Dr. Deep Sea’s Oceanic Adventures with Dr. Joe Dituri
In this episode of the Adrenaline Zone, Dr. Joe Dituri, a former commander in the US Navy, shares his experience as a deep-sea diver, special operations officer, and engineering duty officer. His passion for diving started at a young age when his father gave him a double hose regulator that allowed him to breathe underwater. He eventually found his way to the Navy, where he gained extensive experience in diving, engineering, and research. The episode covers a range of topics, including underwater suits, physics and mechanics of the underwater environment, and his current work in treating traumatic brain injury. The conversation is a must-listen for anyone interested in deep-sea diving and undersea research.
During his 100-day stay at the Jules' Undersea facility, Dr. Dituri serves a threefold purpose: outreach to students to get them excited about STEM fields, discussing preservation, protection, and rejuvenation of the marine environment, and conducting biomedical research related to solving problems for astronauts and aquanauts. Living underwater presents its own unique challenges, including decompression and bone density loss, which Dr. Dituri is researching to help solve problems for astronauts in space. He also shares his goal of becoming an astronaut and his excitement about his upcoming zero gravity flight. Dr. Dituri's work and passion for deep-sea diving and undersea research are truly inspiring and a testament to the limitless potential of human exploration and scientific discovery.
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Transcript:
Sandy Winnefeld: Dr. Joe Dituri, Commander US Navy, retired, has amassed a broad array of knowledge and experiences both during his 28-year Navy career and afterwards. He now goes by Dr. Deep Sea.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: While in the Navy, he spent considerable operational time in the depths of the oceans with the special operations community and other diving assignments. After leaving the military, he earned a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering and turned his focus to the physiological aspects of undersea research.
Sandy Winnefeld: He's also the author of Secrets in Depth, a bit of fiction that leverages his extensive experience in the depths of the world's oceans.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So Joe is currently involved in a 100-day stay at the Jules’ Undersea Lodge, an underwater research facility located off of Key Largo, Florida, where he's performing medical research and technical development as well as ocean conservation work.
Sandy Winnefeld: Joe was kind enough to take a break from his busy schedule and chat with us from 30 ft underwater about his experiences and his passion for research and discovery.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, Joe, welcome to The Adrenaline Zone. There is so much to talk about. I have no idea how we're going to get through it all in the half an hour or so that we have to talk with you, but it's going to be fun.
Dr. Joe Dituri: I agree. Thank you, guys, for having me, and thank you for the privilege.
Sandy Winnefeld: Yeah. Well, look, Joe, we do like to start at the beginning with all of our guests. So let me ask you, what got you interested in diving and undersea, and how did that lead you to the US Navy?
Dr. Joe Dituri: So flashback to the ‘70s, probably ‘77. I was about ten years old. My dad had a boat that was just too big to pull out of the water, so he asked me to go underneath with a mask on and try and take this zinc tab off the bottom of the boat. But try and hold my breath. Try and hold my breath. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. He was like, “All right, hold on. Stay right there.” And he fits this backpack over the shoulder with just a strap on the waist and a double hose regulator. And he's like, “Okay, just keep breathing.” Then he goes, “Wait, just don't hold your breath.” So I go underwater, and I'm breathing underwater. I'm like, “Oh, this is amazing.”
Now I'm in a canal in New York, right? So it's not like it's like the “Oh, I'm in the Bahamas looking at fish. I'm at the Great Barrier Reef.” No, I'm in a canal in New York, and there's dishes over here and junkie things, whatever. I'm underwater, and I'm like, “This is amazing.” So from that point on, I would cut school. And, yeah, it was just– I just dive every chance I can get. And I was just diving in the canals. Why? Because I didn't know. I didn't know any better at all, right? I just dive in the canals, and then I dove off the beach one day, and the lifeguard is like, “What are you doing diving off the beach? There's nothing out here.” I'm like, there are fish. It's so cool. I can finally see. I can see a little bit.”
Sandy Winnefeld: That's great. And how did it go to the Navy?
Dr. Joe Dituri: Yeah, so that didn't necessarily get me in the Navy, but this thirst for wanting to go do something near the water got me in the Navy. Believe it or not, I didn't do very well in high school. I was not paying attention very well and didn't do well on standardized testing, so didn't have a lot of options. So I went down to the recruiter, and I went to the Marine Corps recruiter. My mom said, “Try again. You're 17. I'm not signing the papers.” I said, “But Mom, I want to go be all I can be in the Marines.” Or whatever the saying is. She said, “No, you're going into something that's going to give you an education.” I said, “Okay. How's the Navy? They want to make me a nuke.” And I'm like, “Okay, sounds good.” My mom's like, “Yup.” Two enthusiastic thumbs way up. “You can go in.” So I went in, and then from that point on, it was like, “Oh, wow, there are lots of different cool jobs in the Navy, and I want to go do something cool.”
So long and the short of it was I erect a motorcycle during nuclear power school, and I washed out of that because you can't be a nuke and have Eczema. And I apparently had Eczema, so they offered me a choice of any school in the Navy. And then, long story short, I found my way to a place called Submarine Medical Research Lab as just an enlisted kid, and I'm watching all this Saturation diving stuff, and I'm watching all of this great work being done, and I'm like, “I want to be that guy.” And I pointed at Captain Claude Harvey, I want to be that guy. He relieved Captain George Bond on his last watch in the Navy, and I said, “I want to be that guy when I grow up.” Earned a commission out of there, and sure enough, Special Operations Officer.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That's why I was curious how you got into the special ops pipeline because you didn't know that you wanted to do that, so you just kind of fell into it because you happened to get into the saturation diving, which sounds like it was perfect because it leveraged your love of diving, didn't it?
Dr. Joe Dituri: It leveraged a love of diving. And like I said, I was still diving. I was diving at night. Now I'm diving for lobsters at that point because I'm in Groton, Connecticut, and I'm diving for lobsters. It was neat.
Sandy Winnefeld: So we'll get into kind of what you're doing now here in a little bit. But first, I want to ask you. Tell us about if you can, the diving you did as part of the special operations community. How deep, what lessons did you learn? What risks did you have to manage in that slice of the profession?
Dr. Joe Dituri: When I went in there, I became a mixed gas diving officer. I learned the deep aspects of diving the whole while I'm doing civilian diving while I'm out there. So I'm stationed in Hawaii. I'm at Mobile Diving Salvage Unit One, and we're doing diving salvage, pulling stuff off the beach, that kind of thing. Real, hoo yah stuff. And that was all well and good, and at that point, I said, “Hey, look, we got to do something different here.” Because I don't see a lot of future in this spec ops community because there were 13 captains at the time. Admiral, you get this, there were 13 captains at the time running the community, and there wasn't an admiral. So this was pre-9/11, obviously, it's 1997, 1998, 1999. I did a second tour on a salvage ship, Salvor, and then before you know it, I was like, “Okay, you guys got to get your stuff together.”
So I moved to the engineering duty diver community from there, and that was where I was really exposed to real diving and engineering principles and that type of thing. So you found that the supervisor of salvage and diving was actually an engineering duty officer diving position, not a special operations diving position. So I got a little bit of diving salvage experience, two or three tours, three tours in diving stuff. And then I came and I brought that to the engineering duty officer community, and it was like, “Oh, yeah, now I'm running with scissors.”
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So what kind of dives do you do as an engineering duty officer, and what kind of tasks were the most challenging with that? Because that's completely different than what you were doing before, right?
Dr. Joe Dituri: It is. Most of what I did before, most of what a Navy diver does is underwater ships husbandry. So that type of stuff, that's where I spent a lot of hours. But I also did salvage of materials, salvage of an airplane that went down, salvage of a ship that went down. So when you become an engineering duty diver, you do more of the thinking aspect of that particular dive. So here you are, you're doing salvage calculations on what it's going to take to pull that ship off the beach, how much it's going to take to raise that ship up off the bottom or that aircraft off the bottom, or where the lifting points are and that kind of thing. So generally speaking, the same kind of work.
But then there was that one job in the Navy, that one job where I'm at the National Reconnaissance Office doing my pre-tour like I'm going to go there. And I got the call from the guy that was in charge at the Deep Submergence Unit, and he said, “Joe, you are the heir apparent.” And I said, “No, I got to do a payback tour. I'm going to the National Reconnaissance Office. I'm out here house hunting TAD right now.” And he said, “No, we already fixed that. You are coming and you're going to be in charge of the Deep Submergence Unit.”
Sandy Winnefeld: Needs of the Navy.
Dr. Joe Dituri: Yes. So that job turned out to be the best job I've ever done in the Navy. I got to fly in a one-atmosphere suit. I got to replace the DSRV Mystic with the Pressurized Rescue Module and have the McCann Rescue Chambers. And that was like, hoo yah, hoo yah. So it was the mission of the engineering duty background and all the calculations of being in charge and then the go ahead and do great diving things and have fun and do international engagements. So I smiled a lot during those three years.
Sandy Winnefeld: So Sandra pulled from somewhere that while you were at the Deep Submergence Unit, in that great job, your team won an Award for Excellence and certified a 2000-foot of seawater atmospheric diving system, which scares the living daylights out of me because I can’t imagine diving at 2000 ft. So tell us about that project and the kind of risks you had to manage doing that. That's not trivial, right?
Dr. Joe Dituri: All right, that is absolutely true. So that suit was designed by Hardsuit and originally Phil Newton, so it was called the Newtsuit back in the day. And I've known Phil because of the underwater realm and the engineering duty officer realm. I'd known this guy for probably ten years by this point. Now all of a sudden, I'm flying up to Vancouver to talk with him about the equivalence principle and the ability for the suit to not collapse in on you. So I learned some great engineering principles. I learned about risk mitigation and risk management. And you're flying a suit that is made out of blocks of aluminum that are milled out. So all those blocks of aluminum are milled out and then fastened together with these joints that have knife edges that will seal and close and it won't let them turn if it's not working correctly.
So the whole time you're leaning against MAN-010/P-9290, which is the Navy standard for, “Oh my gosh, we got to keep these guys alive.” And basically, everything in that manual is written in blood. And, I mean, they say that, but that is the honest truth. All that stuff is written in blood. So you're adhering to everything that's in that realm, but you're mixing it with a civilian commercial off-the-shelf product, and now you're trying to push these two together. Oh, boy. The rubber met the road there, and we did a lot of head-banging with the engineers at NAVC and I'm like, “I think it's safe enough.” And they're like, “We don't think you understand.” And I'm like, “Maybe I do a little bit.” So risk mitigation became an every-other-day word for me.
Sandy Winnefeld: So did you test that suit at depth without somebody in it to make sure it was working?
Dr. Joe Dituri: So that was standard protocol. We tested it. So we'd test it, and anytime we did work on it, we'd assemble it, test it, and we'd send it down to 2500 ft. Almost 2500ft, a little less than 250 0ft, and it's good to 2000 ft. So that one time that I almost got fired when we tied the arms together because there was nobody in the suit, and I sent it all the way down to 2500 ft and I flooded the suit because the joints couldn't squeeze together. There was a rope around it, so I couldn't let the joints squeeze together. I flooded the suit and I was like– And when I took over, the guy before me, Commander Keith Lenhardt, he said, “Hey, listen, every day I look in the mirror on this ship and I think, is this the day that I'm going to kill somebody?” And I was like, “Oh, I took over, I took charge.” And I'm like, “Yeah, I got it, I got it.” And I looked in that mirror and I was like, “Whoo.” And it's heavy. Heavy is the mantle of man, right? So every day.
And when I flooded that suit, that was a real, like, “Okay, you better start thinking things through even more than you're already thinking them through. You're being paid to use your brain. You better do all this work.” So I got into the MIL Standard 882, which is operational risk management, and I ate that thing for breakfast. So it was just MIL Standard 882 applied to everything. Operational risk matrix, decision-making authority, who can do what, who can make what decisions. And it was really a good thing because my team were all on board because it gave them the latitude and the stuff in this corner. But I reserved the right for the stuff in this corner to be my decision. So they liked it, I liked it, but you put the decision in the hands of the people that you believe can make the decision.
Sandy Winnefeld: And that's how you avoid change of command without band.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I have to ask. We had all kinds of contingencies in our back pockets when we were doing the stuff they were doing. What kind of contingencies in your back pocket if you're 2000 ft underwater in a hard suit and something goes wrong?
Dr. Joe Dituri: So the backup plan is to launch the other hard suit. And when I took over, we hadn't even been through OPEVAL, we hadn't been through any of that stuff. So I'm taking this over, we're doing the operational evaluation, we're looking at it for readiness. So I was the first person to launch two suits in the water and to practice and establish and make the OPCPs and CPs, the operational procedures, casualty procedures, and emergency procedures. So I was the guy writing all those because I was like, “Okay, what would I want if I was the guy in the suit? I would want somebody to come down here and rescue me. So how are we going to do that? What are the things we have to put in place?” So you're working with the engineers at NAVC and everybody else. I don't want to think that it was just me, but I got the bottom line, a lot of that stuff. So my hands are all over that.
Sandy Winnefeld: So I'm going to ask a question that may sound like a dumb question, but I know my audience is probably asking the same things. Like, why do you need a suit where a person can go down to 2000 ft? Why not just use a deep submergence vehicle with little arms on it and things like that? What kinds of things would you do?
Dr. Joe Dituri: Why do we rule the world? Everybody says it's the opposable thumb, but it's not the opposable thumb. As you know, being an astronaut, you get this. The opposable thumb is not it because otherwise, lobsters would rule the Earth because they have huge opposables. What it is, is our ability to prehens. Now, I don't know if I can do this, but prehensing is going from one to the other to the other, so that's our ability. Our ability to go from finger to finger to finger. So you need that ability and that dexterity when you're at depth, you need that. In Joe's opinion, you need the person in the suit to go, "I have my crooked eye on that" because you're staring myopic vision singular eye with a camera that's here looking at something and you're trying to do this little turning. It's just inefficient and ineffective. So the person in the suit, in my opinion, you need that person's eyes on target. It's like, why don't we fly aircraft by just drone?
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So I have to ask this question because the gloves in our EVR spacewalking suits are bulky because it's a pressurized suit, and they're bulky and they can be very tricky to work with. How do you manage the gloves and the human interface like that at 2000 ft with the pressure and you're in a hard suit?
Dr. Joe Dituri: So you're in a hard suit. So you have these manipulators. You're working and manipulating. You learn to become an expert at manipulating your hands through this pressure seat. It's hard. It's hard at best. On a good day, it's hard. It's almost impossible when you start flying the suit. Let me give you, for instance, the way that we train pilots in the suit. Just like in the old days, you saw men of honor, how they ripped open the bag and they threw the nuts and bolts on the floor. We took a rope with a knot on it and then we put washer, nut, washer nut. We undid it, dumped all the washers and nuts in the pool, and then threw the rope in the pool. You had to go fly over in the suit, go grab the rope, tie a knot in the bottom, then get a washer, put it on, then get a nut, put it on, then get a washer and put it on. Then get a nut and put it on, and then tie a knot in the end, and you do not come up until you were done. Maximum time in a suit is 8 hours. So you get good at becoming dexterous with this little set of equipment, and you have to.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, interesting.
Sandy Winnefeld: A little different from one of those circus things where you manipulate the little hook that goes down and grabs the little teddy bear. Yeah, not quite the same thing.
Dr. Joe Dituri: No, sir.
Sandy Winnefeld: Obviously, you had operators in these suits, and you just told us a little bit about the dexterity training. But how much training do you have to have before you can actually– I mean, it's got to be more than that. You have to understand the laws of physics underwater.
Dr. Joe Dituri: Just like any other qualification in the military, I would sit the oral board. So there was PQs training or Personal Qualification Standard Training, and then we would have an oral board. And it was basically the guys would prep them with a murder board, and I wanted them to know every single thing. I'm like, "Listen, I want to know your emergency bailouts. I want to know that you know how the carbon dioxide scrubber works.” I mean the carbon dioxide scrubber on a suit. It's the same thing. And if you don't know that lithium hydroxide, calcium hydroxide, barium hydroxide have to be wet, they combine with the wheat carbonic acid to form blah, blah. If you don't know that, you don't know your suit. And you need to know every single thing about that suit. Where's the oxygen?
Sandy Winnefeld: That's the nuke in you, Joe.
Dr. Joe Dituri: Yes, sir.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: No, we had to do that kind of stuff, too. I understand. I totally get it.
Dr. Joe Dituri: The suits are very similar. I was at the Explorer’s Club, and I was talking with Alan Eustace, who did the jump from space. The vice president of Google, he's got the high-altitude record, he comes up to me, he goes, "Wait, you're the one-atmosphere suit guy, right?" And I'm like, "There's a whole line of people." And he's like, "How did you prevent fogging?" So we started to say, “It's the same suit.” It's the same suit, except you have more dexterity in your hands, and you guys are cool looking.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Maybe. So let's just shift gears a little bit because we have a lot to cover, and we could spend hours just on this topic, but so many more things to talk about. You focused your master's degree in aerospace engineering. And I found that really intriguing given that this whole conversation has been about undersea. and now all of a sudden, we're out in space. So what caused that shift? And then what happened next?
Dr. Joe Dituri: What had happened was I was at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard doing a shipyard-type tour as a docking officer, diving officer type person. And they said, "Hey, we want to send you to postgraduate school." They said, "What type of engineering would you want? Chemical?” I'm like, “Oh, no, chemical engineering.” They're like, “Okay, electrical.” I'm like, “No, I'm not an electrical engineer by age.” “Mechanical?” I'm like, “I'm sorry, I'm bored to death. What?” And he's like, “An astronautical?” And I'm like, “Wait, what? What's that last one?” He's like, “Astronautical.” I’m like, “What is that?” He’s like, “Hold on, let me get back to you.” He gets back to me, and he's like, “Yeah, it's the study of astronaut engineering stuff for space stuff.” And I'm like, “I'll take that one. That sounds great”
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Why not?
Dr. Joe Dituri: Boring, boring. And I probably couldn't do the chemical just because it's insanely hard. Yeah. I said, “I will jump to something cool like astronautical engineering.” And this is when I met Phil Newton. What you find is that astronaut, aquanaut, same, same. Only difference is you're up here, I'm down here, I'm doing this, you're doing that, so similar mindset. So I actually went to the Astronaut to Aquanaut Symposium. I got a chance to speak at it being the aquanaut side of the house. And then I think it was Mike Gernhardt that came.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Probably.
Dr. Joe Dituri: He was the astronaut side of the house because he plays both roles. He's a diver and he's a stud. I just love him.
Sandy Winnefeld: So we eventually leave the military, and instead of continuing in Astronautical Engineering, you get your Ph.D. now in Biomedical Engineering, which is actually really an up-and-coming field, for sure. How did your experiences prior to that shape that decision? What drove your interest in that area?
Dr. Joe Dituri: We lost a bunch of guys to suicide following the horrific events that they'd been through. So as these people are triding, I'm kind of having a problem with it. But I was about at the time when I was ready to retire, and Admiral McRaven is like, “Hey, I'm going to give you the best job in the world. You can come back here and work for me.” And I'm like, “Boss, I don't think I want to do that now.” I just happened to be spearfishing with one of the other guys, the J3, and I happened to be at Admiral McRaven’s house, so I was helping him move, so it wasn't a big deal. But as I'm sitting there, he's like, “Well, what are you going to do? What are you going to be when you grow up?” I'm like, “I don't know, boss. I just don't want to do that anymore. I want to do something. Not that.” He's like, “Well, I could use your help with the whole veteran suicide thing.” And I'm like, “Really? Hold on. You have my attention now.” So now I'm like, “Okay.” And I'm like, “Man, maybe we could fix this. Maybe there's something we could fix.”
So Admiral McRaven put me on the Preservation of the Force and Family, which was wonderful. I got the opportunity to see firsthand what he was doing, how instrumental he was in trying to reduce the 22 days. And then I saw the bureaucracy, and I saw how we just weren't doing it the right way. I saw that we were doing a lot of talking, and we weren't doing a lot of moving. And I was like, “Okay.” And I'm too dumb to know that I couldn't figure it out. So I go to college, and I said, “Oh, I'm going to do something, not this. And I'm going to go to college and learn how to fix traumatic brain injury.” Well, just like my astronautical engineering degree, it really didn't work out that way. I wound up making a carbon dioxide sensor. It is what it is. A carbon dioxide detecting sensor, which helped guys that were in the Navy anyway. But I was still focusing on traumatic brain injury, and that, like, in my classes and in what I took. So it worked out that I was able to do that, and I opened up a hyperbaric oxygen center and tried to heal people that way.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So is that mainly what your research is now? Is the hyperbaric oxygen in the application of treating traumatic brain injury, or is that just one piece?
Dr. Joe Dituri: It was right up until September 7th of 2001 when I got hit by a car, and I was left with a traumatic brain injury, an 8 mm hemorrhagic stroke, prefrontal cortex left side, and I was knocked out in my car. So I woke up in the hospital. I'm like, “Okay, I got this. I'm a traumatic brain injury guy. I can heal my own traumatic brain injury.” I got out of the hospital seven days later, and I'm trying to fly the plane while I'm assembling it, and my head's just not right. It's all not put together. I fell into a very deep depression. I'm a little less ashamed nowadays to admit it, but I was considering that this would be the end for me. And that was on September 7th, so mid-October, I'm in a deep depression, and I'm like, “Okay, I need to check out, and I don't want my kids to see me like this. I don't want anybody I care about to see me like this.” I was crying. I was angry. Really bad stereotypical prefrontal cortex injuries.
So I said, “All right if I can't fix this inside of a month– But, Joe, you're going to do everything. You're not going to quit. You're going to do it for a solid month. You're going to do everything.” And I did it. Everything that I could think of, anything. I would drive by and I'd see the sign that said, "Ice, Ice, Ice, $5." And when I had that sign, I said, "I wonder if you submerge yourself in ice, you decrease peripheral perfusion. You must increase cerebral perfusion because it's the only thing outside the water that makes physics sense. Let's do that." Okay, boom. Let's do hyperbaric oxygen therapy, let's do neurofeedback therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, structural-energetic therapy, physical therapy. So I did all this at once.
I don't know how much you know, but the body does keep the score. I got struck on the left side. My left shoulder used to twinge and bother me before I went to physical therapy. Turns out that that signal comes up through the vagus nerve, and it reminds you that you have a traumatic brain injury. Oh, yeah, my shoulder hurts. I have a traumatic brain injury. Oh, yeah, my shoulder hurts. So if you don't fix the body physically, physiologically, and psychologically simultaneously, you will not cure traumatic brain injury. Because whatever one of those three things you didn't address, it will come back and go, "Hey, how are you doing? You remember me?" So we decided to throw everything at it. And now that's what I do. A 28-day intensive outpatient protocol. And I am happy to say that by the middle of December, everything was okay. And then by the end of December, I had a protocol that was working, and it truly is. Now, my N is very small. You guys know about science. The number that I have is nine right now, but nine lives saved is better than nine lives lost.
Sandy Winnefeld: I know the feeling from some of the nonprofit work we do. Does any of it relate directly to what you're doing at this very moment, which is 30 ft underwater off the coast of Florida?
Dr. Joe Dituri: It's all the same. It's all astronaut, aquanaut, it’s all related. But I'm crazy, right? Yes. So right now, I'm down here doing a whole bunch of things, and you know how my life is just like this astronautical engineering degree pointed at this degree, pointed at the biomedical engineering, all that stuff culminated with this. Yeah, that's exactly where I'm at. I'm at 1.6 ATA right now, which is the pressure at which we treat traumatic brain injury at my center because we found that you decrease the level of oxygen because oxygen is a vasoconstrictor. If it vasoconstricts, you reduce the cerebral blood flow, and that's not good. So you have to balance that. It has to be a happy balance of brain-derived neurotrophic factor and vascular endothelial growth factor. So you're working all these things at the same time. So that's part of the reason why I'm down here.
The other part is I'm trying to solve problems on the International Space Station for muscle loss and bone density loss. So I'm testing things like nitric oxide synthase builders here while I'm doing the resistance bands workout. And I'm using a cuff to basically raise knots so that you can increase muscle growth and mitochondrial health so that they can take that and then extrapolate it. Look, as you know, it's going to take us six months to get to Mars. And the prospect of having people with no bones or no bones or ability to stand when they get there and weak muscles is just not going to cut it. And not even that, how about myopia? Your vision is 20/20 based upon your ability to see 20 ft. I'm in a 15-foot-long tube. So after 100 days, we know this from submariners, they don't let them drive right after they get out of a long deployment. Why? Because they can't see.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I did not know that.
Dr. Joe Dituri: Well, this is standard protocol for the submarine guys. They go, “Okay, you're not driving home. It's bad.”
Dr. Sandra Magnus: The interesting thing, just real quick, about the exercise piece here. If we exercise, we do maintain bone density and muscle, but if the exercise equipment’s big, it takes a lot of volume. So trying to come up with prophylactic means of satisfying that same need is important because that’s a small space. The space station is huge and we have room for that kind of equipment, maybe going to Mars not so much.
Sandy Winnefeld: So tell us about your stay at the Jules’ Undersea facility. How long are you going to be there? What are your goals? What's a day in a life like? When you wake up in the morning, what do you do? Are you going outside diving? Or is it all your time spent inside? Give us the scoop on what's going on right now.
Dr. Joe Dituri: So I'll be here for 100 days, and what I'm doing down here is threefold. I'm doing a whole bunch of outreach, and we're talking with kids in schools, trying to get them excited about STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. And I want them to be like, “Hey, you can be a scientist and be cool, too.” It's not like you have to just be in beakers and microscopes. See, you get me. I knew you did. So if you can incentivize these kids to do something and talking with all these fifth graders and 6th graders, it's the greatest thing in the world.
The second thing is I'm talking with a bunch of my friends that are in the undersea realm. Ichthyologists, marine scientists. I have a sponge researcher right now, microbiologist. And we're trying to talk about preservation, protection, and rejuvenation of the marine environment because it's important that this particular place gives us between 50 and 70% of the oxygen on our planet, and we need to take care of it. So that's just Joe's opinion. But I get to use this showcase to have people who are experts in their field tell everybody about what they're doing and what they're doing to change the world.
And third and final is the biomedical research aspect. So I get up in the morning, I do urine, I do saliva, I do blood samples, looking at the microscope, sending it off, looking for brain-derived neurotrophic factor, insulin growth factor, all of these little, like, “Oh, it's so boring, it's crazy.” Blood pressure, EEGs, EKGs on myself because nobody else wants to do this on me. So I do science for about, I don't know, 10 hours a day. I do like 5 hours of outreach and then I go for like an hour swim. Thankfully, I get to do a little working out because I have the bands and I've been working that compensatory thing and then I'm testing new things. We're testing an AI for a scientist who got a contract with “NASA.” I don't know, I didn't see the contract. And it's for an artificial intelligence that's going to be a tricorder-like thing. It's going to scan over your body. It's going to tell you, “Hey, look, I believe you have a left ejection fraction that’s less than 25%. We suggest you start whatever.”
Sandy Winnefeld: Dr. McCoy.
Dr. Joe Dituri: Exactly.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: You never know.
Sandy Winnefeld: I love it.
Dr. Joe Dituri: Yeah, it's cool. But I get to go out every day. I get to swim around and I do because I like the ocean life. I get lobster that's outside my window. His name is Fred. I got all kinds of fish that I go visit. I'm looking for the elusive seahorse. Still haven't found him yet, but we will.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So when I was staying in the Aquarius habitat like you, we couldn't just go straight up in case of emergency, you have to do decompression. I don't know if you're scuba diving or helmet diving, but we were helmet diving and we had little cupolas underwater that were little air bubbles that were our emergency place to go in case our hose got tangled or we ran out of air. What kind of emergency procedures do you guys have?
Dr. Joe Dituri: There's one of those, but it's not something that people generally go to. So I take a bottle with me. I have a come-home bottle that I have that comes with me everywhere I go. It's one of these, like, look and I'm scuba and it's shallow. It's more shallow than yours. I mean, I think we're at the bone-crushing depth of 22 ft. I mean, I've been to Aquarius. It is what it is. It's small.
Sandy Winnefeld: But at 22 ft, though, most people who are knowledgeable on scuba diving, you can go down to 22 ft for an hour and you don't have to do anything. You probably don't even have to do a safety stop on the way back up. But if you live down there for 100 days, you are now saturated with nitrogen. So if you had an appendectomy, there's a process you have to go through in order to come back to the surface, right?
Dr. Joe Dituri: And the sad part is, nobody knows that. So here I am doing their third-order partial differential equations, and you're basically calculating M values on bone tissue saturation. Because at this point, it's not the other tissues in your body, it's the bone. It's the ones that are poorly perfused tissues. So those bones and the cartilage, you're trying to figure out what their saturation rates are. The answer is nobody knows, and everybody's rolling dice, so we're making stuff up. I'm literally calculating this as we go along. But the good thing is, 14, 15 days ago, I just got issued my US patent, and that is on heart rate variability and how the autonomic nervous system is stressed. So I can detect decompressive stress prior to symptoms being shown. I can detect the heart. I can detect hypercapnic stress. I can detect oxidative stress. So when the autonomic nervous system is stressed, I can detect that prior to symptomology coming on, and I proved it so much.
Sandy Winnefeld: Is that something that a recreational diver would eventually, someday just strap off? Is it a small device like a Fitbit or something? Where it goes, “Hey, not only are we calculating that you're making a mistake here, your body is telling me that you're making a mistake here.”
Dr. Joe Dituri: Exactly. And what I've done– so it's a really teeny device at this point because it's all computer chip at this point. So my initial prototype was obviously the size of my hand. But this is like the size of a watch, for crying out loud. And what I did is I put a little cell phone vibrator in it. So now it goes every time you're messing up and you're going and decompressing too shallow. So it's not perfectly ready for primetime. It just got a patent two weeks ago.
Sandy Winnefeld: Cool. Congratulations.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, no kidding. That's a big deal. So when is your 100-day visit over? And then what's up with you next after that?
Dr. Joe Dituri: June 9. And then I am going– Yeah, so June 9th. And when I'm done with that in September, I'm doing the Zero-G flight, zero-gravity airplane. I'll be doing that. And my long-term goal–
Dr. Sandra Magnus: The Vomit Comet.
Dr. Joe Dituri: Yeah, the Vomit Comet.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Go ahead.
Dr. Joe Dituri: My long-term goal is to be you when I grow up, Sandra. I would love to be an astronaut. But what I really want to do, my long, long-term goal is to solve problems for aquanauts and astronauts. And that's on my vision board and has been there for years and years and years. But I figure if I fly in the environment one or two times, I can go, “Okay, now I feel this, I can do that, I can work this.” I'm trying.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: The experience makes a difference when you experience microgravity. It’s a whole other level of understanding.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Joe, in the time we have left, tell us about one memorable moment with our audience in this amazing career you've had both in the Navy and since. What is it that really strikes you as something that was the most special or the most frightening or something like that?
Dr. Joe Dituri: I tell you, there was a moment like I said, I had mentioned it already, where my boss could have fired me, I flooded the suit. And it was that everything comes to realization that if we don't do our job as leaders, oh, boy, everybody says, “Oh, people can die.” Yeah, people can die at everything. But when it's your fault, that shiver goes up your spine. You're just like, “Oh, man.” And totally it was my problem, my fault, my everything. And I was like, yes.
Sandy Winnefeld: One of the good things a good leader learns about their subordinates when they make mistakes is if they're sins of commission, you're out of here. I'm not going to deal with you anymore. But if it's a sin of omission, that person just learned a lot like you did that day and you became a better leader because of it as you described.
Dr. Joe Dituri: That's exactly what– Those are the words of him. He said, “I bought that you're never going to do that again.” And I said, “No, sir..”
Sandy Winnefeld: I am never tying the arms together. I'm never crossing the streams again.
Dr. Joe Dituri: Don't cross.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That was a very inexpensive, worthy lesson.
Dr. Joe Dituri: Yes, ma'am, I feel the same way. And for me, it was just a shift in mindset. Like I really had it and I was in the MAN-010/P-9290, keeping people alive. But, oh, boy, I changed heart a little bit and I pushed over to the dark side and I said, okay, I'm going to fail on the side of more caution, where I was a little more hoo ya before that.
Sandy Winnefeld: I think we're almost out of time and I know Sandra is going to close this out, but I just wanted to thank you for the time and attention you're giving to TBI. We're still losing people every day, way too many people. And it's people like you who are going to unlock this puzzle and figure it out for us so that we can save lives of these young men and women who have served our country so well. So thanks, Joe, for that.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, we are running out of time. But I have to say, Dr. Deep Sea, Joe, we really have enjoyed talking with you today and we could go on for hours, but we wish you luck with your expedition and definitely we'll be watching for your next adventure because there is definitely going to be another adventure in your future, I have no doubt.
Sandy Winnefeld:And when there is we’ll bring you back on the podcast.
Dr. Joe Dituri: I would love it. I'm truly the one that's honored. I mean, to meet the two of you, it's like, “Oh, my God. You want to interview me?” I'm like, “Oh, my God. Thank you.” Thank you to your listeners for taking the time.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That was Dr. Joe Dituri, Dr. Deepsea, who's contributing daily to a better understanding of human physiology underwater on the surface and in space. I'm Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm Sandy Winnefeld.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Check us out on social media, including a short video of our interview with Joe on TikTok. Our handle is very simple @TheAdrenalineZone. Also check out his book, Secrets in Depth.
