Unity Jagged Array Index was outside the bounds of the array

Question

I have created a long jagged array full of strings, but am getting an index out of bounds error on the line it is introduced despite the fact that I can create another smaller array just fine like below

string[][] testingout = new string[][]
        {
            new string[]{"testing1","testing2"},
            new string[]{"testing3","testing4"}
        };

I cannot reference or debug to view anything within the array. I have manually inputed the correct sizes for the array, and made sure nothing inside or outside the script is referencing the code, but still get this error. I have tried running this in Start() Awake() and OnEnable Is this a problem with the code running too slow to initialize all the way because there are so many strings? My whole array is 20 long and no array inside is longer than 16 long. Contents are longer than about 5 sentences long. Thank you for any help provided!

Edit: the error code specifies thats its outside the size of the collection and only happens once it has about 9,000 characters in the array. I'm Using System.Collection.Generic. Could that be limiting the size? I don't know how collections work

Edit: This is the line that the error is called upon (which is when its first mentioned and initialized)

 string[][] AlanTalks = new string[16][]