PicoBlog

This story is about a submarine. But to tell that story well, we need to zoom out a bit to understand the rescue and its personalities from a wider view. The good news is that what you’ll find here weaves together a vast mix of sources into a unified whole that’s never been available in one place before. The bad news is that it’s also almost 10,000 words, with 60+ footnotes. But don’t worry, there’s a TLDR summary for those who want the gist. For the rest, maybe better to think of it less as an extremely long post and more an extremely concise book.

Before you scroll to the summary though, an important guiding note: none of what follows is about invalidating the good that anyone contributed. Much of it was heroic, and the parts that weren’t don’t cancel out the positives. Flaws need to be judged in balance, in context, and on an individual basis. And with some empathy.

We understand that the leaders of the British rescue team may disagree with us in places. We’ve given them ample opportunities to argue our findings, along with a standing offer to publish any response they might have in full. While we can’t speak to what evidence or counter-claims they may have withheld from us, a good deal of our sourcing here comes from their own testimonies. 

The TLDR summary follows the below introduction.

Back in the summer of 2018, twelve boys and one of their soccer coaches were rescued from the flooded bowels of Thailand’s Tham Luang cave system. It was one of the biggest news stories of the year, and one of the most mistold. 

The way most heard it, a crack team of British cave divers blindly and bravely inched their way through an underwater maze, found the huddled boys right where a fellow Brit caver said they'd be, then used their unparalleled experience to devise a bold rescue plan, which they carried out to perfection with rigorous preparation and a spot or two of good luck. And all this despite the interference of meddlesome billionaire Elon Musk, who’d parachuted himself in to drop off a death trap of a would-be rescue vehicle in a deranged PR stunt.

But only parts of that are true really, in any full sense. And the bits that are true are only partial scenes in the larger and more jarring tapestry of what actually happened.

The real rescue was a clusterfuck of warring fiefdoms and fractured communication, best symbolized by a zip-tied coach being desperately jabbed with ketamine after he’d clawed at the air hose of a rescuer who’d been recruited so late that he’d missed all the drills and prep meetings, who was only there at all because unchecked egos had sidelined several of the divers who’d first made the rescue possible. The whole operation was profoundly messy, and wasn’t quite contingent on the Brits, who’d given up their hopes and their cave access early on, only to be invited back in by a diver that one of them would later get sent packing, who’d helped make the first real progress through the muddy waters while they were off sightseeing.

And if the most popular reporting Disney-fied the rescue’s Plan A, it did even less justice to all the prep work for the Plan Bs that would surely have been tried had the Plan A that was expected to end with no fewer than three to five dead kids not outperformed its odds by a truly miraculous margin. Or, rather, the most popular coverage focused on exactly one part of one Plan B, in ways that were extremely incorrect, which is our primary focus here.

It turns out that the most viral accounts—like rescuer Vern Unsworth’s infamous CNN interview snippet and the follow-on New York Times opinion piece that set off Elon Musk’s spat with him—were nearly all wrong. Not wrong in some subjective sense, but wrong as to the basic facts on which their criticisms were predicated. 

This matters. 

Thus our attempt at getting the record corrected. Or at least the beginning of that process, starting with the wild story of Elon Musk’s submarine. 

(Major claims without a link or footnote here are covered in more detail later on.)

While Musk deserved real censure for his choice of words about Unsworth, it’s dishonest to vilify a bad response without also considering what led to it. Both matter. And not only did these journalists not do that, but in the face of counter-evidence they either ignored it or doubled down. We think this is a problem, and that it deserves more serious dialogue.

After all, what's the point of covering these rescues? To celebrate the human spirit no doubt, but surely also so that we can learn something. When similar emergencies arise, what lessons can we apply from Thailand? What worked? What didn't? Do we care? 

If we don’t make hard changes, those covering the next story will be just as constrained by the same broken systems and incentives, and we’ll be left just as unequipped to draw meaningful conclusions about how to make the next rescue safer. If we’re truly in this for more than the spectacle of it all, this should concern us. 

We’ve spent 1,000+ hours on this project. All major claims have detailed corroboration. If anyone finds a mistake, we’ll pay up to $1,000 USD per correction.

More details on this offer and on our bios / connection to this story here. There’s also a disclosure in there about our relationship with rescue diver Ben Reymenants, who features in this story. To keep up with any correction requests / FAQ, see this doc. 

Note that this is only a taste of what we hope to cover in a larger project. We’re leaving out some incredible color here, including personal vendettas, stolen valor, bumbled email confessions, covert call recordings, a five-figure side bet, and a hilarious religious whitewashing attempt that accidentally made this telling possible.

For a taste of how this story is still being framed, here are two recent-ish excerpts from The New Yorker, both of which passed through their vaunted fact checks:

From last July: 

Musk’s sub, which had created a media frenzy, was judged too large to wend through the narrow passageways of the caves where the boys had been trapped; Unsworth’s expertise in the cave system’s structure had, by the account of the lead diver, proved essential to the rescue. He had created a detailed map of the area and helped recruit and advise the divers who eventually brought the boys to safety.

And from last August: 

…Musk travelled to Thailand to offer a custom-made miniature submarine to rescuers. The head of the rescue operation declined, and Musk lashed out on Twitter, questioning the expertise of the rescuers. After one of them, Vernon Unsworth, referred to the offer as a “P.R. stunt,” Musk called him a “pedo guy.”

One thing that’s crucial to understand about this story—and what it tells us about where even prestige journalism often fails—is that even though at least 1,500 journalists covered this story, only a few of them contributed original investigative work. Once a wrong narrative took hold, most follow-on reporting repeated these mistakes without ever checking to see if the original accounts were actually true. It wasn’t that contrary evidence wasn’t out there. It’s that too few felt a professional responsibility to look for it. The going narrative was doing numbers, at the expense of a notoriously popular villain, so why question it? 

To be emphatic, it’s fine to hate Musk for things he’s actually said or done. You can dislike him all you want, whether for his political views, his management style, his wealth, or for being Canadian. But journalists still have a duty to help readers judge individual cases by what did and didn’t really happen. Else what are we doing here? 

That said, one part of this narrative is true: Musk did indeed refer to a rescuer with an angry slur. This was wrong, and we have no exoneration for him. But exoneration is separate from contextualization, and there was an awful lot of context that was left out—largely because of how it shows the press as complicit in throwing and affirming the first punch. While two wrongs don’t make a right, it seems morally insane to us to not consider both in making our judgments. 

So let’s look at that context.

“I am the KEY. I am the BIG piece in the Jigsaw.” - Unsworth, in an email

Unsworth was an essential part of the rescue in one concrete sense: he got the British cave divers invited in. That was meaningful, and we’ll get back to that more later. But we have detailed testimony as to his other contributions, many of which were directly harmful to the rescue effort. While praiseworthy for his initiative, he wasn’t a credible source for CNN or anyone else to have turned to for expert judgment, for reasons we’ll cover in four parts. 

A. Submarine Fit

A crucial point of context: though many journalists claimed otherwise, Unsworth isn’t a cave diver. He made this clear multiple times, and even complained about it:

Thanks mate just wish the media would stop referring to me as a ‘diver’ and Ex-Pat. Lost count on how many times I’ve said I’m not either.

Unsworth is a dry caver, meaning his knowledge of the cave is limited to navigating it on the ground when not in a flooded state. While the press made hay of various supposed restrictions in the dive path, only one significant one was part of a path you’d take as a dry caver—a “chimney” that formed part of the approach to Chamber 3, the main staging point for the divers and supply teams. 

Here’s a good video of this restriction to give the sense:

Of note, this restriction wasn’t actually relevant to what Unsworth told CNN. His comments were about the sub not making it “the first 50 meters into the cave from the dive start point”. But that start point was in Chamber 3, on the far side of this chimney.

Secondly, the chimney wasn’t a real obstacle anyway, as the submarine had been built to the rough specs provided by Stanton, which obviously factored in this very notable section of the route. (Musk’s team had also been provided a clear video of it by another cave diver, Ben Reymenants, which is part of the above footage.)

Even so, in an abundance of caution, Musk’s team worked up three contingencies:

Another important thing: the sub only had to make this part of the journey once.

Now, there was a notable artificial restriction a bit deeper into the cave, which it seems Unsworth was thinking of in his comments. The rope rescue line had been initially advanced in low/zero visibility, and part of it got tangled in what divers call a “line trap”, where it weaved through some stalactites. Unfortunately this was never fixed once visibility improved, which complicated things. But this restriction wasn’t a blocker for the submarine either, and Vern had never experienced it himself, as cavers do not traditionally climb along ceilings.

The real crux though is that several of the rescue support divers we interviewed thought it would have fit just fine, and none said otherwise. Cumbersome and unideal, sure, but worth a try if Plan A was no longer viable. We gave Stanton himself opportunities to object to this, which he never did. If you want to judge for yourself, we recommend this episode of National Geographic’s Drain the Oceans, which includes more footage and a precise 3D rendering.

Why did people believe fit was an issue? Because of Unsworth, along with an anonymous “spokesman for Mr. Stanton”. But who was this mystery fellow? We asked Unsworth, Stanton and the British Cave Rescue Council, among others. No one would own it. Nor did Stanton answer why he’d never spoken up against a claim made in his name that he knew to be untrue. 

Journalists are allowed to grant anonymity where it protects a source from expected harm. One wonders what the potential harm here was, or whether the NYT simply helped out someone who didn’t want to be held accountable. 

(This isn’t just a general point. For a relevant example of an anonymous source making false claims, note how BuzzFeed News “confirmed” that Unsworth was actually a cave diver here and here. Yet when put under oath, he affirmed that he absolutely is not. He’d also reported being tired of the press getting this wrong. So who was this source? Who had the motive?)

B. Wrong Location

“The search was going nowhere, the conditions were worsening by the hour and we had no idea where the boys were,” said Unsworth. - The London Times

He was partially correct here: no one could know their location with certainty. But there were only two likely options for refuge, both of which were common knowledge to many locals. Unsworth happened to guess wrong, whereas one of the boys’ friends pointed out the more likely one, which extends up ~10x higher off the cave floor.

To make sense of what follows, here’s a simplified map of the cave that reflects National Geographic’s ultra-precise scanning:

Lots of bad maps, graphics, and descriptions were shared during the rescue, some of which gave the impression that this cave is a maze. It isn’t. It’s essentially a long tunnel with minimal side passages, all of which end fairly quickly. As Unsworth said, it wasn’t a cave you could get lost in if you went in on foot.

While the cave does split in two at a t-junction, the most common destination was to the south. And given that the northern path leads to an effective dead end and offers no safety, if they’d gone that way they were dead, and the flow of the water would have likely pushed at least one body back to the junction. The open question was really just if the boys had made it to high ground in time, whether at the lower (near Chamber 8) or higher (Chamber 9) southern location. Confusingly though, both spots were referred to by many using the same name: Pattaya Beach. 

The first is a sort of natural amphitheater, with shelves starting a few feet above the cave floor. Though he later tried some incredible revisionist history here, this is where Unsworth told the British divers to look, and what led to their surprise when they found it flooded and empty:

I pointed to my compass, indicating that we had gone past Pattaya Beach. … ‘What the fuck is [Unsworth] going on about? There’s nowhere here that would have survived the floods of Thursday and Friday.’ This was absolutely Pattaya Beach, and the boys were clearly not there. - Rick Stanton, from his book on the rescue, pg. 150

Though Stanton adds in a footnote that Unsworth had simply gotten the name wrong and always meant the other location, this feels like a halfhearted attempt to vindicate him, as it’s clearly contradicted by all the available evidence—including the below map, with Unsworth’s name on it, that marks Pattaya Beach at Chamber 8. 

The second location, Chamber 9, was an aven, or basically a hill that extended up some 124 feet (good visualization here). This is where the kids were holding up—which makes sense, as the amphitheater had submerged with the rising water, pushing the boys from there (where they slept the first night) to the one real safe area. 

Both were reasonable enough guesses. And it wasn’t a big issue in itself that Unsworth happened to predict the wrong one, as the rescue wasn’t going to just stop there. It’s more that: (1) his supposedly unique insight here lent him unearned credibility, (2) he then later lied about having been right all along, (3) it elides that the Brits could have just done what the Thai Navy SEALs did and asked a local, some of whom rightly saw Chamber 9 as much more likely.

C. An Almost Fatal Prediction

More concerning than the location mixup, Unsworth’s guesswork also played a large role in the Brits giving up on the rescue early on. 

They’d been unable to make any progress on their initial dive from Chamber 3, given no visibility and a strong current. But they also took Unsworth at his word about the likely extent of the flooding, leading them to judge that the risks weren’t worth it to retrieve likely corpses. So they rescinded their cave access, requested flights home, and went off sightseeing with Unsworth (having been asked to not leave the country just yet for optical reasons).

While they were out, another team (Reymenants and Polejaka), who believed the boys could still be alive, decided to try again—in part under the hope that a letup in the rain had changed the diving conditions just enough, and in part to block the brave Thai Navy SEALs from more risky diving they were less trained for. Miraculously, this worked. One of these two divers, Reymenants, then offered to let the Brits come back in under his own access. (He would later be repaid with crude Keep Out signs as to his own re-entry, though that’s another story.)

Once the Brits were readmitted and dove again, they found that several of the remaining sections leading to the t-junction were only partially flooded, which changed their tune: 

To my surprise, we soon surfaced in a canal passage that was at least 100 metres long. Vern had predicted that most of the cave beyond Chamber 3 would be sumped, but for once he had been wrong. … This left hope that the boys could have found sanctuary when they’d become trapped, instead of being overwhelmed by the flood. This was a turning point. For the first time since we’d arrived, we were considering the possibility that they might still be alive. - Rick Stanton, pg. 145

It’s not that Unsworth didn’t know the cave. Of course he did. But he knew it as a dry caver. His insight into conditions in the far reaches of the cave, when flooded, was just guesswork, and his main guess happened to be wrong. But this had consequences. Were it not for the stubborn actions of other divers, this might have led to the rescue being abandoned altogether. 

D. Non-Cooperation

Unsworth had deep problems getting along with the Thai Navy SEALs who’d come in to formalize the operation after he and others had attempted their own initial rescue. He held, at best, a declining respect for them. As just one taste of this, he went so far as to refer to them in a private chat using a local slur, kwaai, which translates to “buffalo” and is used to compare someone to a dumb beast of low understanding.

This friction led the Thais to call in alternates to work in parallel, including a Thai geographer and a few non-British cave divers. Somewhat predictably, this didn’t solve the problem. When the other divers arrived, Unsworth (and Volanthen) clashed with one of them (Reymenants) too, over some borrowed rope that was later credited as instrumental to the rescue. 

But while figuring out where the kids were wasn’t an issue that required Unsworth’s help, actually getting to them was, kind of. The exit from the cave’s t-junction that connected it to the southward path was in a tricky spot submerged in a growing pool of murky water. If rescuers couldn’t find it, progress was impossible. While Unsworth was hardly the only one with this information, he knew it well. That was valuable.

The work of pathfinding towards the boys was done by three teams: (1) two Brits (Stanton and Volanthen), (2) two Europeans (Ben Reymenants and Maksym “Max” Polejaka), (3) the Thai Navy SEALs. By luck of the draw, it was Reymenants and Polejaka who were up once the line had been advanced back to the t-junction. But, per Reymenants, Unsworth himself didn’t give them any guidance on where to look, nor a map. It fell on a third Brit, Rob Harper, to give him the needed insight, when the latter happened to walk by the former on his final bathroom break, which is what later set up the Brits to be the ones to reach the kids on their next shift. 

E. Other Contributions

So far as we can tell, the sum of Unsworth’s involvement otherwise was:

• He nobly and readily jumped in to help with the earliest rescue effort, before additional flooding forced them all out. This was certainly commendable.

• He assisted his fellow Brits (and perhaps others?) with food and supplies, and played tour guide for them. Again, great.

• He asked Josh Morris, an American caver there as a translator and liaison, to push for the rescue to be entrusted to the Brits. (It’s unclear what impact this had, though it certainly could have been additive to the growing push in that direction.)

• He may have helped carry some of the boys out, as part of a ~200 person convoy, in the same way one might symbolically carry the Olympic torch for a stretch.

Overall, you have a guy who played a key role in getting the other Brits involved, and was willing to sacrificially do whatever he could to help. This was noble, and good. But what he knew about the cave (relevant to the rescue) was mostly common knowledge, and his concrete predictions were both wrong, one almost ruinously. 

As for Musk’s involvement, Unsworth seems to have just picked up rumors. When pressed in court to provide evidence that he was speaking about the sub based on real knowledge, he was only able to point to a YouTube video. He was similarly unable to validate his claim that Musk had been asked to leave the cave (he’d been invited in by a Thai official, at their insistence). 

This may be why his comments to CNN were made off-air at first. They were gossip, not news. But they were apparently too juicy to pass on, or to verify.

Which brings us to the New York Times follow-on that sparked Musk’s infamous comment. 

(We’re not naming names here. While you can trivially figure out who all these journalists are, mobs are bad and this isn’t at all about any one person. Please do not tweet at them! Direct your attention at institutions and systems, not individuals.)

I was also aware that most people’s knowledge of the rescue was very limited due to the poor journalistic reporting…. - Rick Stanton

Starting about a day after Unsworth’s CNN interview, a New York Times columnist piled on, in both an opinion piece and then a supporting Twitter thread. Outside of blindly taking Unsworth’s comments and credentials at face value, their entire narrative was also just fundamentally irreconcilable with how the rescue actually unfolded. Their commentary reads as if a loaded thesis about tech CEOs had already been written, with the specific charges just bolted on:

The Silicon Valley model for doing things is a mix of can-do optimism, a faith that expertise in one domain can be transferred seamlessly to another and a preference for rapid, flashy, high-profile action. But what got the kids and their coach out of the cave was a different model: a slower, more methodical, more narrowly specialized approach to problems, one that has turned many risky enterprises into safe endeavors…

Uhh, from risky to safe? Safe? As being relevant here?

• The divers doped weakly kids with benzos, atropine, and ketamine. The last drug had to be re-upped repeatedly, based more on whim than science. This was like 20 chapters outside the standard playbook. It had never been tried, anywhere, except on a wild seal, once, kind of.

• A few of these injections were done by a diver who’d missed the initial drills and prep meetings. He was only told about the drugs as the rescue was starting, which was news he was left to process as the divers who knew the cave swam on ahead. After deciding to press on anyway, new terrors in mind, he promptly got lost. 

• This diver’s training to inject these drugs was a pantomime. The others at least got to try on a water bottle, once. He was also assigned on the last day to carry out the boys’ coach, whose identity he only learned after his dive, which was after the under-drugged coach had risked both their lives, in two separate incidents.

• This dive was through waters cold enough that a fit ex-Navy SEAL, who was not on a cocktail of drugs, died in them just days earlier. One boy’s temperature dropped as low as roughly 85F / 29C. There were near misses, and blown handoffs. No one had thought to mark the stations each support diver was supposed to be at. Several boys were in there much longer than they had to be.

• The coordinating US Air Force team predicted a 30-40% fatality rate, which was sunny compared to the best-case 50% expectation of the anaesthetist who sedated the boys. His take: “I didn’t feel comfortable in any way, shape or form about what we were doing. … It felt like euthanasia to me.” And elsewhere: “I still maintain that it was the most dangerous and impossible solution to this problem, and I really held that view until the last boy came out..”

It’s great that this all worked out! But nothing like this had ever been attempted, and the Aussie doctors had to ask the Thai government to waive liability for a reason. It was a plan of desperation; a Hail Mary that Mary apparently heard. But not being himself a believer in prayer, Stanton also sensibly kept at least one iron in the fire for a Plan B, even after Plan A’s initial success—by once again affirming that Musk should build his mini-sub.

“We all knew that the integrity of the face mask’s seal would likely be the failure point, and we were open to hearing options to address this risk. … I hadn’t been able to think of another plan with any of the materials that were available to us, but maybe if something useful could be created by a team of engineers… John and I agreed that if anybody could help us, it was Elon Musk.” - Rick Stanton, pg. 299

Plan A was good, execution errors aside, in that it was their best shot. But it wasn’t safe. It was the exact kind of “improbable long shot” that’s derided in this column. The Brits just happened to think two long shots better than only one.

Heroes and Villains

This columnist has a Pulitzer prize, as does a colleague of theirs who recently co-reported a wildly slanted story about Musk with the journalist in the next section. We don’t bring this up to say they were unworthy of their awards. We only mean to illustrate that even the very best journalists can easily lose sight of their objectivity and the importance of due care when it comes to chasing “the premium outcome”. 

It’s important that powerful figures like Musk are held to account. But if this isn’t done well, it’s worse than it not being done at all. And it’s often done…less than well.

In their supporting thread, this columnist added that “the worst thing to do to a famous/rich person is to be their uncritical fan”. While we agree, there’s an inverse point about perceived underdogs. Good journalism can’t be uncritical in either direction! But consider how Unsworth, who isn’t a diver, is framed in this same thread: “This diver is not a bystander—if someone made a movie, I’d make him the key character.” Unsworth was made to be the wronged hero because it was a good narrative, and it was so good that no one ever verified it. 

Anyway, it was to this thread (and linked CNN interview) that Musk replied with his very heated comment about Unsworth. That comment, however inappropriate and unkind, did not come from a vacuum. It came from a man very, very tired of this shit, who had done a good thing, which he’d been encouraged to do by those in the arena, who nevertheless got punished for it by journalists too eager with their takes to first step back and ask if they were zealous or right. 

We can judge both this and Musk. We should judge both. It’s morally insane to not judge both.

One thing that hampers me is my poor memory, but I think I’ve pretty much got everything accurate from my point of view. - Rick Stanton

Stanton’s first public criticisms of the sub (that we’re aware of) surfaced in an interview he did with BuzzFeed News in September, some two months after the rescue. While Stanton hadn’t personally inspected it in the interim, Unsworth had since shaken a suit at Musk, and the sub was again a story. 

Had Stanton’s criticisms here been clear and forthright, this delay in voicing them was fine. But his criticisms weren’t clear and forthright. What he offered was:

• That he “did not recall providing exact specifications to Musk”

• That the sub “was not developed enough”, and more specifically lacked “the necessary life support systems”

• That anyway the sub additionally wasn’t considered because Plan A was “already well underway”

There are deep problems with each of these claims:

• Stanton had provided Musk with rough size specs, and had received back the planned dimensions of the sub along with an offer to modify it if need be, which Stanton was silent to

• Stanton also provided other brusque input on life support systems, which were considered in its final design, which Stanton again never inspected

• Musk had also added that he didn’t “want to put it on a plane if you think there are important changes needed”, to which he received no further feedback

• Plan A was “already well underway” (four boys were already out) when Stanton emailed Musk again to tell him to “please keep working on the capsule details”, as they were still “worried about the smallest lad” 

(We gave Stanton a chance to clarify if BuzzFeed had simply misreported his comments, to which he provided no real answer.)

The lead reporter here could have asked Stanton why he’d continued encouraging Musk to build the sub even after the first rescue day, and after his initial disapproving comments. There was a known reason for this, and Musk had already made relevant emails with Stanton public back in July. (The reporter did, to their partial credit, ask for more of his emails with Stanton, which we’ve collected in full into a handy timeline here. But if you only ask for more after ignoring the ones already out there, that’s unlikely to go well!)

It’s worth noting that this lead reporter also has a (co-authored) book on Musk coming out. They’ve materially advanced their career on the back of reporting on Musk, and as I’ve covered eg. here, some of this reporting is, at best, flawed in a structurally prejudicial way. While I suspect the book will be right in places, how will readers know which claims are and aren’t based on real legwork? 

There are two things easy to conflate: (1) the Brits being ideal choices as lead rescue divers, and (2) the Brits being ideal choices to lead the rescue effort. 

Believing the first isn’t at all controversial. They were obvious choices. But this is wholly separate from the skills that go into broader leadership, like communication and collaboration. They were not especially good at this, as they themselves testify to:

Laughing off the idea of being bad team players isn’t an aside. Plan A’s execution had a lot of gaps that less insular leadership should have caught and solved for:

• The Brits’ insistence on using their own divers based on idiosyncratic trust and “the right experience” meant several qualified exits and at least three late arrivals. By Stanton’s own admission, they weren’t even left with enough divers for their own original Plan A (though it was likely worse anyway).

• The line trap was never fixed, causing at least one diver to lose hold of it while carrying one of the boys out, and several to struggle. (To his credit, Stanton acknowledged this mistake in his book.) The fix was somewhat trivial, and would have greatly improved safety.

• At least one of the support divers wasn’t taught the trick to this line trap, where they could avoid the narrowest underwater restriction. This created a problem on the first rescue day when said diver was asked to relieve one of the Brits (Jewell) and carry a boy out through this section, and wasn’t able to on first go.

• Nothing was done to mark the stations for the support divers, leading to a lot of confusion and failed handoffs (and some yelling at divers who didn’t deserve it).

• They didn’t have anyone double-check the boys’ sizes, leading to a troublesome surprise when they realized, at quite literally the last possible moment, that not one but two boys had mask fit issues.

• They never really came up with a plan for said issues, and were only bailed out because a Thai volunteer took it upon himself to retrofit a smaller mask.

• They also just weirdly accepted the limitation of only having four masks they really trusted. Reymenants owns a dive shop, and several other divers were based locally. Give them the make and model and get people calling! Or ask Musk!

• Their “no filming” policy made it difficult for later-arriving divers to really understand the route. One of the support divers, when asked what he’d do differently, went straight to suggesting that all divers be asked to use GoPros.

It’s lovely that none of these planning issues turned fatal. But they easily could have, and you can’t judge a plan only by its outcome. A run of good luck is not itself a great blueprint for repeatable success, and there will be more rescues to come. 

Alternate Reality

With all the typical caveats about counterfactuals, let’s also imagine a scenario in which all the Brits were just never involved:

• The Thai Navy Seals would have done exactly what they did, and asked locals where the boys were likely to be, and gotten pointed to Chamber 9.

• While map quality varied, the main issue was incorrect distances (also true of Unsworth’s maps). The actual orientation of where to go to get to Chamber 9 was well understood. As Unsworth himself said, the boys weren’t missing, but trapped. They didn’t need to be found so much as reached.

• That the Brits were the ones to reach the kids was incidental, and involved them breaking their own safety rule. The teams were diving in rotation, and if the Brits hadn’t made it far enough then the next team up would have gotten there.

• Getting through the t-junction would have been trickier, but again many locals knew roughly where the exit was, and they weren’t looking for a pinhole. This would have just slowed them down. Precious time, but not itself a dealbreaker.

• Other Thai-based cave divers were already coming in on their own initiative, and it was Reymenants and Polejaka (along with the indefatigable Thai SEALs) who did the initial pathfinding through the hardest area. While the Brits did a crack job of adding two quite long sections, both were through easier areas that the most competent divers on site could have managed. 

• Reymenants was already in contact with the same Aussie doctors who came up with the actual Plan A used.

• The other divers all got along with the Thais, and likely wouldn’t have fractured the communication structure into silos.

• Stanton admitted in his book being “extremely skeptical” that the low oxygen reading in the cave was correct. While being mum about this suspicion was perhaps tactically shrewd in building urgency for action, it’s also the sort of thing that kills trust when discovered.

This isn’t at all to diminish Stanton and Volanthen as divers, as athletes, as tinkerers, or as men of very admirable bravery. Counterfactuals aside, their rescue got 13/13 out alive. They deserve their laurels for that! But looking forward to future rescues, have they mended their ways? You really do need leaders who can play well with others. That’s not just important, but essential.

(We’re leaving out Stanton’s partner, John Volanthen, for much of this. He was for the sub being made, never voiced a criticism of it, and didn’t testify on Unsworth’s behalf.) 

While strong egos are common amongst experts in one niche or another, what separates ego and arrogance is the ability to trust that others know things too, along with minimum baselines of curiosity and humility. It’s fine to be confident because you’ve really put in all the work. It’s quite another to skip to conclusions based on knee-jerk judgments, and to be slow to reconsider. 

The accounts we collected all point to Stanton as a man who trusts supremely in his own intellect and judgment, often requiring others to prove themselves to his standards before being all that interested in what they have to say. 

For a taste of this, the final paragraphs of one of his emails to me (Jeremy): 

For you to fully grasp the complexity of the [sub’s] functionality I would have to start at first principles as you’re so lacking in specific area expertise.

I guess your readers would be the same, therefore I feel no requirement to educate them. 

No one else we spoke to was like this. I’ve worked with a lot of brilliant technologists over my career, and specialize in doing comms work on the nuanced and the complex. While I wouldn’t pretend that I always follow every fine technical point, people find a way to explain, and I find a way to ask questions where I’m unsure. That Stanton engaged like this feels symptomatic. He’s claimed to have a six-page document outlining his concerns with the sub. Why not share it publicly for peer review?

Many Lions, One Pride

Stanton had Reymenants run off the cave site because of frictions that mostly boiled down to premature judgments. He was constantly primed to believe negative things about Reymenants, and rarely curious enough to really look into them before deciding. But Reymenants, who also consulted on the sub’s design, was no less qualified than Stanton to do so, and arguably a bit more, being a board-certified hyperbaric technologist. And of course the people who made it also know a thing or two about engineering. Some of them had day jobs working on the life support aspects of SpaceX’s Dragon space suits. That NASA trusts them was apparently not enough for Stanton to give them the benefit of some self-doubt.

Stanton responded fairly brusquely to pictures that Musk sent him of an early test unit, in an email containing more periods than question marks. It wasn’t that the things Stanton listed were unimportant; it was that his response assumed they’d been overlooked. He never did inspect it to know what made the final cut. He just decided, in full self-trust. 

We’ve confirmed that some of his later criticisms came down to a video he’d watched where he didn’t see air bubbles come out of the sub. But they were there. He’d just overlooked them. And then moved the goalposts.

Might he be sitting on some criticisms that are valid? And would the sub still have needed more on-site tinkering before being used? Both are certainly possible! But Musk had a contingent of elite engineers there, and they were not idiots.

The World’s Best Cave Divers

The story of how Stanton got involved has often been told with a sort of reverse emphasis. It wasn’t that Unsworth called him up based on his reputation. Stanton reached out, via a mutual contact, to him.

As Stanton recounts in the early chapters of his book:

• He’d recently hit things off with a Thai woman who’d been visiting the UK. She returned home on the same Saturday the boys went missing, and happened to live nearby, leading her to tell Stanton about it on the Monday.

• Stanton then reached out to Volanthen, who agreed they should go help. Knowing they’d need an official invitation, they tried to secure one through various UK government officials, none of whom immediately responded.

• Undeterred, Stanton found a press release that mentioned Unsworth’s name next to that of a British cave diver Rob Harper. Stanton had met Harper once back in the early 80s, and knew how to get a hold of him, which he did. The next day, Unsworth successfully pushed two Thai ministers into inviting the three of them.

But if Harper had indeed thought of Stanton and Volanthen before, and if Unsworth had been advocating for them specifically all along, we’re left with the curious question of why Stanton had to make that contact with Harper based on online sleuthing. Had Harper really just never thought to give them a head’s up to start preparing in case Unsworth’s appeals were successful? 

Again, none of this changes the central fact that Stanton and Volanthen are extremely good at their core competencies. They might very well be the world’s best cave divers. But skill isn’t the only thing that matters. Good leaders communicate, explain, and hold their judgments softly. It was great that they were ultimately called in. If they’re called in for the next one too, we can only hope they’ve taken some of this to heart. 

Musk dropped his submarine off with the Thai Navy Seals at around midnight, between the rescue’s second and third days. This was a subject of some surprise to the Thais, most of whom didn’t know that it was coming or why. While Stanton had asked for it to be brought to his room upon arrival, it never was. And, given the hour of its arrival, he was unable to meet Musk or inspect it in person. Why he was never shown it later by the Thais may remain a mystery. 

During a media event the following morning, local Thai governor Narongsak Osatanakorn (now sadly deceased), made a comment that many took as him saying the submarine had been ruled out entirely. This wasn’t true, and didn’t come from Stanton. The sub was still a candidate for Plan B until it could be determined if the masks would fit the smallest two boys (only one of whom the Brits knew about), and Osatanakorn was seemingly unaware of this. 

Osatanakorn’s ambiguous statement was that, though the sub was "sophisticated", it didn't "fit with our mission". But as Musk rightfully pointed out on Twitter, Osatanakorn was not the subject matter expert. Stanton was, and it was Stanton who’d asked, as late as after the first set of rescues, for Musk to continue his work on it. 

(Whether Osatanakorn, as Musk also claimed, wasn’t even “the rescue chief” is thornier. For most practical purposes the Brits were running the rescue dives at this point. There was also a complex command structure on the Thai side, including several ministers and senior military folks. Notably, Osatanakorn had also been scheduled for demotion, with his transfer delayed until after the rescue. Given the intense public interests here, it's difficult to believe his say was final on larger questions, and indeed the evidence suggests it wasn’t. He was valuable for his media handling and logistics, and was a good, learned man. But Musk had been dealing with the Thai Prime Minister's office directly, and may have had this context in mind.)

Scorecard

So, to recap Musk’s actions, both public and private:

• He was complimentary of all involved in his tweets, including the rescue divers. The only exceptions were his (we think correct) clarification about the Thai governor, and his over-the-line response to Unsworth’s suckerpunch.

• He never expected the sub to be used outside of an unlikely Plan B, but brought it because they asked him to, knowing Plan B might indeed be needed.

• While fairly quiet as to the PowerWalls his guys dropped off for the pumping team, the donated tools, and the scope of engineering assistance offered, Musk was loud and public about the sub and other direct rescue ideas. But only because he thought open dialogue would help there, which has long proven true for his company’s own innovations, and was widely used by the Thais (via Facebook) in their own open calls for assistance.

• He went to the cave in person because it was the fastest route to deliver the sub (he was headed to China anyway), and only went into the cave—at midnight, while no rescue operations were underway—because the Thais insisted.

• The team he sent was praised for being uniquely notable for listening, for not forcing their ideas, and for not insisting anything they built be used.

Apart from his reply to Unsworth, this is…bad? We want less of this? 

And as for the very regrettable exception here, consider what you'd do if you’d invested greatly in trying to be helpful, constantly deferring to the on-the-ground experts as you went, only to be met with angry tinfoil takes promoted by journalists at the largest news orgs? While you very well might not lash out so wildly, if you did lash out you’d hope that at least one of those journalists would take this as a clue to have a deeper look. But none ever did.

If your theory of the world is that Musk is too powerful and that he gets away with too much, the exact wrong strategy is to lead crusades against him that will fall apart under basic levels of scrutiny. It’s much better to be selective and precise in any outrage. That’s how you get readers to reflect, to update their perceptions, and to push alongside you in a helpful way. And how you get Musk to do the same.

Musk was in the wrong in his response, yes. And not by a little. But it’s small of us to stop our outrage there, or to absolve ourselves of the mob spirit that gave CNN the inkling that broadcasting Unsworth’s suckerpunch was a winning move. Absent that confidence, they never air the clip unchallenged and the confrontation with Musk never happens. Hopefully more raindrops will consider themselves part of the flood.

(This section is by Jeremy alone.)

The Aussie doctors made a healthy point at the end of their joint book, in reference to their own investigation into some of the media myths: 

"‘At some point,’ Craig said to me, ‘you really have to question everything in the story, even the things you think you saw with your own eyes. Memory is an unreliable thing.’

There’s no substitute for slowness, for caution, for double and triple checking, or for refusing to take narratives at face value. I’ve learned a lot since my original coverage of this in 2018, which erred in places from too much media trust. I’ve been chastened into extra skepticism of what I read, of what I’m told, and of what I write. This is why I maintain a corrections policy. It’s very easy to be wrong. We ought to expect it as the default, then do something concrete about it.

There will be objections here, from some journalists, about deadlines and resource cuts and reasonable expectations. I have basically two responses to them:

1. I was able to get this story mostly right with modest amounts of time back in 2018. That writeup was then used by Musk in his initial apology to Unsworth, supplying some context as to why he’d been so worked up. Its core points hold up pretty well. 

2. Lots and lots of journalists saw that piece. But not only did it not cause them to rethink what they’d gotten wrong, they took the opposite approach:

• Many outright misrepresented what I said

• None addressed any of my concerns

• Many mentioned my piece without linking to it to let readers decide for themselves

When I appealed to the New York Times for a chance to respond, I heard crickets.

(Full recap of all this here.) 

So if the argument is that they couldn’t have done the full job, what’s the argument that they couldn’t at least have put in a matching effort to a random guy blogging from his bedroom in his spare time, who had minimal contacts or resources? 

Is this the kind of journalism we’re asking people to have faith in? I’m a subscriber to the New York Times. I want, so badly, for journalism to be better, and to be able to point my readers towards outlets they can trust. But which ones don’t have these problems? And how can readers know if they’re reading the 80% good articles or the 20% slapdash ones? And how many newspapers even reach that split?

These are not entirely rhetorical questions. 

The Lengede Miracle happened in 1963. Note all the parallels to Thailand in 2018, and how little changed. We desperately need to commit to learning something from these events to improve our odds at the next one—else we need to admit that it’s all just theater and that we want the drama more than we care about the outcome. 

May we choose better.

I’ll close by thanking my research partner, Raimund, for investing an amount of effort into this that I found remarkable, concerning, and humbling. I hope we have a chance to tell the rest in a fitting format, and in doing so to properly celebrate the unsung, downplayed, and in some cases erased contributions of other heroes who played essential roles in getting those boys out alive. 

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