3 MINUTE MONDAY

Hi friend,

I’m coming back to the UK & Ireland with a brand new live show!

Edinburgh, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Exeter, London, Dublin (sold out), Newcastle & Belfast 🚀

In 1976, a trolleybus carrying around 90 passengers crashed into a reservoir in Yerevan.

The bus sank roughly 10 metres to the bottom in freezing, murky water.

A 23-year-old man named Shavarsh Karapetyan happened to be jogging nearby with his brother. Without giving it much thought, Shavarsh jumped into the water and ordered his brother to help him from the shore.

This might seem like an unusually bold act of heroism, but Karapetyan was not an ordinary bystander. He might be the most serendipitous witnesses to an accident in history.

Sharvarsh was a 17-time world champion and an 11-time world record holder in finswimming.

Basically, a trolleybus had crashed into a lake directly in front of one of the best underwater swimmers on Earth.

“It was scary at first. It was so loud, as if a bomb went off. I almost drowned several times. I could imagine the agony of those 92 people and I knew how they would die”.

Karapetyan immediately dove into the water to help but visibility was almost zero because the reservoir was full of mud, sewage, and debris.

He repeatedly swam down in the dark to locate the submerged bus and kicked through the rear window underwater to get inside.

Dive after dive, he held his breath, found trapped passengers, dragged them back to the surface, handed them to rescuers in a rowboat and went straight back down again.

He reportedly made dozens of dives over around 20 minutes, physically pulling out 37 people, 20 of whom ultimately survived.

During one dive, he accidentally grabbed a leather seat cushion instead of a passenger because the visibility was so poor.

After the event Karapetyan was hospitalised alongside victims of the accident.

He contracted septic fever, double-sided pneumonia and nervous prostration which resulted in doctors fighting for his life for over a month.

He ultimately survived but the rescue destroyed his athletic career. Broken glass from the bus had shredded his legs, while the polluted water caused permanent damage from the severe pneumonia and sepsis.

Soviet authorities initially downplayed the story, so it remained relatively unknown for decades.

Today, the rescue is considered one of the greatest acts of civilian heroism ever recorded, while years later Sharvarsh said nothing about the end of his athletic career but did state that grabbing the single leather seat cushion still haunted him because he believed someone may have died while he carried up the cushion instead.

MODERN WISDOM

I do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent.

This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Monday.
Liv Boeree, Zack Kass & Aric Thomas: AI Debate - what will the next 30 years look like? Should we be worried about power centralisation or misaligned AI? How big of a deal is half the world being made redundant from their jobs? Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Thursday.
Dr David Sinclair - Harvard Medical School’s leading life-extension researcher on how to live longer with his best diet, training, supplementation and lifestyle interventions for longevity.

Saturday.
Dylan Gossett - one of the hottest country musicians in the world plays unreleased songs from his new album, explains why Morgan Wallen doesn’t need to cover himself in gold, talks creativity, AI and more.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
People’s perception of crime levels are not accurate.

“Crime rates in the US have been mostly decreasing since the 1990s. But most people feel like crime is increasing, even when it’s not.” — Adam Mastroianni