news channels counting down the submersible’s dwindling oxygen supply.

All of it was for nothing. The men had died in an instant on that first day as the Titan’s hull had imploded under pressure. Most deep-diving submersibles use a sphere of titanium or steel, shapes and metals proven to handle extreme pressure. Rush chose instead to build a cylinder out of carbon fiber, a material prized in aircraft for being light and strong but almost never trusted at these depths. Investigators later found that Titan had likely been damaged on an earlier dive and should have been pulled from service. Rush had also cut corners that beggar belief. The viewport at the front was only certified to a depth of around 650 meters, a fraction of the 3,800 meters needed to reach the Titanic. Rush had refused to have the craft independently certified at all, dismissing outside safety checks as obstacles to innovation.

The official reports, released in 2025, were damning. The US Coast Guard called the disaster entirely preventable and described OceanGate’s safety culture as critically flawed, with a yawning gap between the company’s written protocols and what it actually did. Engineers who raised the alarm had been threatened with lawsuits or fired, and Rush was found to have inflated figures to make Titan seem more tested and reliable than it was. Investigators stated plainly that, had Rush survived, they would have recommended he face manslaughter charges. Perhaps the most chilling detail is that Titan had completed 87 dives before this one, each success breeding a little more confidence and a little more carelessness. The story has become a modern parable about the danger of a powerful man who surrounds himself with people too frightened to tell him no.

Below - a great documentary about the disaster we highly recommend.

That small booklet in your drawer is one of the most sophisticated security documents ever mass-produced. A modern US passport is printed using around 60 different materials and carries as many as 30 separate security features, most of which the holder will never see. The whole assembly process is treated as classified. The layers begin with things you may half-notice, such as the watermarks pressed into the paper, the fine engraved line-work borrowed from banknote printing, and inks that shift color as you tilt the page or glow under ultraviolet light. Each feature is cheap for a government to add and fiendishly expensive for a forger to reproduce convincingly.

The heart of the modern passport is the small gold chip embedded in the cover, introduced to US passports around 2007. This is an RFID chip. It is readable by a scanner held close to the book, and it stores a digital copy of your details along with the photograph and other biometric data such as facial measurements. The information is digitally signed by the issuing country using encryption, so a border scanner can instantly confirm the data genuinely came from that government and has not been altered. A forger might copy the words printed on the page, yet without the issuing country’s secret signing key they cannot produce a chip that passes this electronic check. To calm early fears that thieves could secretly read the chip from a distance, governments built shielding into the cover.

The real reason passports are so hard to fake is that all these defenses have to be beaten at once. A convincing forgery must survive both the human eye and the machine. Interestingly, forgery experts say the single hardest element to copy is the transparent holographic laminate laid over the photo page, combined with the exact feel and flex of the polycarbonate plastic. A fake tends to betray itself the moment it is handled. There is a quiet irony buried in all this brilliance. The security has grown so layered and complex that no border officer can possibly memorize every feature as machines increasingly do the checking.

Below - The top 10 most forged identity documents according to the Sumsub Fraud Report (2022). Based on their data, more than 50% of all identity fraud detected worldwide is attributed to 5 countries: Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam, Nigeria and USA.

Few writers have shaped modern storytelling as profoundly as Edgar Allan Poe, and fewer still lived a life so drenched in misfortune. Born in Boston in 1809 to a pair of travelling actors, he was orphaned before he turned three. His father vanished, and his mother died of tuberculosis in Richmond, leaving the toddler to be taken in by a wealthy merchant named John Allan. The relationship soured badly over money, and Poe spent his adult life in near-constant poverty. Along the way he married his cousin Virginia when she was just thirteen. Her death from the same disease that took his mother deepened the obsession with grief and mortality that runs through everything he wrote.

Poe more or less invented the detective story in 1841 with The Murders in the Rue Morgue, creating the eccentric investigator Auguste Dupin who solves crimes through pure reasoning. The word detective did not yet even exist in English, and every sleuth who followed, from Sherlock Holmes to the modern crime novel, descends from that single character. He was also a pioneer of horror and early science fiction, building tales like The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher around dread, guilt, and the thin line between the living and the dead. In 1845 he published The Raven, which made him famous almost overnight.

His death remains one of literature’s great unsolved mysteries. In late September 1849 Poe left Richmond bound for New York, but he got only as far as Baltimore. On October 3 he was discovered outside a tavern, delirious and disheveled, wearing shabby clothes that were not his own. Taken to hospital, he never became lucid enough to explain what had happened. Poe died four days later at the age of forty and no medical records or death certificate survive. Theories have piled up ever since, blaming alcohol, rabies, syphilis, cholera, heart disease, even a violent voting scam in which victims were drugged and dragged to cast fraudulent ballots. To make matters worse, a rival named Rufus Griswold wrote a poisonous obituary and biography that painted Poe as a depraved madman, a caricature that stuck for generations. The man who built his art from mystery and untimely death ended up furnishing the greatest mystery of all.

Enjoyed today’s edition?

A Little Wiser is free, always. If you found it valuable, the single best thing you can do is share it with one person who would enjoy it. Every referral helps us grow and keeps the lessons coming.

— Share A Little Wiser below —

Until next time — stay curious.
The A Little Wiser Team