November 8, 2022 • 42 mins
On today’s episode I have the pleasure of speaking with retired US Navy Commander, and author of the new fictional thriller, Secrets in Depth.
His name is Joe Dituri and his laid-back persona and colorful and exciting life truly make for an interesting episode.
We’ll open our conversation by learning about Joe’s journey as an enlisted sailor to being commanding officer in charge of the Navy’s’ deep submergence unit.
Next, we’ll unpack his transition out of the spec-op community and into the world of hyperbaric medicine.
We’ll then hear how Joe’s involvement in a rollover car crash contributed to his researching Traumatic Brain Injuries, starting with his own.
Later, we’ll dive into Joe’s work to help prior military servicemen and women overcome the debilitating effects of explosive concussions and why his unique approach of not just treating the psychological manifestations of the injury, but the actual physical, physiological root causes as well, has proven so effective.
And we’ll wrap up our conversation by discussing Secrets in Depth, a Jack Reacher-esque style thriller that weave’s many aspects of Joe’s life into the main protagonist character known as “The Dragon Slayer”.
The Show Notes
Joe Dituri
http://drdeepsea.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Unknown (00:00):
And
Joe Dituri (00:09):
Welcome to Grit Nation. I'm Joe Cadwell, the
host of the show, and on today'sepisode, I have the pleasure of
speaking with retired US NavyCommander PhD in Biomedical
Engineering and author of thenew fictional thriller secrets
in debt. His name is Joe Dituriand his laid back persona and
colorful and exciting life trulymake for an interesting episode
(00:32):
we'll open our conversation bylearning about Joe's journey as
an enlisted sailor to be acommanding officer in charge of
the Navy's deeps emergency unit.
Next one pack is transitionedout of the SpecOps community and
into the world of hyperbaricmedicine. Well then hear how
Joe's involvement in a rollovercar crash contributed to his
(00:52):
researching traumatic braininjuries, starting with his own.
Later, we'll dive into Joe'swork to help prior military
service men and women overcomethe debilitating effects of
explosive concussions. And whyis unique approach of not just
treating the psychologicalmanifestations of the injury,
but the actual physical andphysiological root causes as
well as proven so effective. Andwe'll wrap up our conversation
(01:19):
by discussing secrets in depth.
Jack Reacher s style thrillerthat weaves many aspects of
Joe's life into the mainprotagonist character known as
the dragon slayer. After theepisode, be sure to check out
the show notes for moreinformation about Joe to Terry
and his new book Secrets indepth. And now on to the show.
(01:46):
Joe Dettori Welcome to gritnation.
Hey, thanks. Thanks for havingme. I really appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you so much, Joe,for taking your time to be on my
show. Today. I've been followingyour career been listening some
podcast reading a lot onlineabout Mr. Joe Dituri, aka Dr.
Deep Sea. And for the listenerswho may not know who Joe Dituri
(02:07):
is, I was hoping you couldintroduce us to the guy who's a
motivational speaker, formermilitary commander in the Navy,
and now an author.
I appreciate the opportunity todo that. It's always weird
talking about yourself in myopinion. But you know, I sit
here guard guard. So I did 20years in the Navy, worked my way
up from an enlisted guy to anofficer. When I retired, I
(02:30):
retired as a Special OperationsCommand as a commander and
decided that I wasn't going todo that anymore. I wanted to do
something totally different. SoI went back to school, I got a
PhD in Biomedical Engineering.
And now I work on and curetrying to solve traumatic brain
injury among other things in theclinical research realm.
Traumatic Brain Injury app hasbeen near and dear to my heart,
having had a couple and alsohave a bunch of friends that
(02:52):
have decided to end their life,you know, because of traumatic
brain injury. So, so yeah, Ijust wrote a book because during
COVID, I was bored, and it'sbeen sitting around for the past
15 years since I was in chargeof deep submergence unit. That
idea that books been rattlingaround in my brain. So I was
like, okay, COVID not doing awhole lot of work. I'm teaching
(03:13):
med school online. Let's write abook. I got a good idea.
Yeah, no kidding. And we'll getinto that book. I believe it's
the secrets of the deep, whichhas just recently been secrets
in depth. I'm sorry, secrets indepth. And you've also written
another book, The Tao ofunderwater survival. And then
also a children's book as well.
(03:34):
That is my daddy wears adifferent kinds of suit to wear,
because they're just fun books.
Right? Yeah.
Good. Good stuff. So let's,let's unpeel the the layers of
the Joe Dettori onion slowly.
Let's start with your childhood.
Joe, you were born in New York,from what I understand.
Born in Oceanside, New York. Mydad worked for an Italian
(03:55):
company. So I lived in Italy forthe first four or five years of
my life. I used to speak Italiandon't do it anymore, and then
moved to Long Island, New York,where we continue to, you know,
grow up and I lived all my, Iguess teenage years here joined
the Navy when I was 17. Onlybecause my mom would not let me
(04:15):
go in the Marine Corps. That wasmy first choice. But thank
goodness that all worked out.
And then you know, was she askedme was that a processing
technician worked my way up toget a commission and oh boy.
So how did you get into thediving then in the Navy?
I was on a submarine tender formy second tour. First tour was
(04:38):
an aircraft carrier second tourwas a submarine tender while I
was on the tender I you know, Isaw these guys were in Groton,
Connecticut. So these guys thatwere just running around in
shorts and shirts and you know,like
the UD T's and the blue and goldUD T's
and the blue and gold. Exactly.
And I'm like, yo, what's up withthat master diamond Donlin drags
me aside and goes wait Don'tjust take anybody and I'm like,
(05:00):
Hey, man, I was sailor tofreaking corner on an aircraft
carrier for crying out loud. I'mpretty good guy. Yeah, he's
like, Huh, well see, made me amud pump sent me over to Naval
submarine medical researchlaboratory, where I worked on a
saturation dive system and workthe Trimec series of down
(05:20):
decompression required if asubmarine was saturated. So I
worked on that with a greatgroup of researchers. And like,
I really, like I learnedresearch at that point, like I,
that's where I cut my teeth, andI didn't know anything. And then
they're like, Hey, you're verysmart guy. I want you to go to
school. And I'm like, Well, I'mgoing to school at night. No,
(05:41):
like, no, no, why don't youapply for the enlisted
commissioning program? And I'mlike, what, what? So the rest is
history, man, just get up thereand went school, got a
bachelor's in computer scienceand then got commissioned in
Special Operations Officerpipeline.
So you were in for 28 years. Andit sounds like a good part of
(06:02):
that was with the with theSpecOps. And with, with a diving
program, from what I understand,he did saturation diving,
I worked at an enlistedsaturation diving facility where
we did all that research. That'swhere the Genesis chambers were.
When Captain George Bond wasTheorizing the, the possibility
of doing cielab He did it there,Hawaii. So all of those
(06:23):
chambers, just this still alive.
They're still around, right? Allthat stuff. The Genesis Chamber
all those all the people andstuff is all there. And then
when I got commissioned, I wasjust a regular diver. They call
it a basic diving officer,because I was 1140 special
operations guy and then I was attwo tours in the SpecOps
community. And then I saw thatthey wanted me to go to EOD
(06:46):
school, and at that point, I waslike, I'm not going to EOD
school. I got almost 20 years inthe Navy. Why would I go to EOD
school at this time because Iwas long in the tooth right? I
was enlisted for 10 years andthen you know, sure for
a couple of years to stop itreal quick there Joe for folks
who don't know EOD is ExplosiveOrdnance Disposal school. We
(07:07):
tend to Bandy about these theseacronyms, you know being ex
military, but yeah, EODexplosive ordnance disposal. So
yeah, you said no to that.
I said no to that. And then, youknow, I was like, okay, the
writing's on the wall. I thinkthat entire community is going
towards the Explosive OrdnanceDisposal route, and less with
the diving and salvage in mindcountermeasures. So I popped
(07:30):
over to the engineering dutydiver community. So they sent me
off to postgraduate school, Igot a master's in astronautical
engineering. It's funny, becausethey asked me, you know, just
like ask any two people in acrowd and be like, Okay, you can
go to school and get a master'sin mechanical engineering, or
you can go get a master's inAstronautical Engineering. I'm
(07:51):
like, I don't even know whatthat is. But that sounds way
cooler.
It sure does. And for thelayperson, myself included what
is that? What is the difference?
So Astronautical Engineering hasto do with the, the things that
you have to deal with as anengineer for space for
spaceflight orbital mechanics,the fall rates, geosynchronous
(08:15):
orbits, has a lot to do withsatellites and satellite
uplinks, but it also has a lotto do with life support stuff.
So for me, everybody's like, Oh,well, you're all over the place.
I'm like, Well, I'm all over theplace, but I'm really in life
support. I'm all over the placein life support, you know, so I
just tried to, you know, I triedto make it fit me. And that's
(08:36):
kind of what I did with my, myMasters is I kind of just found
the right professor asked him tolet me do the things that I
wanted to do, wrote a couplearticles did a couple of things.
And that was great. You know,while my thesis was actually a
statistical orbitaldetermination, it's a whole
bunch of math, it really doesn'tmatter. The physics and the
physiology were not lost on me.
And I wrote a bunch of articlesand I became a speaker on that
(08:58):
topic. Because it's like, howmany guys are really savvy in
space stuff? Not a lot. I cantell you that. So you know, Kay,
never been to space wanted to goto space. So I said, Well, let
me just try this. So you know,did the whole NASA astronaut
thing application thing and theywere like, you are? You are? You
are too devilishly handsome tobe an astronaut. That's they
(09:20):
literally told me thatI've heard that so many times in
my life.
They said you are better offbeing a steely eyed Dennis into
the deep and I said thank youvery much. So then I you know,
went off and I did moreengineering duty officer tours.
From there I got to be the guywho's in charge of deep
(09:41):
submergence unit the divingdetachment we brought the one
atmosphere suit online. Wecertified the pressurized rescue
module. We replaced the mysticin the Avalon as the DSRVs and
the rescue asset on scene.
Deep Submergence rescue vehiclesfor those listening at home.
Oh, I'm sorry. No worries. Yeah,so a lot of this sounds like
(10:02):
it's it's building up to a pointwhere you're going to eventually
put it all down on paper duringCOVID It sounds like he got a
little bit bored. You were Iunderstand directed by the
government to kind of like notput too much fat in there. So
we're talking about a factditional book that you've
written called secrets in depth,secrets in depth. Exactly. That
(10:23):
it Okay, so your exploitsmy exploits, I, you know, the
names have changed to protectthe absolutely guilty, you know,
and some of the stuff thatactually didn't happen. So, in
the book, people died thatdidn't actually die. You know,
in the book, things happen, thatdidn't actually happen. But it's
all drama. And it's a fun read.
(10:45):
And, you know, some people were,you know, comparing it to like
Jack Reacher sort of stuff. ButI view it as the the, the
protagonist is basically justthat, more like the Bruce Willis
hero now, kind of like theunwilling, unwilling, I don't
want to be in the middle ofthis. This was not my gig. And
(11:07):
you guys wanted me to go do somesuper secret squirrel mission,
but it's not my requiredoperational commitment,
projected operationalenvironment. Why would I go do
that? Well, because the admiraltold you to? Well, there's that.
Well, very cool. And well, I'msure we'll get a little more
into the book as we go along.
But it sounds like a prettydistinguished career in the
military. 28 years. You you leftactive duty. How many years ago?
(11:32):
Want to say it's going on? 10?
Okay, nine plus, certainly.
Okay. So you took a pretty solidfoundation that the military
provided for you and youtransition that I think he said
at a certain point at a master'sdegree, and now you're a PhD.
So I'm a PhD in BiomedicalEngineering. So all that life
support stuff comes to play. Andthen when I retired, we were
(11:54):
losing lots of people. And, youknow, Admiral McRaven, calls me
up and says, Hey, listen, when Ineed your help, I got I got 22
people a day killing themselves.
Will you be on the presentationin the force and family for me?
And I'm like, Yeah, I'll dothat. I'll help. I was retiring.
At that point. I was retired.
(12:14):
And he was like, Can you help?
And I was like, yeah, and then Iwas like, I can help more. I can
help more, because we can fixthis. Like, I'm too dumb to know
that there's no cure fortraumatic brain injury. I'm too
dumb, right? So I just go, Ilearned a whole bunch of stuff.
And I'm like, Well, what do youthink? Let's try this. What do
you think? I think that'll work.
I think that'll work. I don'tknow, we're rolling dice, right?
(12:36):
And we found that if you come atit, if you come at traumatic
traumatic brain injury has threecomponents to it. physical,
physiological and psychological.
Right. So if you treat one ofthem, you got you got those
other two outliers, and it'llalways keep coming back and re
manifest itself, you'll relivethat trauma, you will re injure
yourself that hypoxic. Hypoxiato the brain is always going to
(12:59):
be there. So if you treateverything simultaneously, what
I'm seeing right now, and thisis preliminary, and I'm a
scientist, so you know, it'searly. I'm telling you, I have a
very small end. So I'm notclaiming victory just yet. But
we can't find any discerniblerecord of somebody having a
traumatic brain injury rightnow. Right? All that test scores
(13:20):
are through the roof, thatfeeling great. Anecdotally,
they're like, yes, thank you.
You saved my life. And and youknow, as the reportable stuff,
we can't see anything. So, butit's really hard to discern. So
really, we're not done yet. Wehave worked.
Let's let's back it up a littlebit. So yeah. Back then the
(13:42):
Special Operations Command. Yousaid we're having how many
people killing themselves.
At that time, it was 22. Ibelieve it's gone up to 25 or
28. And then back down to 25hours
a day, a week, a day. So peoplethat were in the Special Forces
in all of our branches ofservice in general, okay,
(14:02):
wanting to a day are killingthemselves and
why it why was that or why isthat?
I opine. Right. I mean, you'reasking me my opinion. The answer
is we don't know. But I opinedthat so backwards go to Vietnam,
(14:24):
people would have a concussiveblast injury, and they just
wouldn't survive it. I mean,that would just, we didn't have
the body armor back then. Wedidn't have the helmets back
then. We didn't have the blastprotection. We didn't have the,
you know, the encasements and soforth.
Now people were just shreddedwent by and they would not.
They wouldn't survive it. Andthat'd be that but now, it's
(14:46):
great because we're protectingthem but it still scrambles the
head. I know that I've been in acouple of explosions and, and
they're not pretty. I mean,there's no, there's no easy way
out of it. When your bell isrung, your bell is rung when
you're done. Add on fire andyour burn your lit on fire and
burn. I mean, you know,it's so going, going going back
to your your three legs of thattraumatic brain injury stool or
(15:08):
someone that survived atraumatic brain injury you said
there was a psychological, aphysiological and a physical
physical. Okay, so So and let'sif we could real quick Joe and
again in layman's terms try tobreak down those three legs of
the stool. So we'll start withthe physical then that the
actual mechanics of what happenswhen someone suffers a it sounds
(15:29):
like an extreme concussion. Okaycan I just kind of simplify it
by saying something like aconcussion can lead to to TBI
traumatic brain injury,it's it's concussion, like Yeah,
and multiple concussionsyndromes can lead to a
traumatic brain injury, it's,it's all in a definition, and I
kind of really doesn't matter.
(15:50):
But what it is, is, you'redisconnecting a synaptic
pathway, you're you go from hereto here with your learning and
knowledge and education, right?
And then this node right here isbroken the modem, the center of
your head is broken. So that'swhere you go through all the
time. And that nodes just brokenfor whatever reason. And do you
know that it only takes 1.3 G,to break a synaptic pathway. So
(16:13):
1.3 times gravitationalacceleration, that is a hard
stop and a car against theseatbelt. Just just to be clear,
right? That's that's what ittakes to create a traumatic
brain injury or break in asynaptic pathway, right? And if
it happens to be a crucial onewhere it goes from the language
area and out and you get it inthat note, well, then you don't
(16:34):
talk very well or you havespeech difficulties or in my
case, you have nystagmus and youknow, he you have brain injury
from being able to now you can'tprocess your vision correctly.
So it's it's multifaceted. It'slike saying, It's like saying so
to say traumatic brain injury isto say you have cancer. Well,
did you have prostate cancer?
(16:56):
Did you have melanoma? Did youhave breast cancer? Did you have
what? Music Theory Oh, mycatch all term then when we say
TBI, so we have the physicalmanifestation or the physical,
actual reality that there's beena broken synapse, a pathway that
relays information in the brain,then you said there's a
physiologicalYeah, so there's the chemical
changes in the body, right?
(17:19):
There's the there's the increasein something called interleukin,
right? It's cytokines, thesethese inflammatory markers. So
your body's immune response isto, you know, bring aid by the
form of white blood cells, butit inflames everything. So once
you have this inflammatoryresponse, it actually reduces
(17:41):
cerebral blood flow at thatpoint. So you know, your our
idea currently as researchers isthat we should be increasing
cerebral blood flow. So we'retrying to do stuff that
increases cerebral blood flow.
And we'll get into that becauseI believe you're using
hyperbaric again, drawing onsome of your past experiences
with diving and hyperbaricmedicine to do so. And then
(18:01):
finally, you saidpsychologically,
we are overdeveloped, as, ashumans, we are over developed in
the frontal part of our brain,prefrontal cortex. Specifically,
this is supposed to be aprefrontal cortex is supposed to
be more executive function. Butsince it's over size, then under
utilized, we store everything upthere. It's like storing
(18:24):
everything on your hard drive inthat spot. Well, what we do is
we store the lesson, which isimportant. And we store the
pain, we store the lesson to thepain coupled together, what you
have to do is you have todecouple the lesson from the
pain, I don't need the pain ofputting my hand on a hot stove,
I don't need to have that withme the rest of my life, to know
(18:46):
that I shouldn't put my hand ona hot stove, right? So decouple
that and then store it whereit's supposed to be stored in
the medulla oblongata. Right? Soit's just, it's rerouting where
you're how you're storing thisstuff. And you use an attachment
technique. I mean, I I hooked upwith a cognitive behavioral
therapist who's a PhD inpsychology, and she walked me
(19:06):
through my traumatic braininjury and then moved it
forward. So I said, That's it,you're hired. And trust me, I've
been to a bunch of cognitivebehavioral therapists, and none
of them are worth a darn until Ifound one who was an ex military
girl who went back and got aPhD. And she's working on her
second doctorate right now, justto codify her process, which is
(19:27):
terrific, sofantastic. And so you were
tasked with helping the soldiersto be honest with you. I saw
everything that was going on andthe preservation and the force
and family and I saw that theywere only doing it from a
psychological perspective.
Gotcha. And I said, you'remissing the point. I said, I'm
not that smart yet, but I'm notthat smart. But But I think we
(19:50):
got to be doing this and indifferent avenues. And finally,
I just came through this entireprocess on December of this past
year. What I was sitting theregoing, Hey, I do not want to go
to another funeral. But I callthem my brain trust bunch of
buddies of mine. We get togetherPhDs, MDS, you know, influential
(20:11):
people, money movers, shakers,and we all talk, right? We just
sit around a fire and tell liesto one another most of the time,
you know, but as we're talking,it's like, hey, what do you want
for next year, and I was like, Ido not want to go to another
funeral. I don't want to go toanother funeral. I don't want to
lose another guy. Like, and myguys challenged me. They're
(20:31):
like, alright, what are yougoing to do about it? Mike? Huh?
Wow. Why don't I just get thegroup that helped me with my
traumatic brain injury? Andmaybe we can, like, Well, what
do you need? Oh, my, ah, holdon. So we just kind of like,
cobbled this together. And thenit's like, oh, we can do an ex
(20:51):
post facto, you know, study onthis, and, you know, try and
retro actively figure out what'sgoing on. But you know, as
researchers, we're really bad,right? A researcher, if you ask
three researchers why why mypotted plant is dying, one will
say it's food, it needs food,the other will say it needs
water, and the other will say itneeds sunlight. But as
(21:13):
researchers, we want to find outwhich one of those needs. Now,
common sense tells you it needsall three of those. That's
common sense. But common senseis not what we are about in
research. So what we do is weput it in the sun for 24 hours
straight. And then when theplant dies, our understanding is
that sun kills plants. Right?
Same thing with water. Samething with food nutrients,
(21:37):
right? So it's like, no, it's acombination. And that's why I
was like, I got it. I'm gonna goback to that combination thing.
I'm going to treat it all.
Joe Cadwell (21:47):
And you were treating this on yourself,
because you had recentlysuffered a fairly significant
brain injury. Yep,
Joe Dituri (21:54):
I was T boned. I drive a 1947 Chevy. And I got t
boned. And when I did a loss ofconsciousness in the car, I was
out for 2030 minutes. I don'tknow how long they don't know
how long you know, nobody knowsanything, except that I was out.
Sure got to the hospital. And itwas like, oh, yeah, you have a
really good traumatic braininjury. You're jacked up what's
(22:17):
going on? Um, I have no idea. Sothen I started getting on the
road to try and repair it. Andmy initial thought was
hyperbarics. And that was sothis isn't just for frame of
reference September 7 of lastyear.
Joe Cadwell (22:29):
Yes. Thank you for doing that. This is recent
history. It's not yet been ayear since you've suffered a
rather significant TBI. Andagain, talking to you and
listening to you. And looking atyou, Joe, you seem like you're
pretty well adjusted for havingsurvived such a horrific event.
So is this because of some ofthe protocols and procedures
(22:52):
that you had adopted along theway of helping other people out?
Joe Dituri (22:55):
100%? Because so what I wound up doing was first
I'm treating with hyperbarics.
And then I got better. And thenI wasn't treating the other
stuff. So I got worse. So I'mlike, I got worse. I got in my
mind. I started spinning my mindaround and I was like, you know,
they tell you, they there aregroups out there who pontificate
going to let's just say going toMexico and doing things that are
(23:19):
not legal in the United States.
psychotropics. So I did that,and do not do that, because that
does not work. And I came backand I was sitting in my office
right here in this chair. And Iwas literally bawling. And my
friend, one of those movers andshakers in that group walked in,
and he's like, it was like,October timeframe. And he's
(23:41):
like, what's going on, man? AndI'm like, I haven't slept in
like six weeks. I'm spiralingman. I'm hurting. I'm hurting.
Because one of the side effectsof having a traumatic brain
injury is altered sleep state,right? You can't sleep and when
you can't sleep, man, it's adownhill, right? No. So the
depression kicks in the cryingthe anger the I mean, I was such
(24:02):
a stereotypical prefrontalcortex left side injury. And it
was like, you could have writtena book on it right? Like, oh,
yeah, he's angry all the time.
He switches from being angry tobeing sad and crying. You know,
he has risk taking behavior. Hehas suspicious behavior.
Joe Cadwell (24:19):
And this is all post accident, obviously, is
what you're before that you arefairly level headed. I mean,
navy commander for 28 years, aPhD. And then after this, this
traumatic injury, you begin tohave some significant changes in
your personality.
Joe Dituri (24:37):
And I'll tell you, I was I understand I understood at
that time, despotism, right? Iwas like, I was at that point. I
was at that point where I waslike, Well, if this is it for me
forever. Now I see. Now I seebecause I can't, I cannot
function like this. This is notgoing to work.
Joe Cadwell (24:59):
It's not going to work. So The hyperbaric came
into play right off the bat. Itsounds like in for again, the
layperson who doesn't understandthis. Someone who goes into a
hyperbaric chamber is put underpressure, the the atmospheres
are increased the amount ofpressure pounds per square inch
and the chamber is, isincreased, and you're breathing
100% oxygen at those depths forperiods of time in order to
(25:19):
hyper perfuse the tissues withoxygen. Is that sort of in a
nutshell, what we're doing?
That's exactly right. Okay,right. And what is the benefit
to that? Medically speaking.
Joe Dituri (25:30):
So normally, your oxygen is transported to your
tissues via the hemoglobin,right? So they can only carry a
certain amount. But it turns outand hemoglobin are in the grand
scheme of things large when itcomes to the capillary bed
perfusion when it comes togetting the oxygen out to all
the little tissues that need it.
And all the tissues that areswollen shut, all that ischemia,
(25:51):
all that swelling that we talkedabout earlier, when you have a
poorly perfused tissue, thatmeans that the red blood cells
can't even get to it. So whathappens is when you use
hyperbaric hyperbaric oxygen, itsaturates your plasma, with
enough sufficient amount ofoxygen to support cellular
respiration without having anyhemoglobin in your system. So
(26:14):
you don't even need hemoglobinduring hyperbaric to transport
the oxygen, you get enough fromjust the plasma. And plasma is
really teeny compared tohemoglobin. And it weeps
everywhere. So what it does isit increases cerebral blood flow
like that's one of the knownmechanism of action. It also
creates something calledneurogenesis. And neurogenesis
is more just a it's it's thegrowing of new neural pathways,
Joe Cadwell (26:41):
which is a relatively new science, from
what I understand, I think theold school of thought was we
could never, you know, repair abrain which has been damaged,
and that this neurogenesis iskind of an emerging field in
sciences and medicine.
Joe Dituri (26:56):
It really is, it really is. And what you need is
something called brain derivedneurotrophic factor, which is
this like lawn seed, you see thelawn, and then you water it with
hyperbarics. And then you comeout in a hyperbaric so and this
is where all this stuff ties inphysical, physiological,
psychological, you hit it withneuroplasticity, you hit it with
(27:17):
neurofeedback, which isupgrading and downgrading the
brainwaves, you know, you hit itwith that cognitive based
therapy, you hit it with, youknow, the physical therapy, you
know, and you do all this atonce, so that the oxygen is
helping you the brain derivedneurotrophic factor is helping
you increase cerebral bloodflow. So it's, you get this
additive effect of healing, youknow, and it's not rocket
(27:40):
science. I mean,
Joe Cadwell (27:41):
it sounds to me like it's a whole brain whole
body approach, a holisticapproach to treating the patient
as a whole, as opposed to just,you know, looking at the signs
or symptoms, hey, this person'sangry, let's give them some
pills to kind of take take theedge off of that anger. So this
sounds like you're on to somereally, really good things. And
without getting too deep intointo the weeds, it sounds like
(28:03):
Joe from from what I'mgathering, obviously, a very
motivated person I've picked upa few times you, you have
trouble just staying still youget bored, you push yourself to
different levels. And when youdo that, you are one of the
things that you've done. One ofthe things I've caught on to is
your motivating kind of guy. Andyou've actually been asked to
speak as a motivational speakerto two groups over the years
(28:26):
about your experiences in themilitary, and so forth. So what
can you tell my listener nowsomeone who is a blue collar
workers, someone who you know,works in the field, and it's not
always a sunny day, where dosome motivational tips show that
we can talk about to help themsee through to the next level?
Joe Dituri (28:42):
All right, pretty easy and straightforward. I'll
let you you and your listenersknow I don't think I've ever
said this before, but I got a910 on last 80 And everybody's
like, what, you have a PhD andI'm like I got a 9:10am I sad
went to go into the Navy wasn'tphysically qualified. I have
these molds all over my body.
They're like, Huh, you gotmoles, you can't come in. And
then somebody said you can havea waiver. Okay, what's the
(29:05):
waiver? Now I learned thewaiver. And then I went to go
get commissioned and my eyesightwasn't correctable to 2020 and
they're like waiver and I'm likewaiver got it. Then we're
building you know, deepsubmergence rescue assets. And
I'm like, Hey, is there a waiverfor this? Physical stuff, you
know, the pressure depth test.
(29:26):
And then by the time I got toSOCOM to build dry combat
submersible, I was like waiverwaiver waiver. I'm signing
waivers by myself, right. Soit's like, in life in general.
There is a waiver foreverything. There's a rule, and
then there's a waiver to thatrule. So my piece of advice to
you guys is work around it, man.
I understand that there's arule, work around it. What
(29:49):
Admiral McRaven said Is he says,You are allowed to break any
rule you want because I makerules. He said you're not
allowed to break any laws, youcan break all the rules that you
want. And we'll we'll fix that.
So you see, I'm saying justlike, bend the rule be
aggressive push forward, youknow, all this with the sense of
(30:11):
doing something good in yourlife, Hey, man, you know, bend
that rule, though don't wave,don't blink an eye,
Joe Cadwell (30:17):
it kind of falls in line with something I've always
lived by and said, it's easierto get forgiveness than
permission. But in the military,I do remember those waivers and
a lot of things that, you know,you have to work around like you
say, So, Joe. So yeah, gettingthat waiver getting around
whatever obstacles are in yourway. Sounds like a great plan.
(30:39):
But I also picked up onsomething that from an episode
I've listened to, you talkedabout load shedding, and I'm
hoping you can explain to thelisteners a little bit more on
what load shedding is.
Joe Dituri (30:48):
So load shedding came out of my military days
when I was an engineer on aship. And, you know, what we
have is a bunch of criticalsystems that have to stay online
all the time. And then there'slike ancillary systems, you
know, like, like air,conditionings and ancillary
system, who cares, I want theengineering plant to be running,
but I don't care if the AC isworking, you know, I'm saying
(31:09):
so. But the overall the takeawayis just let the unimportant
things slide. Right, let thethings that are not it. Look, if
you've got too much going on,you just let those unimportant
things slide. But you got toknow your core, you got to know
your base, like, you know, likewe said, the Navy honor, courage
and commitment, right? I don'tlie, cheat, steal or tolerate
(31:30):
those who do. That's my corevalue, right. And if I, if I
have that, and it's good, nomatter what's going on me, no
matter how much brief I gottaprepare for Congress, or how
much what admirals yelling at meor somebody wants this or you
know, the kid is going I youknow, I didn't get my milk money
today, just load shed the stuffthat can't be dealt with at that
(31:50):
point. And then just go back toyour core values. But that takes
a lot of soul searching andunderstanding what your, what
your core values are. So ittakes a lot of work on your
part. But trust me, it'sworthwhile. Because once you
know, your center, boy, you'regood.
Joe Cadwell (32:05):
And for so many people, I think a lot of
listeners may be younger instill trying to find out what
their center are. And for corevalues for someone, such as
yourself, who's obviously liveda full and rich life and is
seems like really in the spiritof giving back to to the
community, we're assuming yourcore values, Joe?
Joe Dituri (32:23):
Yeah. So I went to grew up Catholic, right. So as
I'm raising my children, Ididn't raise them in a religious
sense, but I raised them with abunch of these core values. So
you know, balance being thefirst core value, right?
Balance, family consideration ofothers, those are the top three,
and everything has to be inbalance, right. So like balance
(32:46):
is the most important. And thenfamily, even family has to be in
balance, right? Because like,Yeah, Dad comes to visit you and
stay with you for a littlewhile. Only in little amounts
your dad living with you. 24/7.
Right. You don't want mom to bethere all the time, you know,
family has to be taken in littlebits. Sure. So balanced family
consideration of others beassiduous. The Four Agreements,
be impeccable with your word,you know, don't take it
(33:10):
personally. So as I kind ofgrew, I made a whole list of
them. And that's kind of the waythat I'm that I'm working my
life. And I add to it daily, andI, you know, I subtract from it,
I'm like, well, we don't needthat, you know,
Joe Cadwell (33:26):
right, for sure.
And so how did you? How did youcome up with these, I heard you
reference the Four Agreements,which for folks who don't know,
is a book based on ancientToltec wisdom, and it's a
fantastic read, I'll make sureand put it in the hyperlinks for
the show show notes. I firstcame across that have the most
random place, I think it was aan episode on HBO is Barry about
(33:50):
the Hitman turned to actor. AndI'd never heard of the federal
four agreements. So you neverknow when you're going to cross
paths with some, something likethat. But yeah, so do you have a
personal philosophy,
Joe Dituri (34:06):
you know, in the end, and you know, as I'm older,
I'm mid 50s, right? Sure, right.
So, as I grew older, I was like,none of this stuff matters, like
happiness is on my list. And Imoved happiness higher up.
Because it's like, in all ofthis, if you decide to be happy,
that's the best thing that youcould do. If you can find a job
(34:29):
that makes you happy. That'sgreat. Because if you work your
entire life, you work 30 yearsin a career that you just hate.
You hate going to work. You'relike, oh my god, you wasting
your life, you know? So it isand this is what I'm trying to
teach the kids now as their mid20s. You know, whatever. And I'm
like, Look, you need to startworking on your own happiness.
(34:51):
Find your happiness, find thethings that make you happy. Find
what excites you to get you outof bed in the morning because
Trust me when you're 50 andeverything hurts, it's like, oh,
I need something to get out ofbed for Well, I'm fighting for
the kids, you know, okay, go getout of bed
Joe Cadwell (35:09):
need to have that passion. Now, recently, you have
written the book The secrets indepth. And did you? You said you
drew that from inspiration fromyour time in the military. What
is the process when you sat downwhen you finally put pen to
paper? What What was your, yourprocess?
Joe Dituri (35:27):
So what I did was I threw up on paper, that's the
God's honest truth. I just threwit up on paper. And then I kind
of hired a guy who, whobasically recorded a session,
and he read everything that Ihad, and then asked me questions
so that I'd go deeper. So now Ihave a depth of stuff. Now I
have 70 80,000 words, right? Andthen I went to an editor, and
(35:50):
they're like, Did you seriouslygraduate high school because you
write like, you're in the fourthgrade? No, my I now and I get
that. But then she helped me andI mean, the whole editorial
staff and team, you know,they're like, Okay, what are you
trying to say? They call me onthe phone, like, what are you
trying to say? And then they'dmassage it and they go, I go,
Oh, that's exactly what I'mtrying to say. That's exactly
it. Right?
Joe Cadwell (36:11):
So what's the protagonist name in your your
book?
Joe Dituri (36:14):
So Joe commis, a joker? Nice Italian boy from New
York right man? Imagine that.
Imagine that. Very similar, verysimilar looking to me very
similar acting but no, noresemblance, really. Right. But
so the the thought processesthat there may be a book two and
the reason that there isn't BookTwo, we just kind of left it
(36:34):
open. Because when I left therewhen I left deep submergence
unit went to SOCOM. Oh boy, someinteresting things happened. So
that's where we literally putpen to paper on dry combat
submersible. And you know, like,that's, that's the asset that
we're using right now. It'sreally cool that we, we
conceived of this on a napkin ina bar to Navy SEALs, me and a
(36:54):
civilian engineer, and and namedJay Schroeder. And, and, boy,
did we do some great things. Andnow it's a full program of
record on and I was $1.6 billion$1.4 billion, whatever it is.
It's really great. Oh, we didthat. We did that on a cocktail
napkin. Yeah, that's fantastic.
Joe Cadwell (37:14):
Well, we're gonna have to talk about that,
hopefully have you back on tothe show some other time.
Joe Dituri (37:18):
But more importantly, sorry, I don't mean
to interrupt you. But moreimportantly, the next book
that's in the hopper for Joe, iswhy my traumatic brain injury is
the best thing that everhappened to me. Oh, so
Joe Cadwell (37:29):
that's the title of the working title of the book
you're going to be writing. Thatis
Joe Dituri (37:33):
the working title and the one that I'm already
throwing up on paper right now.
Joe Cadwell (37:37):
Well, let's explore that just a few more minutes,
then. Why has a traumatic braininjury been the best thing for
Joe?
Joe Dituri (37:43):
So we're treating traumatic brain injury here,
right? And I'm, I'm learning thethings that work and the things
that don't work, right. And it'sjust like, I'm working with a
bunch of physicians here. I'mworking with my staff. We're all
trying to push down the road.
And you know, you have a kidthat's laying in the chamber or
getting some sort of treatmentNeurofeedback something and he's
very angry, and one of themreached up, grabs the speaker
rips the speaker off the wall.
(38:07):
And I'm like, and, and he's a 30something year old kid. He's
like, you know, 642 150 poundsginormous. Right, but he's got a
traumatic brain injury. So whatmy traumatic brain injury gave
me was the ability to empathize.
And instead of being upset aboutinstead of being, you know,
whatever, his mom was there, andshe was in tears, she was
(38:27):
absolutely in tears. So when hewent off to the to use the
restroom at that point, she wassitting there and she's like,
what do I owe you for this, andI might just just come here,
just just give me a hug. It's amommy doing a friggin great job.
I said, whatever. Just keepdoing what you're doing. Don't
worry about that. That's TwistedMetal, we'll fix that. You're
okay. Right. So it's more of thehuman component, that empathy
(38:50):
that I frankly liked, right? Andthat recent relevant experience
with the traumatic brain injurygave me that, look, Joe, it's
not personal, don't take itpersonal. Don't make it
personal. And try and try andhelp just keep doing something
every day. You know, you askedme about my if I have an overall
philosophy and the one that Itruly love by just came to mind.
(39:13):
And it's like, I only need truenobility is not being better
than your fellow man. It's beinggreater than your former self.
So all I have to do is be betterthan I was yesterday, Hemingway,
quote, I believe, isn't it?
Exactly. Right. So it's like,all I got to do is be better
(39:34):
than I was yesterday. I mess up.
I'll be better tomorrow. I messup. I'll be better tomorrow. I
just keep getting better keepgetting better. And if we all
just did that. I mean, you know,Bill and Ted's Excellent
adventures, they'd said, Just beexcellent to one another. Really
good philosophy, believe it ornot.
Joe Cadwell (39:53):
Right up there with Socrates and Plato. We got Phil
and Ted and Joe to Terry, thishas been a fantastic The
conversation. Where can peoplego to find out more about you
and your work? And your book?
Thank you.
Joe Dituri (40:06):
Yeah. www.dr deep sea.com dr. D. P sca.com. Or
just Google Joe Torre. I'm onFacebook. I'm on Dr. Deep Sea,
Twitter and all that. Igenerally don't do the Facebook
and Instagram stuff.
Occasionally I'm on there. Butyou know, you got to have
somebody doing that nowadays,because that's the way you reach
(40:27):
people. So, but secrets in depthis the name of the novel. And I
would absolutely love it if youguys went out and really gave me
a hard scrub and looked at itand what, hey, it's good. Or
hey, Joe, you let this fall, youcould have done so much better,
let me know because we'll putthat in the next book or the
next book, you know.
Joe Cadwell (40:44):
All right. Well, I sure do appreciate your time.
Thank you so much for being onthe show today.
Joe Dituri (40:48):
Thank you very much.
I appreciate being here. Thanksfor the invite.
Joe Cadwell (40:51):
My guest today has been Joe Dituri author of
secrets in depth. To dive deeperinto the topic. Pun totally
intended. Be sure to check outthe show notes for this episode,
or visit the show's website atgrit nation podcast.com. If you
enjoyed today's episode, pleaseconsider sharing it with a
friend, family member or anyoneelse you think may get something
(41:11):
out of it. If you haven'talready done so I'd really
appreciate it. If you could takeone minute, I mean, seriously,
one minute to rate and reviewthe show on Apple podcasts or
Spotify. Your input really doesmake a difference in helping
other people find the show. Andit keeps me motivated to
continue putting out thecontent. I hope you like to
hear. As always thanks for yourcontinued support. And until
(41:31):
next time, thank you for wantingto know more today than you did
yesterday. And I'm gonna getyour book. Oh, I
Joe Dituri (41:39):
really appreciate that. I really really really
appreciate that it trust me it'sone of those things. Yeah, I
love it. When people say hey, Iread your book. I'm like I'm
always floored because yeah,like I said, my my English
teacher from the 11th grade isprobably rolling right now going
you wrote a book. Oh my god. It
And
Joe Dituri (00:09):
Welcome to Grit Nation. I'm Joe Cadwell, the
host of the show, and on today'sepisode, I have the pleasure of
speaking with retired US NavyCommander PhD in Biomedical
Engineering and author of thenew fictional thriller secrets
in debt. His name is Joe Dituriand his laid back persona and
colorful and exciting life trulymake for an interesting episode
(00:32):
we'll open our conversation bylearning about Joe's journey as
an enlisted sailor to be acommanding officer in charge of
the Navy's deeps emergency unit.
Next one pack is transitionedout of the SpecOps community and
into the world of hyperbaricmedicine. Well then hear how
Joe's involvement in a rollovercar crash contributed to his
(00:52):
researching traumatic braininjuries, starting with his own.
Later, we'll dive into Joe'swork to help prior military
service men and women overcomethe debilitating effects of
explosive concussions. And whyis unique approach of not just
treating the psychologicalmanifestations of the injury,
but the actual physical andphysiological root causes as
well as proven so effective. Andwe'll wrap up our conversation
(01:19):
by discussing secrets in depth.
Jack Reacher s style thrillerthat weaves many aspects of
Joe's life into the mainprotagonist character known as
the dragon slayer. After theepisode, be sure to check out
the show notes for moreinformation about Joe to Terry
and his new book Secrets indepth. And now on to the show.
(01:46):
Joe Dettori Welcome to gritnation.
Hey, thanks. Thanks for havingme. I really appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you so much, Joe,for taking your time to be on my
show. Today. I've been followingyour career been listening some
podcast reading a lot onlineabout Mr. Joe Dituri, aka Dr.
Deep Sea. And for the listenerswho may not know who Joe Dituri
(02:07):
is, I was hoping you couldintroduce us to the guy who's a
motivational speaker, formermilitary commander in the Navy,
and now an author.
I appreciate the opportunity todo that. It's always weird
talking about yourself in myopinion. But you know, I sit
here guard guard. So I did 20years in the Navy, worked my way
up from an enlisted guy to anofficer. When I retired, I
(02:30):
retired as a Special OperationsCommand as a commander and
decided that I wasn't going todo that anymore. I wanted to do
something totally different. SoI went back to school, I got a
PhD in Biomedical Engineering.
And now I work on and curetrying to solve traumatic brain
injury among other things in theclinical research realm.
Traumatic Brain Injury app hasbeen near and dear to my heart,
having had a couple and alsohave a bunch of friends that
(02:52):
have decided to end their life,you know, because of traumatic
brain injury. So, so yeah, Ijust wrote a book because during
COVID, I was bored, and it'sbeen sitting around for the past
15 years since I was in chargeof deep submergence unit. That
idea that books been rattlingaround in my brain. So I was
like, okay, COVID not doing awhole lot of work. I'm teaching
(03:13):
med school online. Let's write abook. I got a good idea.
Yeah, no kidding. And we'll getinto that book. I believe it's
the secrets of the deep, whichhas just recently been secrets
in depth. I'm sorry, secrets indepth. And you've also written
another book, The Tao ofunderwater survival. And then
also a children's book as well.
(03:34):
That is my daddy wears adifferent kinds of suit to wear,
because they're just fun books.
Right? Yeah.
Good. Good stuff. So let's,let's unpeel the the layers of
the Joe Dettori onion slowly.
Let's start with your childhood.
Joe, you were born in New York,from what I understand.
Born in Oceanside, New York. Mydad worked for an Italian
(03:55):
company. So I lived in Italy forthe first four or five years of
my life. I used to speak Italiandon't do it anymore, and then
moved to Long Island, New York,where we continue to, you know,
grow up and I lived all my, Iguess teenage years here joined
the Navy when I was 17. Onlybecause my mom would not let me
(04:15):
go in the Marine Corps. That wasmy first choice. But thank
goodness that all worked out.
And then you know, was she askedme was that a processing
technician worked my way up toget a commission and oh boy.
So how did you get into thediving then in the Navy?
I was on a submarine tender formy second tour. First tour was
(04:38):
an aircraft carrier second tourwas a submarine tender while I
was on the tender I you know, Isaw these guys were in Groton,
Connecticut. So these guys thatwere just running around in
shorts and shirts and you know,like
the UD T's and the blue and goldUD T's
and the blue and gold. Exactly.
And I'm like, yo, what's up withthat master diamond Donlin drags
me aside and goes wait Don'tjust take anybody and I'm like,
(05:00):
Hey, man, I was sailor tofreaking corner on an aircraft
carrier for crying out loud. I'mpretty good guy. Yeah, he's
like, Huh, well see, made me amud pump sent me over to Naval
submarine medical researchlaboratory, where I worked on a
saturation dive system and workthe Trimec series of down
(05:20):
decompression required if asubmarine was saturated. So I
worked on that with a greatgroup of researchers. And like,
I really, like I learnedresearch at that point, like I,
that's where I cut my teeth, andI didn't know anything. And then
they're like, Hey, you're verysmart guy. I want you to go to
school. And I'm like, Well, I'mgoing to school at night. No,
(05:41):
like, no, no, why don't youapply for the enlisted
commissioning program? And I'mlike, what, what? So the rest is
history, man, just get up thereand went school, got a
bachelor's in computer scienceand then got commissioned in
Special Operations Officerpipeline.
So you were in for 28 years. Andit sounds like a good part of
(06:02):
that was with the with theSpecOps. And with, with a diving
program, from what I understand,he did saturation diving,
I worked at an enlistedsaturation diving facility where
we did all that research. That'swhere the Genesis chambers were.
When Captain George Bond wasTheorizing the, the possibility
of doing cielab He did it there,Hawaii. So all of those
(06:23):
chambers, just this still alive.
They're still around, right? Allthat stuff. The Genesis Chamber
all those all the people andstuff is all there. And then
when I got commissioned, I wasjust a regular diver. They call
it a basic diving officer,because I was 1140 special
operations guy and then I was attwo tours in the SpecOps
community. And then I saw thatthey wanted me to go to EOD
(06:46):
school, and at that point, I waslike, I'm not going to EOD
school. I got almost 20 years inthe Navy. Why would I go to EOD
school at this time because Iwas long in the tooth right? I
was enlisted for 10 years andthen you know, sure for
a couple of years to stop itreal quick there Joe for folks
who don't know EOD is ExplosiveOrdnance Disposal school. We
(07:07):
tend to Bandy about these theseacronyms, you know being ex
military, but yeah, EODexplosive ordnance disposal. So
yeah, you said no to that.
I said no to that. And then, youknow, I was like, okay, the
writing's on the wall. I thinkthat entire community is going
towards the Explosive OrdnanceDisposal route, and less with
the diving and salvage in mindcountermeasures. So I popped
(07:30):
over to the engineering dutydiver community. So they sent me
off to postgraduate school, Igot a master's in astronautical
engineering. It's funny, becausethey asked me, you know, just
like ask any two people in acrowd and be like, Okay, you can
go to school and get a master'sin mechanical engineering, or
you can go get a master's inAstronautical Engineering. I'm
(07:51):
like, I don't even know whatthat is. But that sounds way
cooler.
It sure does. And for thelayperson, myself included what
is that? What is the difference?
So Astronautical Engineering hasto do with the, the things that
you have to deal with as anengineer for space for
spaceflight orbital mechanics,the fall rates, geosynchronous
(08:15):
orbits, has a lot to do withsatellites and satellite
uplinks, but it also has a lotto do with life support stuff.
So for me, everybody's like, Oh,well, you're all over the place.
I'm like, Well, I'm all over theplace, but I'm really in life
support. I'm all over the placein life support, you know, so I
just tried to, you know, I triedto make it fit me. And that's
(08:36):
kind of what I did with my, myMasters is I kind of just found
the right professor asked him tolet me do the things that I
wanted to do, wrote a couplearticles did a couple of things.
And that was great. You know,while my thesis was actually a
statistical orbitaldetermination, it's a whole
bunch of math, it really doesn'tmatter. The physics and the
physiology were not lost on me.
And I wrote a bunch of articlesand I became a speaker on that
(08:58):
topic. Because it's like, howmany guys are really savvy in
space stuff? Not a lot. I cantell you that. So you know, Kay,
never been to space wanted to goto space. So I said, Well, let
me just try this. So you know,did the whole NASA astronaut
thing application thing and theywere like, you are? You are? You
are too devilishly handsome tobe an astronaut. That's they
(09:20):
literally told me thatI've heard that so many times in
my life.
They said you are better offbeing a steely eyed Dennis into
the deep and I said thank youvery much. So then I you know,
went off and I did moreengineering duty officer tours.
From there I got to be the guywho's in charge of deep
(09:41):
submergence unit the divingdetachment we brought the one
atmosphere suit online. Wecertified the pressurized rescue
module. We replaced the mysticin the Avalon as the DSRVs and
the rescue asset on scene.
Deep Submergence rescue vehiclesfor those listening at home.
Oh, I'm sorry. No worries. Yeah,so a lot of this sounds like
(10:02):
it's it's building up to a pointwhere you're going to eventually
put it all down on paper duringCOVID It sounds like he got a
little bit bored. You were Iunderstand directed by the
government to kind of like notput too much fat in there. So
we're talking about a factditional book that you've
written called secrets in depth,secrets in depth. Exactly. That
(10:23):
it Okay, so your exploitsmy exploits, I, you know, the
names have changed to protectthe absolutely guilty, you know,
and some of the stuff thatactually didn't happen. So, in
the book, people died thatdidn't actually die. You know,
in the book, things happen, thatdidn't actually happen. But it's
all drama. And it's a fun read.
(10:45):
And, you know, some people were,you know, comparing it to like
Jack Reacher sort of stuff. ButI view it as the the, the
protagonist is basically justthat, more like the Bruce Willis
hero now, kind of like theunwilling, unwilling, I don't
want to be in the middle ofthis. This was not my gig. And
(11:07):
you guys wanted me to go do somesuper secret squirrel mission,
but it's not my requiredoperational commitment,
projected operationalenvironment. Why would I go do
that? Well, because the admiraltold you to? Well, there's that.
Well, very cool. And well, I'msure we'll get a little more
into the book as we go along.
But it sounds like a prettydistinguished career in the
military. 28 years. You you leftactive duty. How many years ago?
(11:32):
Want to say it's going on? 10?
Okay, nine plus, certainly.
Okay. So you took a pretty solidfoundation that the military
provided for you and youtransition that I think he said
at a certain point at a master'sdegree, and now you're a PhD.
So I'm a PhD in BiomedicalEngineering. So all that life
support stuff comes to play. Andthen when I retired, we were
(11:54):
losing lots of people. And, youknow, Admiral McRaven, calls me
up and says, Hey, listen, when Ineed your help, I got I got 22
people a day killing themselves.
Will you be on the presentationin the force and family for me?
And I'm like, Yeah, I'll dothat. I'll help. I was retiring.
At that point. I was retired.
(12:14):
And he was like, Can you help?
And I was like, yeah, and then Iwas like, I can help more. I can
help more, because we can fixthis. Like, I'm too dumb to know
that there's no cure fortraumatic brain injury. I'm too
dumb, right? So I just go, Ilearned a whole bunch of stuff.
And I'm like, Well, what do youthink? Let's try this. What do
you think? I think that'll work.
I think that'll work. I don'tknow, we're rolling dice, right?
(12:36):
And we found that if you come atit, if you come at traumatic
traumatic brain injury has threecomponents to it. physical,
physiological and psychological.
Right. So if you treat one ofthem, you got you got those
other two outliers, and it'llalways keep coming back and re
manifest itself, you'll relivethat trauma, you will re injure
yourself that hypoxic. Hypoxiato the brain is always going to
(12:59):
be there. So if you treateverything simultaneously, what
I'm seeing right now, and thisis preliminary, and I'm a
scientist, so you know, it'searly. I'm telling you, I have a
very small end. So I'm notclaiming victory just yet. But
we can't find any discerniblerecord of somebody having a
traumatic brain injury rightnow. Right? All that test scores
(13:20):
are through the roof, thatfeeling great. Anecdotally,
they're like, yes, thank you.
You saved my life. And and youknow, as the reportable stuff,
we can't see anything. So, butit's really hard to discern. So
really, we're not done yet. Wehave worked.
Let's let's back it up a littlebit. So yeah. Back then the
(13:42):
Special Operations Command. Yousaid we're having how many
people killing themselves.
At that time, it was 22. Ibelieve it's gone up to 25 or
28. And then back down to 25hours
a day, a week, a day. So peoplethat were in the Special Forces
in all of our branches ofservice in general, okay,
(14:02):
wanting to a day are killingthemselves and
why it why was that or why isthat?
I opine. Right. I mean, you'reasking me my opinion. The answer
is we don't know. But I opinedthat so backwards go to Vietnam,
(14:24):
people would have a concussiveblast injury, and they just
wouldn't survive it. I mean,that would just, we didn't have
the body armor back then. Wedidn't have the helmets back
then. We didn't have the blastprotection. We didn't have the,
you know, the encasements and soforth.
Now people were just shreddedwent by and they would not.
They wouldn't survive it. Andthat'd be that but now, it's
(14:46):
great because we're protectingthem but it still scrambles the
head. I know that I've been in acouple of explosions and, and
they're not pretty. I mean,there's no, there's no easy way
out of it. When your bell isrung, your bell is rung when
you're done. Add on fire andyour burn your lit on fire and
burn. I mean, you know,it's so going, going going back
to your your three legs of thattraumatic brain injury stool or
(15:08):
someone that survived atraumatic brain injury you said
there was a psychological, aphysiological and a physical
physical. Okay, so So and let'sif we could real quick Joe and
again in layman's terms try tobreak down those three legs of
the stool. So we'll start withthe physical then that the
actual mechanics of what happenswhen someone suffers a it sounds
(15:29):
like an extreme concussion. Okaycan I just kind of simplify it
by saying something like aconcussion can lead to to TBI
traumatic brain injury,it's it's concussion, like Yeah,
and multiple concussionsyndromes can lead to a
traumatic brain injury, it's,it's all in a definition, and I
kind of really doesn't matter.
(15:50):
But what it is, is, you'redisconnecting a synaptic
pathway, you're you go from hereto here with your learning and
knowledge and education, right?
And then this node right here isbroken the modem, the center of
your head is broken. So that'swhere you go through all the
time. And that nodes just brokenfor whatever reason. And do you
know that it only takes 1.3 G,to break a synaptic pathway. So
(16:13):
1.3 times gravitationalacceleration, that is a hard
stop and a car against theseatbelt. Just just to be clear,
right? That's that's what ittakes to create a traumatic
brain injury or break in asynaptic pathway, right? And if
it happens to be a crucial onewhere it goes from the language
area and out and you get it inthat note, well, then you don't
(16:34):
talk very well or you havespeech difficulties or in my
case, you have nystagmus and youknow, he you have brain injury
from being able to now you can'tprocess your vision correctly.
So it's it's multifaceted. It'slike saying, It's like saying so
to say traumatic brain injury isto say you have cancer. Well,
did you have prostate cancer?
(16:56):
Did you have melanoma? Did youhave breast cancer? Did you have
what? Music Theory Oh, mycatch all term then when we say
TBI, so we have the physicalmanifestation or the physical,
actual reality that there's beena broken synapse, a pathway that
relays information in the brain,then you said there's a
physiologicalYeah, so there's the chemical
changes in the body, right?
(17:19):
There's the there's the increasein something called interleukin,
right? It's cytokines, thesethese inflammatory markers. So
your body's immune response isto, you know, bring aid by the
form of white blood cells, butit inflames everything. So once
you have this inflammatoryresponse, it actually reduces
(17:41):
cerebral blood flow at thatpoint. So you know, your our
idea currently as researchers isthat we should be increasing
cerebral blood flow. So we'retrying to do stuff that
increases cerebral blood flow.
And we'll get into that becauseI believe you're using
hyperbaric again, drawing onsome of your past experiences
with diving and hyperbaricmedicine to do so. And then
(18:01):
finally, you saidpsychologically,
we are overdeveloped, as, ashumans, we are over developed in
the frontal part of our brain,prefrontal cortex. Specifically,
this is supposed to be aprefrontal cortex is supposed to
be more executive function. Butsince it's over size, then under
utilized, we store everything upthere. It's like storing
(18:24):
everything on your hard drive inthat spot. Well, what we do is
we store the lesson, which isimportant. And we store the
pain, we store the lesson to thepain coupled together, what you
have to do is you have todecouple the lesson from the
pain, I don't need the pain ofputting my hand on a hot stove,
I don't need to have that withme the rest of my life, to know
(18:46):
that I shouldn't put my hand ona hot stove, right? So decouple
that and then store it whereit's supposed to be stored in
the medulla oblongata. Right? Soit's just, it's rerouting where
you're how you're storing thisstuff. And you use an attachment
technique. I mean, I I hooked upwith a cognitive behavioral
therapist who's a PhD inpsychology, and she walked me
(19:06):
through my traumatic braininjury and then moved it
forward. So I said, That's it,you're hired. And trust me, I've
been to a bunch of cognitivebehavioral therapists, and none
of them are worth a darn until Ifound one who was an ex military
girl who went back and got aPhD. And she's working on her
second doctorate right now, justto codify her process, which is
(19:27):
terrific, sofantastic. And so you were
tasked with helping the soldiersto be honest with you. I saw
everything that was going on andthe preservation and the force
and family and I saw that theywere only doing it from a
psychological perspective.
Gotcha. And I said, you'remissing the point. I said, I'm
not that smart yet, but I'm notthat smart. But But I think we
(19:50):
got to be doing this and indifferent avenues. And finally,
I just came through this entireprocess on December of this past
year. What I was sitting theregoing, Hey, I do not want to go
to another funeral. But I callthem my brain trust bunch of
buddies of mine. We get togetherPhDs, MDS, you know, influential
(20:11):
people, money movers, shakers,and we all talk, right? We just
sit around a fire and tell liesto one another most of the time,
you know, but as we're talking,it's like, hey, what do you want
for next year, and I was like, Ido not want to go to another
funeral. I don't want to go toanother funeral. I don't want to
lose another guy. Like, and myguys challenged me. They're
(20:31):
like, alright, what are yougoing to do about it? Mike? Huh?
Wow. Why don't I just get thegroup that helped me with my
traumatic brain injury? Andmaybe we can, like, Well, what
do you need? Oh, my, ah, holdon. So we just kind of like,
cobbled this together. And thenit's like, oh, we can do an ex
(20:51):
post facto, you know, study onthis, and, you know, try and
retro actively figure out what'sgoing on. But you know, as
researchers, we're really bad,right? A researcher, if you ask
three researchers why why mypotted plant is dying, one will
say it's food, it needs food,the other will say it needs
water, and the other will say itneeds sunlight. But as
(21:13):
researchers, we want to find outwhich one of those needs. Now,
common sense tells you it needsall three of those. That's
common sense. But common senseis not what we are about in
research. So what we do is weput it in the sun for 24 hours
straight. And then when theplant dies, our understanding is
that sun kills plants. Right?
Same thing with water. Samething with food nutrients,
(21:37):
right? So it's like, no, it's acombination. And that's why I
was like, I got it. I'm gonna goback to that combination thing.
I'm going to treat it all.
Joe Cadwell (21:47):
And you were treating this on yourself,
because you had recentlysuffered a fairly significant
brain injury. Yep,
Joe Dituri (21:54):
I was T boned. I drive a 1947 Chevy. And I got t
boned. And when I did a loss ofconsciousness in the car, I was
out for 2030 minutes. I don'tknow how long they don't know
how long you know, nobody knowsanything, except that I was out.
Sure got to the hospital. And itwas like, oh, yeah, you have a
really good traumatic braininjury. You're jacked up what's
(22:17):
going on? Um, I have no idea. Sothen I started getting on the
road to try and repair it. Andmy initial thought was
hyperbarics. And that was sothis isn't just for frame of
reference September 7 of lastyear.
Joe Cadwell (22:29):
Yes. Thank you for doing that. This is recent
history. It's not yet been ayear since you've suffered a
rather significant TBI. Andagain, talking to you and
listening to you. And looking atyou, Joe, you seem like you're
pretty well adjusted for havingsurvived such a horrific event.
So is this because of some ofthe protocols and procedures
(22:52):
that you had adopted along theway of helping other people out?
Joe Dituri (22:55):
100%? Because so what I wound up doing was first
I'm treating with hyperbarics.
And then I got better. And thenI wasn't treating the other
stuff. So I got worse. So I'mlike, I got worse. I got in my
mind. I started spinning my mindaround and I was like, you know,
they tell you, they there aregroups out there who pontificate
going to let's just say going toMexico and doing things that are
(23:19):
not legal in the United States.
psychotropics. So I did that,and do not do that, because that
does not work. And I came backand I was sitting in my office
right here in this chair. And Iwas literally bawling. And my
friend, one of those movers andshakers in that group walked in,
and he's like, it was like,October timeframe. And he's
(23:41):
like, what's going on, man? AndI'm like, I haven't slept in
like six weeks. I'm spiralingman. I'm hurting. I'm hurting.
Because one of the side effectsof having a traumatic brain
injury is altered sleep state,right? You can't sleep and when
you can't sleep, man, it's adownhill, right? No. So the
depression kicks in the cryingthe anger the I mean, I was such
(24:02):
a stereotypical prefrontalcortex left side injury. And it
was like, you could have writtena book on it right? Like, oh,
yeah, he's angry all the time.
He switches from being angry tobeing sad and crying. You know,
he has risk taking behavior. Hehas suspicious behavior.
Joe Cadwell (24:19):
And this is all post accident, obviously, is
what you're before that you arefairly level headed. I mean,
navy commander for 28 years, aPhD. And then after this, this
traumatic injury, you begin tohave some significant changes in
your personality.
Joe Dituri (24:37):
And I'll tell you, I was I understand I understood at
that time, despotism, right? Iwas like, I was at that point. I
was at that point where I waslike, Well, if this is it for me
forever. Now I see. Now I seebecause I can't, I cannot
function like this. This is notgoing to work.
Joe Cadwell (24:59):
It's not going to work. So The hyperbaric came
into play right off the bat. Itsounds like in for again, the
layperson who doesn't understandthis. Someone who goes into a
hyperbaric chamber is put underpressure, the the atmospheres
are increased the amount ofpressure pounds per square inch
and the chamber is, isincreased, and you're breathing
100% oxygen at those depths forperiods of time in order to
(25:19):
hyper perfuse the tissues withoxygen. Is that sort of in a
nutshell, what we're doing?
That's exactly right. Okay,right. And what is the benefit
to that? Medically speaking.
Joe Dituri (25:30):
So normally, your oxygen is transported to your
tissues via the hemoglobin,right? So they can only carry a
certain amount. But it turns outand hemoglobin are in the grand
scheme of things large when itcomes to the capillary bed
perfusion when it comes togetting the oxygen out to all
the little tissues that need it.
And all the tissues that areswollen shut, all that ischemia,
(25:51):
all that swelling that we talkedabout earlier, when you have a
poorly perfused tissue, thatmeans that the red blood cells
can't even get to it. So whathappens is when you use
hyperbaric hyperbaric oxygen, itsaturates your plasma, with
enough sufficient amount ofoxygen to support cellular
respiration without having anyhemoglobin in your system. So
(26:14):
you don't even need hemoglobinduring hyperbaric to transport
the oxygen, you get enough fromjust the plasma. And plasma is
really teeny compared tohemoglobin. And it weeps
everywhere. So what it does isit increases cerebral blood flow
like that's one of the knownmechanism of action. It also
creates something calledneurogenesis. And neurogenesis
is more just a it's it's thegrowing of new neural pathways,
Joe Cadwell (26:41):
which is a relatively new science, from
what I understand, I think theold school of thought was we
could never, you know, repair abrain which has been damaged,
and that this neurogenesis iskind of an emerging field in
sciences and medicine.
Joe Dituri (26:56):
It really is, it really is. And what you need is
something called brain derivedneurotrophic factor, which is
this like lawn seed, you see thelawn, and then you water it with
hyperbarics. And then you comeout in a hyperbaric so and this
is where all this stuff ties inphysical, physiological,
psychological, you hit it withneuroplasticity, you hit it with
(27:17):
neurofeedback, which isupgrading and downgrading the
brainwaves, you know, you hit itwith that cognitive based
therapy, you hit it with, youknow, the physical therapy, you
know, and you do all this atonce, so that the oxygen is
helping you the brain derivedneurotrophic factor is helping
you increase cerebral bloodflow. So it's, you get this
additive effect of healing, youknow, and it's not rocket
(27:40):
science. I mean,
Joe Cadwell (27:41):
it sounds to me like it's a whole brain whole
body approach, a holisticapproach to treating the patient
as a whole, as opposed to just,you know, looking at the signs
or symptoms, hey, this person'sangry, let's give them some
pills to kind of take take theedge off of that anger. So this
sounds like you're on to somereally, really good things. And
without getting too deep intointo the weeds, it sounds like
(28:03):
Joe from from what I'mgathering, obviously, a very
motivated person I've picked upa few times you, you have
trouble just staying still youget bored, you push yourself to
different levels. And when youdo that, you are one of the
things that you've done. One ofthe things I've caught on to is
your motivating kind of guy. Andyou've actually been asked to
speak as a motivational speakerto two groups over the years
(28:26):
about your experiences in themilitary, and so forth. So what
can you tell my listener nowsomeone who is a blue collar
workers, someone who you know,works in the field, and it's not
always a sunny day, where dosome motivational tips show that
we can talk about to help themsee through to the next level?
Joe Dituri (28:42):
All right, pretty easy and straightforward. I'll
let you you and your listenersknow I don't think I've ever
said this before, but I got a910 on last 80 And everybody's
like, what, you have a PhD andI'm like I got a 9:10am I sad
went to go into the Navy wasn'tphysically qualified. I have
these molds all over my body.
They're like, Huh, you gotmoles, you can't come in. And
then somebody said you can havea waiver. Okay, what's the
(29:05):
waiver? Now I learned thewaiver. And then I went to go
get commissioned and my eyesightwasn't correctable to 2020 and
they're like waiver and I'm likewaiver got it. Then we're
building you know, deepsubmergence rescue assets. And
I'm like, Hey, is there a waiverfor this? Physical stuff, you
know, the pressure depth test.
(29:26):
And then by the time I got toSOCOM to build dry combat
submersible, I was like waiverwaiver waiver. I'm signing
waivers by myself, right. Soit's like, in life in general.
There is a waiver foreverything. There's a rule, and
then there's a waiver to thatrule. So my piece of advice to
you guys is work around it, man.
I understand that there's arule, work around it. What
(29:49):
Admiral McRaven said Is he says,You are allowed to break any
rule you want because I makerules. He said you're not
allowed to break any laws, youcan break all the rules that you
want. And we'll we'll fix that.
So you see, I'm saying justlike, bend the rule be
aggressive push forward, youknow, all this with the sense of
(30:11):
doing something good in yourlife, Hey, man, you know, bend
that rule, though don't wave,don't blink an eye,
Joe Cadwell (30:17):
it kind of falls in line with something I've always
lived by and said, it's easierto get forgiveness than
permission. But in the military,I do remember those waivers and
a lot of things that, you know,you have to work around like you
say, So, Joe. So yeah, gettingthat waiver getting around
whatever obstacles are in yourway. Sounds like a great plan.
(30:39):
But I also picked up onsomething that from an episode
I've listened to, you talkedabout load shedding, and I'm
hoping you can explain to thelisteners a little bit more on
what load shedding is.
Joe Dituri (30:48):
So load shedding came out of my military days
when I was an engineer on aship. And, you know, what we
have is a bunch of criticalsystems that have to stay online
all the time. And then there'slike ancillary systems, you
know, like, like air,conditionings and ancillary
system, who cares, I want theengineering plant to be running,
but I don't care if the AC isworking, you know, I'm saying
(31:09):
so. But the overall the takeawayis just let the unimportant
things slide. Right, let thethings that are not it. Look, if
you've got too much going on,you just let those unimportant
things slide. But you got toknow your core, you got to know
your base, like, you know, likewe said, the Navy honor, courage
and commitment, right? I don'tlie, cheat, steal or tolerate
(31:30):
those who do. That's my corevalue, right. And if I, if I
have that, and it's good, nomatter what's going on me, no
matter how much brief I gottaprepare for Congress, or how
much what admirals yelling at meor somebody wants this or you
know, the kid is going I youknow, I didn't get my milk money
today, just load shed the stuffthat can't be dealt with at that
(31:50):
point. And then just go back toyour core values. But that takes
a lot of soul searching andunderstanding what your, what
your core values are. So ittakes a lot of work on your
part. But trust me, it'sworthwhile. Because once you
know, your center, boy, you'regood.
Joe Cadwell (32:05):
And for so many people, I think a lot of
listeners may be younger instill trying to find out what
their center are. And for corevalues for someone, such as
yourself, who's obviously liveda full and rich life and is
seems like really in the spiritof giving back to to the
community, we're assuming yourcore values, Joe?
Joe Dituri (32:23):
Yeah. So I went to grew up Catholic, right. So as
I'm raising my children, Ididn't raise them in a religious
sense, but I raised them with abunch of these core values. So
you know, balance being thefirst core value, right?
Balance, family consideration ofothers, those are the top three,
and everything has to be inbalance, right. So like balance
(32:46):
is the most important. And thenfamily, even family has to be in
balance, right? Because like,Yeah, Dad comes to visit you and
stay with you for a littlewhile. Only in little amounts
your dad living with you. 24/7.
Right. You don't want mom to bethere all the time, you know,
family has to be taken in littlebits. Sure. So balanced family
consideration of others beassiduous. The Four Agreements,
be impeccable with your word,you know, don't take it
(33:10):
personally. So as I kind ofgrew, I made a whole list of
them. And that's kind of the waythat I'm that I'm working my
life. And I add to it daily, andI, you know, I subtract from it,
I'm like, well, we don't needthat, you know,
Joe Cadwell (33:26):
right, for sure.
And so how did you? How did youcome up with these, I heard you
reference the Four Agreements,which for folks who don't know,
is a book based on ancientToltec wisdom, and it's a
fantastic read, I'll make sureand put it in the hyperlinks for
the show show notes. I firstcame across that have the most
random place, I think it was aan episode on HBO is Barry about
(33:50):
the Hitman turned to actor. AndI'd never heard of the federal
four agreements. So you neverknow when you're going to cross
paths with some, something likethat. But yeah, so do you have a
personal philosophy,
Joe Dituri (34:06):
you know, in the end, and you know, as I'm older,
I'm mid 50s, right? Sure, right.
So, as I grew older, I was like,none of this stuff matters, like
happiness is on my list. And Imoved happiness higher up.
Because it's like, in all ofthis, if you decide to be happy,
that's the best thing that youcould do. If you can find a job
(34:29):
that makes you happy. That'sgreat. Because if you work your
entire life, you work 30 yearsin a career that you just hate.
You hate going to work. You'relike, oh my god, you wasting
your life, you know? So it isand this is what I'm trying to
teach the kids now as their mid20s. You know, whatever. And I'm
like, Look, you need to startworking on your own happiness.
(34:51):
Find your happiness, find thethings that make you happy. Find
what excites you to get you outof bed in the morning because
Trust me when you're 50 andeverything hurts, it's like, oh,
I need something to get out ofbed for Well, I'm fighting for
the kids, you know, okay, go getout of bed
Joe Cadwell (35:09):
need to have that passion. Now, recently, you have
written the book The secrets indepth. And did you? You said you
drew that from inspiration fromyour time in the military. What
is the process when you sat downwhen you finally put pen to
paper? What What was your, yourprocess?
Joe Dituri (35:27):
So what I did was I threw up on paper, that's the
God's honest truth. I just threwit up on paper. And then I kind
of hired a guy who, whobasically recorded a session,
and he read everything that Ihad, and then asked me questions
so that I'd go deeper. So now Ihave a depth of stuff. Now I
have 70 80,000 words, right? Andthen I went to an editor, and
(35:50):
they're like, Did you seriouslygraduate high school because you
write like, you're in the fourthgrade? No, my I now and I get
that. But then she helped me andI mean, the whole editorial
staff and team, you know,they're like, Okay, what are you
trying to say? They call me onthe phone, like, what are you
trying to say? And then they'dmassage it and they go, I go,
Oh, that's exactly what I'mtrying to say. That's exactly
it. Right?
Joe Cadwell (36:11):
So what's the protagonist name in your your
book?
Joe Dituri (36:14):
So Joe commis, a joker? Nice Italian boy from New
York right man? Imagine that.
Imagine that. Very similar, verysimilar looking to me very
similar acting but no, noresemblance, really. Right. But
so the the thought processesthat there may be a book two and
the reason that there isn't BookTwo, we just kind of left it
(36:34):
open. Because when I left therewhen I left deep submergence
unit went to SOCOM. Oh boy, someinteresting things happened. So
that's where we literally putpen to paper on dry combat
submersible. And you know, like,that's, that's the asset that
we're using right now. It'sreally cool that we, we
conceived of this on a napkin ina bar to Navy SEALs, me and a
(36:54):
civilian engineer, and and namedJay Schroeder. And, and, boy,
did we do some great things. Andnow it's a full program of
record on and I was $1.6 billion$1.4 billion, whatever it is.
It's really great. Oh, we didthat. We did that on a cocktail
napkin. Yeah, that's fantastic.
Joe Cadwell (37:14):
Well, we're gonna have to talk about that,
hopefully have you back on tothe show some other time.
Joe Dituri (37:18):
But more importantly, sorry, I don't mean
to interrupt you. But moreimportantly, the next book
that's in the hopper for Joe, iswhy my traumatic brain injury is
the best thing that everhappened to me. Oh, so
Joe Cadwell (37:29):
that's the title of the working title of the book
you're going to be writing. Thatis
Joe Dituri (37:33):
the working title and the one that I'm already
throwing up on paper right now.
Joe Cadwell (37:37):
Well, let's explore that just a few more minutes,
then. Why has a traumatic braininjury been the best thing for
Joe?
Joe Dituri (37:43):
So we're treating traumatic brain injury here,
right? And I'm, I'm learning thethings that work and the things
that don't work, right. And it'sjust like, I'm working with a
bunch of physicians here. I'mworking with my staff. We're all
trying to push down the road.
And you know, you have a kidthat's laying in the chamber or
getting some sort of treatmentNeurofeedback something and he's
very angry, and one of themreached up, grabs the speaker
rips the speaker off the wall.
(38:07):
And I'm like, and, and he's a 30something year old kid. He's
like, you know, 642 150 poundsginormous. Right, but he's got a
traumatic brain injury. So whatmy traumatic brain injury gave
me was the ability to empathize.
And instead of being upset aboutinstead of being, you know,
whatever, his mom was there, andshe was in tears, she was
(38:27):
absolutely in tears. So when hewent off to the to use the
restroom at that point, she wassitting there and she's like,
what do I owe you for this, andI might just just come here,
just just give me a hug. It's amommy doing a friggin great job.
I said, whatever. Just keepdoing what you're doing. Don't
worry about that. That's TwistedMetal, we'll fix that. You're
okay. Right. So it's more of thehuman component, that empathy
(38:50):
that I frankly liked, right? Andthat recent relevant experience
with the traumatic brain injurygave me that, look, Joe, it's
not personal, don't take itpersonal. Don't make it
personal. And try and try andhelp just keep doing something
every day. You know, you askedme about my if I have an overall
philosophy and the one that Itruly love by just came to mind.
(39:13):
And it's like, I only need truenobility is not being better
than your fellow man. It's beinggreater than your former self.
So all I have to do is be betterthan I was yesterday, Hemingway,
quote, I believe, isn't it?
Exactly. Right. So it's like,all I got to do is be better
(39:34):
than I was yesterday. I mess up.
I'll be better tomorrow. I messup. I'll be better tomorrow. I
just keep getting better keepgetting better. And if we all
just did that. I mean, you know,Bill and Ted's Excellent
adventures, they'd said, Just beexcellent to one another. Really
good philosophy, believe it ornot.
Joe Cadwell (39:53):
Right up there with Socrates and Plato. We got Phil
and Ted and Joe to Terry, thishas been a fantastic The
conversation. Where can peoplego to find out more about you
and your work? And your book?
Thank you.
Joe Dituri (40:06):
Yeah. www.dr deep sea.com dr. D. P sca.com. Or
just Google Joe Torre. I'm onFacebook. I'm on Dr. Deep Sea,
Twitter and all that. Igenerally don't do the Facebook
and Instagram stuff.
Occasionally I'm on there. Butyou know, you got to have
somebody doing that nowadays,because that's the way you reach
(40:27):
people. So, but secrets in depthis the name of the novel. And I
would absolutely love it if youguys went out and really gave me
a hard scrub and looked at itand what, hey, it's good. Or
hey, Joe, you let this fall, youcould have done so much better,
let me know because we'll putthat in the next book or the
next book, you know.
Joe Cadwell (40:44):
All right. Well, I sure do appreciate your time.
Thank you so much for being onthe show today.
Joe Dituri (40:48):
Thank you very much.
I appreciate being here. Thanksfor the invite.
Joe Cadwell (40:51):
My guest today has been Joe Dituri author of
secrets in depth. To dive deeperinto the topic. Pun totally
intended. Be sure to check outthe show notes for this episode,
or visit the show's website atgrit nation podcast.com. If you
enjoyed today's episode, pleaseconsider sharing it with a
friend, family member or anyoneelse you think may get something
(41:11):
out of it. If you haven'talready done so I'd really
appreciate it. If you could takeone minute, I mean, seriously,
one minute to rate and reviewthe show on Apple podcasts or
Spotify. Your input really doesmake a difference in helping
other people find the show. Andit keeps me motivated to
continue putting out thecontent. I hope you like to
hear. As always thanks for yourcontinued support. And until
(41:31):
next time, thank you for wantingto know more today than you did
yesterday. And I'm gonna getyour book. Oh, I
Joe Dituri (41:39):
really appreciate that. I really really really
appreciate that it trust me it'sone of those things. Yeah, I
love it. When people say hey, Iread your book. I'm like I'm
always floored because yeah,like I said, my my English
teacher from the 11th grade isprobably rolling right now going
you wrote a book. Oh my god. It
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