What 100 Days Underwater Revealed About Aging and Healing with Dr. Joseph Dituri

Well, everyone, welcome back. I couldn't be more excited to offer you what we're going to talk about today. This is a gentleman that I met a couple of months ago when we were on a mutual talk show together, and he blew me away. He's going to do the same for you. Dr. Joe Gittori isn't just talking about longevity. He tested it from 30 feet under the ocean. A former US Navy commander, biomedical engineer, and hyperbaric medicine expert, Dr. Joe spent 100 days living underwater in a pressurized environment to study how pressure, oxygen, and isolation impact inflammation, aging, telomeres, and cellular health. What happened shocked even him. Markers of aging reversed, inflammation dropped, sleep improved, and cellular regeneration accelerated. He is now known as Dr. Deepsea, and Dr. Joe is challenging everything we thought we knew about aging, recovery, and healing, and asking a radical question. What if the environment that we live in is aging us faster than disease ever could. Welcome, Dr. Joe.

How are you? Thank you so much for having me. I'm so grateful to be on your show.

I'm very well, and I'm excited to have Dr. Deepsea on my show.

It's a good time. It'll be a good time or a good story. I don't know which.

And maybe both. Maybe both, right? Okay. So tell us how you got your nickname, Dr. Deepsea. I want to hear about I want to hear, what does that mean?

So in the military, I was a military diver. As a matter of fact, oh, this was my stack when I retired. There's a Navy dive pin, all the medals, all the special operations. So when you're a military saturation diver, you refer to one another as deep sea. It's like a funny colloquialism, right? Like, how you doing, deep sea? I'm good, deep sea. How are you, deep sea? And it's all like very, third person, very egomaniacal. We're neighbors, whatever.

No, I like it.

It's fun. We have fun. And then I got my PhD in biomedical engineering and they were like, oh, now we have to call you doctor. Oh, it's Dr. Deepsea now. And I'm like, oh, that's horrible. And they're like, that's it. That's your Delta Tau Chi nickname is Dr. Deepsea. And I'm like, oh man, it's fun.

I like it. I like it. All right. So, let's start off with the basics. What are hyperbarics?

So, simply put, hyper means more than, baric means pressure, right? So, if we can increase the pressure, I can squeeze due to all laws of physics and so forth that are complicated to get into, but easy to work. I can push the oxygen into your cells more. Basically, we found— we, not we, I was not alive at this time, but In the 1950s, we used to do open heart surgery. They used to do open heart surgery in a hyperbaric chamber. Why? Because we found that we could take all of the red blood cells out of pigs in the '50s and still they would live because the oxygen presses into the plasma enough. Red blood cells no longer have to transport oxygen alone. The plasma can transport sufficient oxygen to support cellular respiration.

Oh my, I never knew that.

Right? Isn't that cool? And here's another useless fact. The first use of hyperbaric medicine, 1664.

How? I mean, how did they even create it?

They, they literally took one of these, one of these riveted together—

I'm so blown away right now.

Just imagine, right? And they said, His name was Henshaw. He said, "I have a good idea. I'm having digestive problems. I'm gonna try pressurizing myself in this, literally, a train engine compartment." He pressurized himself in this pop-riveted steel death night trap. It was crazy. But, this nightmare wound up coming through and he wound up improving his symptoms. So, we've been slowly but surely finding other symptoms that were all off-label at one time that we're now trying to bring on-label. That's what I want to do when I grow up is bring off-label indications to on-label for this, this really great medicine.

Wait, you plan on growing up? Come on.

We're trying.

I thought you were my last holdout.

We'll see how this goes.

All right. So I want you to tell us about the experiment. How did it come to be? Tell us about your experience. Like, take us there with you.

Oh my goodness. Okay. So believe it or not, this starts when I retired from the military. I retired from the military and I'm somewhat of a submersible expert. So I get a call from James Cameron, the filmmaker James Cameron.

I don't—

not James Cameron himself, his people. They say, hey, Jim wants you to come out to the house. I'm like, me? Like, yeah, his house. Yeah. So I said, right. I'm like, am I? So I said, send me a ticket. They send me a ticket, drive me out to James Cameron's house, and I am looking at the submersible that he went to the bottom of the Marianas Trench in. And he says, hey, I need an evaluation for the submersible. Walking his dog on the beach, sleeping at the house. I mean, like, it was crazy. Like, real weird stuff. But great information, great fun. So I looked at the entire package. I put together everything when it came to this mission that he did to go to the bottom of the Marianas Trench and what he found down there. And he's not, he's not a zoologist. He's not a, he's not an ichthyologist. He doesn't know much about nature side of the house. He's just a really smart cat. He captured something underwater in the bottom of the Marianas Trench. It's a sea lice. And normally in Florida, sea lice are like this big. And they usually just bite you in your wetsuit. They're teeny tiny underwater. They're about 11 inches long, 12 inches long at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. They are white and huge. Huh. He just captured it and had no idea what it was. We pulled the DNA sample of it. It matches up to a partial cure for Alzheimer's. Let me say that again a different way. A partial cure for a disease that afflicts humanity existed unbeknownst to us at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. And I was like, so I have to put together the whole report. I have to send everything to James Cameron, right? So I said it, and it's due on Christmas Day. So Christmas Eve, I'm writing and I'm like, I'm like, hey, this matches up with, and I said, holy mackerel, everything we need is on this planet. We have the yin, we have the yang, we have the dark, we have the light, we have the disease. We damn sure have the cure. I have to live in the ocean. And everybody's like, he's lost it. He's off the rails. I'm like, no, it makes perfect sense. Can you see this? All, like, freaking makes sense. And then it was like, I got to get there. So that was 2013. I stepped out of uniform. So 12 was when this happened. I stepped out of uniform in 13, and then I needed to get smarter, so went back to school. I got a PhD in biomedical engineering. And then it was like, by '19 rolls around, we're like, hey, we're finally going to do this. We're going to get in the water. So we went into this habitat, this underwater research lab, me and 4 of my friends in a very tight environment for 5 days. And that was the start of all of this. And then we said, hold on, who can do it? And we're like, okay, in 2020, we're going to do it. And there's going to be 2 of us. Okay, 2 of us in 2020. And then COVID hit and then we couldn't do it. And then, then, long story short, push that forward to 2023. And I said, I'm doing it in 2023. And my friends all said, we don't have the money. We don't have the time. I can't take time off work. I said, I'm doing it. I'm living in the ocean for 100 days. And they're like, you're crazy. There you go.

Oh my God. So that you just decided to go and do this alone.

You said it earlier. You have a calling. It's what he tells you to do. Because I'm not here doing anybody else's work but his. I'm doing his work. And this is what he told me to do. And I'm like, man, I gotta know how to do it. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I, I think probably all of your military training gave you the gumption to move forward. In the face of fear. But there has to be something terrifying to you about just the thought of spending 100 days alone in isolation in a capsule.

Yeah, 100 days underwater was a little tough. You could, you could just imagine. But when I did it, I prepped everybody. I called my mom. I said, Mom, listen, not coming out. It's the way that it is. Called the kids. I said to the kids, I'm not coming out. And, you know, my daughter was like, that's fine. You weren't invited to my college graduation from Caltech anyway. Yeah, I'm kidding. Yeah. But, you know, it's like it's, it's that kind of a thing when you set your sights on something, you just do it. And I mean, look, I've crawled inside a torpedo tube, you know, and they closed the doors. It's what we did, right? Yeah. There is no claustrophobia in my world. You know, MRI machines are not tight to me at all. So living in these isolated, confined, extreme environments— look, I got the added benefit of doing all this stuff for the preparatory trip to get to Mars, right? Because all this isolated, confined, extreme environment work needs to be done before we get in the tube. I love Elon. We're going to Mars. I'm like, What are we going to eat? How are we going to work out the logistics? Where are we going to pee? What are we going to— are we going to poop? Like, where's all that stuff going to go? Like, we got to answer these questions. I know we want to go to Mars, but there are so many questions.

Yeah, for sure. So can you paint us a little picture of what it was like? Like, give us, give us a day in the life. Give us a little bit of the experience. How is, how is day 1's version different than day 10's version different than day 50's version? And did you lose track of time? Like, I mean, I'm just picturing Matt Damon on Mars.

Yeah, well, it got very cyclical, right? The good thing that I had is I had connectivity. So on day one, we swam down a Cat5 cable and we plugged it into a router. And I had the best Wi-Fi in all of the laboratories because I wasn't sharing any of my Wi-Fi with anybody. It won't go through the water. So basically there was one guy on the Wi-Fi and that was me.

Oh my God, unbelievable. You have better Wi-Fi at the bottom of the ocean than I do in my office.

You get it. So, you know, when we hooked everything up, we were like, okay, this is gonna work. So that connectivity, that's a little disingenuous to the travel to Mars because we're gonna have little or no connectivity there. But, you know, when I had that, I was able to teach med school online, teach biomedical engineering courses, lecture to 5,000+ kids in science, technology, engineering, and math. I wanted them to think that science was a little cool because usually science is pretty damn boring, right? And it's like, oh, I'm a scientist. Oh. So we wanted to make it cool for the kids. And then, you know, I, I did all of that, and then I got to talk to all of my friends in the underwater realm, all of the ichthyologists, the zoologists, all the people talking about brand new invertebrates, brand new cone jellyfish, that kind of thing, and what they could be used for and talked about preserving, protecting, and rejuvenating our marine environment. So what did I do? I woke up every morning at 5 o'clock because I'm broken. I wake up at 5. It's click. Lights come on, lights come on in my brain and I start thinking and working. I used to go get 2 cups of coffee. That was, I used to drink coffee. I don't drink coffee anymore, but I used to drink 2 cups of coffee and then I'd have just some sort of a breakfast usually involving 3, 4, or 5 eggs and lots of protein. And then I would get to work on science. Now remember, while I was down there, I did electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms, pulmonary function tests, you know, blood, urine, saliva, all these tests while I was down there the entirety of the time. 19 psychological psychosocial tests over periods of time so we could track what happens to the human body when you leave it in that isolated confined extreme environment. Well, that being done, okay, that's 6, 7 hours of your life that you're never going to get back. If you've never put EEG leads on your own head, you don't know what to do with 2 hours. So stuff like that. But, you know, and then when I was done with that, I'd get on TV for like an hour or I'd get on CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox, whoever for like an hour. And then I'd get on with the kids for like 2 hours a day. And then I'd teach my classes, which was 2 or 3 hours of debate depending on which day it was. So I worked my ass off for literally 14 hours a day, give or take. But it wound up working out because, look, I'm a researcher. I sit in the office 8, 9, 10 hours a day. That's usually what I do. And I go home. I'm a pretty boring dude. I always eat the same thing. I eat the same thing I ate underwater, the same thing I ate while I was on the surface. It's all the same.

What did you eat underwater?

So, like, 4 or 5 eggs in the morning with some cheese and some meat, then salads. Because they'd swim them down in like a pre-prepared, pre-washed sort of a salad that had protein in it. And then for dinner, I had a protein and then something green, you know.

So they were bringing you—

they were bringing you food every 3 days or so. I'd get a shipment of food, which is, like I said, disingenuous to the transport to Mars because you think it's hard, right? It is almost impossible. And getting rid of the garbage, getting rid of like Even though it was a one person, I was producing a lot. So you got to figure out where we're going to put all this stuff when we go where we go.

Yeah. Yeah. Did you have a shower?

I did. So we had a hose.

I'm here. I'm thinking about like you doing all this teaching with some really bad hair days.

It, it was 100 days of really bad hair days because it is so, so you, you like me, you have the long hair, right? And my hair was a lot longer then. So. This hair, when you're underwater, it's 100% humid environment because when you're in this habitat, it's basically like being in this, right? Here you are in this tube, but in the bottom, it's got a hole so that you can swim in and out. So the thing is full of water, 100% humid environment. And like you said, 100 bad air days. So I just greased it back and called it good and tried my best, you know. But yeah, I did. I had a shower and, you know, it was just fresh water from the surface. That was piped back to the surface. This lab, it's in Key Largo, and it is totally unobtrusive to the marine environment aside for its size and girth. We don't put anything back in. We didn't pee in the water. We didn't poo in the water. Like, we pulled it in, we put it out. We took the trash out. We took all the— anything I used out, right? So we want it to be as, you know, as less impactful as possible.

Environmentally friendly. How big is it? How big is it?

Yeah, so, uh, it is about 6 feet in diameter. I'm 6 feet tall, so it's 6 feet wide, 6 feet tall. I'm tall enough that I would hit my head on the top of the structure daily. Um, so 6 feet by, uh, I want to say 17 feet long. So not that long. Pretty— my office is 10 by 10. It's about the same general square footage. You know, but that included bed sleeping, all the things that you have to do, including using the restroom. And yes, we did that. And, you know, showers, everything. Everything was about the size of my office for 100 days. And that's actually quite huge, comparatively speaking. I mean, those guys in the Apollo mission, they were in a shoebox for 3 days.

I know. Standing room only.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Oh my God. So you were underwater for 100 days. And what, what did— what shocked you the most during that time?

So I had a couple of suppositions. You know, you go in there with a null hypothesis, right? You think what's going to happen. The thing that impacted me the most was normally humans sleep between 30% and 33% deep in REM. I slept between 60 to 66% in deep and REM combined. Unheard of numbers. Now, 70 million Americans alone suffer from sleep problems. And we have something that can double your deep and REM. And what do we do in deep and REM? We relearn, we recategorize, we structure everything. We put things in little baskets in our head. We remove it from the to medulla, from the prefrontal cortex to the medulla oblongata. We put it in long-term storage. That kind of stuff happens when you go to deep in REM. So when you do it as much as I did, I'm telling you, I was on fire. I was functioning. I was functioning at a 12. I'm telling you, on a scale of 1 to 10, I was off the charts. And when I did the EEGs, that even confirmed I had a— what did I have? I want to say a 9% increase in coherence. And a 5% decrease in phase lag. So coherence is how well you talk to one another and connect in your brain, and phase lag is how long it takes you. So I sped up my brain and I thought better. The connectivity was better. It's crazy. Now, was that due to sleep or was that due to the pressure? I don't know which. I don't care. But it's an example of what hyperbaric medicine can do and does do.

You also saw changes in inflammation and immune function. You talked about sleep and telomere length.

Oh, yeah.

Can you, can you talk about that a little bit for people who don't understand what that means?

So one of the known mechanisms of action for hyperbaric medicine, and it's a drug according to the USP, right? So it has to be prescribed by a physician. These these end caps.

Is it a drug or a device?

So hyperbaric oxygen is a drug according to the US Pharmacopeia. So it needs a prescription from a doctor. Now the devices are what's used to deliver the hyperbaric oxygen.

Okay, so the chamber is the device and that's what is that device FDA clearance because Class 2 medical devices get clearance.

Yep.

And drugs get approval.

Drugs get approval, devices get clearances. That's exactly right.

Yeah.

And you want to go in if you are looking for hyperbarics, you want to find a place that has a, you know, ASME PVHO approved chamber that is stamped and certified. And, you know, you got to go to the right place. There's a bunch of fly-by-night people that are coming up, but okay, we're going to, we're going to talk all about that.

But right now, I want to get, I want to get back to the things that you measured, the things that you learned during this time. And I want to get to the why.

Oh, yeah. So, well, the why. Okay, so the why was generally so that everybody in the world would understand the mechanisms of action of hyperbaric medicine, because this is a great adjunct therapy and it's a great primary therapy. That is underutilized and overlooked and often thought that, oh, that's just voodoo, black magic, witchcraft. Like, you went to med school. Aside from the med school that I teach, which is, you know, the undersea portion of it, I don't know that anybody gets any diving or hyperbaric medicine in their tenure at med school.

Did you try? I'm trying to remember. I mean, I knew I knew about it, but I can't remember if I learned about it in medical school, if I learned about it in residency, or if I learned about it in practice. And I'm— it's all a blur and it was a long time ago.

Come on. What? Like, like a couple of months? What are you talking about?

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

A couple of months.

Yeah.

Plus, plus 30 years.

Med school basically, and I talked to the, you know, the chairman, president of med school here, nobody has room in the curriculum, right? So he's like, okay, look, I understand it's just a 40-hour class. So in that 40-hour class, tell me what you want me to take out of medical school and not teach anymore. So there's nowhere to squeeze it in. So by and large, nobody gets it. I wanna say 3 to 5% of the doctors was the last known figure, and that was from 2007, so it's a long time ago, that they got taught anything about it. So 3% is nothing.

Maybe we could spend less time on statins and beta blockers and proton pump inhibitors and all the things that are making our society chronically ill.

Yes, ma'am.

Maybe we could spend less time on that.

You are getting the— you have the understanding that we, we do. We're a drug-based society and we should not be a drug-based society. This is labeled a drug, but if this truly was a drug, the trees would all get arrested because we know that their cellular metabolism produces oxygen. So I don't want to hear it, right? This is a naturally occurring element that should not be withheld from the people, is my feeling. And if you want to use it to make your hair grow longer, and it's not hurting you, go ahead and try it, right? But science wins over bullshit, right? This is what we do. We do the science behind it. So, yeah, with the telomeres, so the telomere lengthening, one of the known mechanisms of action of hyperbaric medicine is reverse transcriptase. So if we can make those telomeres, the end cap on the end of your chromosome, if you have a little end of your chromosome Picture it like a shoelace, that little shoelace. When you use one, you lose it. So there's only, let's say, 100 of them. That's the amount of times that you can replicate that chromosome when you do that mRNA to DNA transcription thing that we do, right? So when that happens, you lose one of those telomeres. Okay, that's not a problem. You lose 2, 3, 4, 5. When you get to 99, You got one more left and there's cell senescence. That's death, right? That's it. So if we can lengthen those telomeres, we can extend that ability to reproduce that chromosome, make that DNA, mRNA, DNA transcription thing work. That's good, right? Yes.

So that's it. That's the reverse aging kind of thing, right?

It truly is.

Or life extension. Let's, let's call it life extension.

It's life extension because there's a whole host of other things that go with this, you know, with this anti-aging thing, because it doesn't matter if my brain's scrambled. I don't care how long I'm living. If my body's not working, I don't care how long I'm alive.

Living longer, living longer isn't the, isn't the panacea, right? It's living better. It's living younger. Yeah, right. And we, even though we maybe have, um, in the United States, like, an, an, an older survival, although I don't even know that we do as compared to other, other nations, but, um, we are definitely not living better. And the last 10 years of life in the United States is generally spent in a very debilitated and compromised condition.

And that said, there are more centurions in Okinawa. There are more centurions in Greece, in Italy. And they drink, they drink wine, they drink rice sake. They, you know, but they, they live their diet their way and their diet's not half bad for them. Where most American diets, I mean, Joe's opinion, not the best for you. Full of inflammatory diets that are terrible, plastics and processed and ultra pro—

oh God. And the more Americanized the world becomes, the more they start to suffer from the same conditions that we suffer from. Yep.

Yep.

So tell us, so is just being in that pressurized environment, is that creating a hyperoxygenated state?

Yeah. So that's exactly what it did. So, for instance, we know, we know our body compensates, right? We can go live at altitude. And when we live at altitude, we want to go train football, right? We're going to train in Denver up a mile high so that we can get more red blood cells. When you go underwater and you—

Because that's a lower— oxygen environment.

Exactly. Because of the altitude, you're in a lower oxygen environment. If I go in a higher oxygen environment, I get less blood cells because the oxygen is multiplied down there due to the laws of physics. So while I was underwater, I decreased the number of red blood cells that I had as a compensatory behavior for the body. Human bodies do that. We can adapt to live in certain places. But I got all the benefits that came with it, like the 17% increase in telomere length. When you said inflammatory markers, that was quite surprising to me. So things like interleukin-6, hs-CRP, you know, IGF-1, all of these growth factors, everything dropped to the floor. Even the, the pro-inflammatory cytokines went through the roof. It's crazy, right? So I basically went from like, I wanna say a 7.0 for interleukin-6 to a 1.6. Unheard of. All the systemic inflammatory response in my body was absolutely gone. I had a—

Why do you think that is? What do you attribute that to?

So, well, okay, it has to do with reducing intervascular leukocyte adherence, right? So this is the white blood cells that stick on the inside of the endothelium lining. I don't know if you remember that from med school, but like when you get inflamed, you start to stick these white blood cells on the inside of the endothelium lining. Well, hyperbaric oxygen basically reduces that. It basically scrapes the inside of the endothelium lining and gets rid of what I believe, Joe's opinion, our overactive immune system, 'cause the white blood cells just go, freaking nuts. And they're like, I gotta go, I gotta go, you know, and they like run around, warning, warning, danger, danger. So, and basically, hyperbaric oxygen will grab up those and quell that response, right? Our, our immune response, our histamine response, if you will, you know.

I mean, it's just, it's mind-blowing. But, you know, originally, I was struggling with one part of it, which was the isolation part, because we think of isolation as a pro-inflammatory condition. In fact, when I talk to people about breast cancer and, and mitigating risk for getting breast cancer, mitigating risk for breast cancer recurrence or progression, I talk a lot about the power of connection. And yet you spent 100 days alone and saw your inflammation plummet. So now you were deeply connected, though, but not, not in a way that we generally associate as positive in that your connection to the outside world was a virtual one.

Yep. And we learned this during COVID right? We had all these virtual connections and it was freaking horrible. So yeah, mind you, I was isolated, but I did have people come down occasionally, drop off food, visit me. It wasn't like there was no— but I did feel the lack of what we call motherly love, the lack of motherly love. So the high fives, the shaking hands, there wasn't a lot of that down there. So I did absolutely feel that. And you are 1,000— I love how connected you and I are because you're 1,000% right on the community. Oh man, we are humans. We are made to be together. We are made to do things together. We're not made to be alone. Or, you know, oh, here, let me get on my phone and do this. No, that's not what we're meant to do. Yeah.

What was the hardest part? What was the hardest part about your 100 days?

Uh, somebody that I know and cared for greatly got got hurt during that time and wound up in the hospital. And I am, in case you don't know, a control freak. So of course I would have never guessed. Don't hate me for saying this, but I don't think many medical doctors know a lot about what they're doing. So when this person was hurt and they were going to the ER, I was like, okay, here's what you're going to do. I want you to start with this and do that and do this and do that. And then people are like, Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're armchair quarterback in this thing. And I'm like, don't make me come out of here and go up there and take care of that person because this person's important and I need this to work out. So, you know, and you have to kind of relinquish control to people that you don't know and just hope that they remembered human physiology from medical school. And human physiology and physics to me are the key to everything. And you know, because you're chasing it, you get it.

Yeah. Well, they are and that is why the functional medicine movement is so strong. It's because the functional medicine movement gets it. But, you know, unfortunately, most conventionally trained doctors and me being one of them, they basically tell you to throw your knowledge of biochemistry and physiology out the window the second you finish medical school. You go into residency training and you train to check boxes, right? Recognize symptoms, prescribe drugs or procedures. Don't think outside of the box. Don't ask questions. Don't question convention. Don't question authority. And if you do, you're someone like me and you're a quack or you've lost it or, you know, some version of putting you down instead of hearing and confronting truth.

Yeah.

Right. That's, that's what happens.

Yeah.

That's what happens. But we don't even need to go in that area. So, so I hear you. You were disconnected from your world and in, in a place that you thought really needed your help and guidance.

Yeah.

Was there anything else that was hard for you about being there?

Um, I guess it's all about the waiting, right? You know, we broke the world record on day 73, and this was never about a world record. This is about letting the world know that we can and should live underwater, and we can and should look for different things that we have underwater. Like, look, we found sponges underwater. While I was down there, I worked with a sponge researcher, and we found a new species of sponge. Now, who cares about a sponge? Wait a minute. A powerful antiviral called acyclovir is derived from a sponge that is found naturally occurring in the ocean. Wait a minute. Like I said before, the cure is here. Antibiotics.

Nature has figured, has figured a lot of stuff out, right?

Yeah, it's all here. We just need to look where we haven't looked before.

Yeah.

And what we're doing is we're doing the same damn thing we always do. So I I'm like, get in another place and live in another place. Look differently, you know, change your view. I don't know, hang upside down, whatever you gotta do.

All right, so let's talk about, because, you know, it's nice to talk about the lowering of inflammatory markers and that kind of thing, but what does that actually translate into? So to me, this is the difference between biological age and chronological age.

Yeah.

And what we were talking about before is living to a high chronological age while enjoying the benefits of a low biological age. Yeah. So what— talk about the difference. What does this mean to you and how does this fit into your experiment?

Oh, yeah. So, chronological, biological, obviously we did all of those methylation tests. We did all of the, you know, it's not 23andMe, I think it's called Truvaly. But, you know, all of that stuff, we did all of those measurements and experiments. And look, I'm 58+ years old right now. And when I went in the water, I started at an extrinsic age of 44. That's because I spell gym with a G. I create autophagy in my body all the time. I get enough hydration. I, you know, all of the tenets of, of well-living, right? I don't eat crap. And guess what? I, I drink alcohol occasionally. I don't overdo it. I try not to, right?

I— yeah, we, we don't strive for perfection here. We talk about it's what you do most that matters.

Right. And perfect is the enemy of good enough in that situation. Trust me. So, you know, that kind of thing. So when I went in the water, I was 44. When I came out 100 days later, I was 34.

Okay, so I just want to be clear for people, you are talking about your biologic age, not your chronological age, because your chronological age was in your 50s.

Yeah, it was like 55, 56 at the time.

Okay, so your, your biologic age when you went into the water was 44. And go over for people what, what makes up that biologic age, like what do they use to determine what your biologic age is? I know Mark Hyman's platform Function Health is very focused on, on measuring that for people. I think some of the wearable devices like the Whoop is doing that too. What are they looking at? How do they determine your biologic age?

It is a complex sort of a—

Mine's 37, by the way.

Yes, I know. You are not age appropriate for me. That's what I know.

Well, that's, you don't know because my chronologic age is 20 years more than that.

Yeah, it's probably true. No, I get it. And because you're living the right way, right? Because you're doing the right thing. Okay, so how do they get this? This number is one of these proprietary numbers, and everybody that I talk to at Truveri, they have this algorithm. It has to do with your body's production of stem cell, your reactive oxygen species in your body, your your heart rate, your heart rate variability, your, you know, all of these drivers that we know, you know, endothelium health lining, nitric oxide synthase production, whether it's endothelial and neuronal nitric oxide, you know, all of these production of things that come in your body that we have that are associated with those people that live long. So it's this proprietary sort of a blend. Now, Do, do I feel like I'm young? Look, I mean, like I said, I'm—

You're not going to show us your abs, are you?

Oh, I will show you my abs. But, you know, I'm 58 years old and I'm still in the gym every day. I'm still in the gym every day because you spell gym in life. You spell gym with a G, not with a J, right? That should be your mantra every day.

Get in, do something that I hope everyone got that. For those that are slow on the up.

It's, it's the stupidest thing.

We're talking about the gym that is important to him, not his friend Jim.

Not my friend Jim.

But the gym that he goes to every day. I just want to do my own personal brag.

Yeah.

So my goal for 2025 was to be able to do 10 chin-ups. And on December 29th, I did 10 chin-ups. All right.

That is epic.

And I started on January 1st, 2025, barely being able to do one. And I said, I am going to get this this year. And in July, I was like up to 5 and I'm like, I'm getting 10. I'm getting 10. And I got 10 yesterday.

Can we just stop and take a moment on that? Because A, we don't celebrate people's successes enough. That is freaking huge.

Isn't it awesome?

Huge to be able to lift your own body weight. Huge, colossal to be able to do that. Thank you for taking the time to take care of yourself. It is amazing. And we should be doing it more and more. Everybody should be helping one another. You think you're not alone?

It feels great. The only thing I said afterwards to my trainer, who is my friend, but she is just wicked. She is a taskmaster.

I know. I hate my trainer.

Oh, God, she's wicked. Sorry, Jenn, I love you, but you are wicked. Is like, now the bar is set. So now I have to do 10, and by next year, I'm going to have to do 20.

Easy. Exactly. And it might be even more, right?

It might be. But it was funny because my 17-year-old is like, Mom, you cannot do a pull-up because pull-ups are different than chin-ups.

Yeah.

Right. And I was like, really? He's like, Mom, you can't do a pull-up. Banging them out.

You know, it's, it's good when the kids look at us and go, you're not— oh, oh, wow, you are. Oh, yeah. That's pretty impressive. I'm like, yeah, that's because you do this all day and I go to the gym.

Right. Now, mine's a football player. So he's winning. Yeah, he's winning. He's like, okay, so you can do a pull-up and I'm proud of you. That's pretty good. As he squats like 450.

My knees hurt you just saying that. Ouch.

No, but that's a rite of passage.

And you're absolutely right because it's not just the gym, right? It's the stability. It's all the balancing muscles. It's the core strength. It's the You know, what quadricep size, right? And leg size.

And yeah, it's all of it. It's all of it. Muscle is what keeps you young. And the other thing that I think that we're not taught enough and we're not taught from the beginning is that bone follows muscle. So all these people are out there thinking that they're going to take calcium and build their bones, they're not lifting weights and they're not getting anywhere. Yeah, duh, obviously, because bone follows muscle.

Yeah, no, I love it, I love it.

Gotta build your muscle, you have to do it. And that, that goes across the board, right?

Like everybody. Yes, everything, a lot. But guys and girls, look, man, if you're osteoporosis paralytic. You're— you're— I, I know, um, I, I can't say my mother's age. Uh, I'm pretty sure she's 39. So my mother's 39, uh, for the—

however, of course, that's mine, right?

Exactly. Uh, and, and this woman gets out and jumps. She goes to the gym every day. She works out, and she is sharp as a tack, the smartest person I know. And like, I call her all the time like, hey Mom, can you help me with this? Hey, I'm thinking about this. And like, never been to any school, never did anything. She's just wisdom beyond her years. It's crazy. And that's healthy living. That is the way to go.

That's part of being a lifelong learner. Yeah. Right? Like, if you never stop using your brain, your brain never stops working.

Thank you.

Right? You gotta be a lifelong learner.

You will lose it. Just like your muscle. You don't use it, you will lose it. For sure.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, so sorry, we're getting back to— huge tangent, it's okay. We're getting back to biologic age versus chronological age. So what do we do to lower our biologic age? Because that is what we're all after ultimately, right? What do we do?

It's based— Joe's tenets at this point I believe that hormesis is the single greatest thing that you can do for the body.

Look, that's a big word.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's translate. Yeah.

So basically, you need to put little healthy stresses on your body that your body can then widen its path or its ability to exist, right? So, for instance, if I want to give you a lot of coal, I'm going to give you a lot of cold for a little bit of time. I'm going to increase the brown adipose tissue that you have, which is the mitochondrial dense tissue. I'm going to give you 250 times the endorphins. I'm going to give you breathing techniques and your body's going to adjust. That's all good stuff. Healthy stress, right? I don't want to give you the chronic, I'm late, I'm late, I'm always late, I'm late, I'm late, I'm always— that's a bad stress. I want to give you healthy stressors. Like if I give you oxygen and then I take it away, that is a hormetic stress. It induces hormesis, that oxygen deprivation or that hypoxia. And what does your body do? It upregulates something that they won the Nobel Prize for in 2019, something called HIF-1 alpha. So if you upregulate HIF-1 alpha, you also upregulate— HIF-1 alpha upregulates brain-derived neurotrophic factor, insulin-like growth factor, vascular endothelial growth factor, all of these things that are good for us in our body. Look, remember I told you I believe we have an overactive immune system. We used to get chased by saber-toothed tigers, and when we did, our body went, oh my gosh, click adrenaline, click You need some antiviral. Click. You're going to need some of this, 2 of these, 6 of those. And you would— and you'd go and do something really big. What's our biggest stress? What's your— food, clothing, and shelter all taken care of. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is not a problem anymore. Maybe somebody didn't like my Instagram post. That's a stress? No. Right? So we have this overactive immune system that used to—

Traffic. Traffic is a perfect example.

Exactly. You're mad at a person who you don't know who cut in front of— are you serious? Like, ooh, you better take that chill pill, right? So if we can stress ourselves in these healthy ways, like going to the gym, stress ourselves like inducing cold, stress ourselves like inducing heat for long periods of time and sweating, getting toxins out, induce our stress by autophagy, creating autophagy in the human body. Fasting, right? All of these are inducing hormesis, which takes us from living from here to here, and it widens our band and it gives us a lot more bandwidth, if you will, which is all good. And that stops your cells from fornicating or reproducing, slows them, and puts them into protection mode. And if they're in protection mode, they're not replicating, which, you remember that mRNA DNA transcript thing on the end of the chromosome? The telomere is not being used. So if you don't use the telomere, it doesn't get— and you're still existing. Yeah, good thing. You want to slow down, cells will last longer and function better. Exactly.

Yeah.

And, you know, I'm a brain researcher, you know that. So as I'm researching in the brain, you find that the— a portion of the brain called the anterior midcingulate cortex gets bigger. The anterior midcingulate cortex gets bigger when you do things that are good for you that you don't necessarily want to do. Like, every time you say, I don't want to go to the gym, I feel like I don't want to go. Well, shut up. You don't have feelings. Go to the gym, right? Just go to the gym. All of those guys that are saying that online, all the girls that are preaching it online, they're all right. We got to just go do the things that we— look, life is not supposed to be easy. You're not supposed to sit on your couch with nonstop delivery of bonbons watching TV, right? That's not our life. It's supposed to be a little bit hard, a little bit stressed in the natural ways that are good for us. By the way, one thing that I didn't bring up that I really want to focus on here real quick. While I was underwater, I had a sharp decrease in cortisol, that cortisol response, right? That fight or flight, that, you know, I'm in a stressed situation. I had a sharp decrease in cortisol. And do you remember from med school, what's the corresponding increase when you have a decrease in cortisol? An increase in freaking testosterone. I had a huge spike, 7-time increase in testosterone levels, which has stayed that way because I changed—

I won't ask you how you manage that alone under underneath the ocean.

There is a whole nother podcast that we should do about that. I have, I have good news. And I mean, good news. I mean, good news. No, but, but, but that, that 7 times increase in testosterone was insane. And it has remained.

Did you happen to measure melatonin? What happened with melatonin?

So we didn't measure melatonin. Melatonin is produced in the pineal gland, right? I did not actually measure melatonin production.

And I actually, to me, that is the balancing hormone to cortisol. And it's one of the primary healing hormones in our body. So I, I would be really curious as to what happened if cortisol is dropping, what happens with melatonin?

Yeah, I mean, so it makes sense if you get a better night's sleep, right? You're able to cope with, deal with everything. And I'm just common sense here, not science. But the melatonin production, if I was sleeping better due to an increase in melatonin production because of the pressure, ooh, that would be an interesting take. Right, huh?

Yeah, but melatonin is about so much more than sleep. I mean, low levels of melatonin are associated with sleep. Higher levels of melatonin are associated with cellular repair, uh, improved immune function, uh, all the things that we know, um, melatonin plays a role in beyond just sleep. But I, I'd be so curious to know Yeah, I would be too.

See, that's the unfortunate thing about this experiment. It was an N of 1, right? There was one person that went down there and stayed 100 days, and that was me.

Yeah.

So really, I'd like to— everybody's like, do you want somebody to break your record? I'm like, yes, I do. Absolutely. I will help some kid break my record if they want, but we're going to do more experiments. 3, 4, 5 of them at one time. Put them down there and let's see what happens.

So, out of curiosity, do we have to send people to the bottom of the ocean or can we reproduce some version of that here in everyday life?

That is a great, great segue. Yeah, 100%. You can do this by going to basically an approved hyperbaric center, right?

Okay.

And getting in hyperbarics. We find—

So, let's get into that. Because hyperbarics has very mixed sentiment associated with it. First of all, there are tons of people and providers that are unaware of it.

Yeah.

That don't know what, what it's for, what the indications are, what it's doing. And there are even people who refer to it as dangerous.

Yeah.

So I, I want to tell you that I have a very, very, very dear friend who was treated for breast cancer, had an implant reconstruction many years ago. And I said to her, listen, those implants are not serving you well. Like, they're two plastic bags in your body, foreign, foreign. And you've had radiation, you're not happy with your outcome anyway in terms of cosmesis. I think you should have a tissue repair. But before you have a tissue repair, I want to make sure that you're getting hyperbaric and, you know, to prepare you for surgery, to enhance the quality of your tissues, to enhance the quality of, you know, your oxygen supply so that you have the best chance at healing and a really good outcome afterwards. Do you know that her plastic surgeon fought me, fought me, fought me like I was doing something crazy on, like, making some unindicated, uneducated recommendation. And it got to the point where he, like, put his hands up and said, I won't take responsibility for what happens to you if you decide to do hyperbaric. Can you imagine? But this is what's happening.

Send these people to me because I do. I get these silly people all the time. Science wins over bullshit.

Okay, so give us the science. What's happening? What is it doing? Who should be thinking about hyperbaric? How should we be using it? How often should we be using it? Like, let's put it out there. Yep.

Collagen synthesis. Secondary to fibroblast proliferation, but collagen synthesis. Every cell in your body is made of collagen. One of the known mechanisms of action of hyperbaric medicine is collagen synthesis. Okay, so if you're a surgeon and this is the way I explain it to surgeons, if you're a surgeon, you are the artist. All I want to do is prep the canvas for you. I'm going to hyperoxygenate the canvas, which is the skin, I'm going to hyperoxygenate that area so that you get a bunch of collagen, collagen synthesis in that area. Right. I'm going to hyperoxygenate it. I'm going to increase the number of stem cells around it so that when you cut into it, I can heal you. I can help heal you faster. I can help reduce that cytokine activity. I can help toxins, inhibit toxins. I can do that whole intravascular leukocyte adherence reduction. You know, leukocyte oxidative killing, vasoconstriction, all of these mechanisms of action are going to help. Now, those are the known peer-reviewed literature-supported mechanisms of action of hyperbaric medicine. So when these, when these people that just do not know, and I call them hyperbarosauruses, right? They are, they are, they are literally the dinosaurs of their age. Ah, that stuff doesn't work. And anytime somebody does that, I just think of, God rest his soul, my grandfather. He's like, he's a curmudgeon. He's just a curmudgeon. It's not going to work. No, science wins over bullshit. These are the mechanisms of action. Nobody disputes them. Now, whether or not it's on-label or off-label, all that's disputed. If I can enhance the healing of selected problem wounds that are in the face of diabetes, which is pure poorly perfused tissue people, and I can help them heal their wounds, couldn't I do a better job at increasing the wound healing, decreasing the wound healing time of somebody that doesn't have a problem, that doesn't have diabetes? Yeah, that stands to reason. That is common sense. And everybody throws the common sense out with the, ah, who's going to pay for it? I don't give a crap who pays for it. What I care about is whether or not it's going to help you. And that makes sense. So, well, sorry, I'm a little passionate about that.

Yeah, no, you should be. We— I mean, we pay for a lot of stuff that does a lot of bad things to people, right? And, and expensive stuff that does a lot of bad things to people. And it's kind of amazing to me that this is so dismissed. So readily, so easily dismissed. Talk about the role of hyperbaric in cancer.

Oh, yeah. Well, look, I think we said it before. Cancer thrives in a hypoxic environment, right? So if I make you hyper—

meaning a low oxygen environment, right?

So cancer thrives in an anaerobic or no oxygen or low oxygen environment. I'm going to increase the oxygen levels in your body. What I, the hyperbarics, will, right? You know, we can, we can help diminish drug resistance. We can improve radiation and chemotherapy sort of outcomes. Like, it does such a great job on things like chemo brain. Even if you are going to choose to do that kind of stuff, it can help you recover better from it. And all that is literature supported. No kidding. Right. So it can even help hinder the cancer's progression for absolutely sure. Now, we know that tumors do what they want to grow in size. So they create something called VEGF, vascular endothelial growth factor, that creates angiogenesis, which makes more red blood, which makes more of our blood vessels. It makes more blood vessels so that it can get more oxygen. If you give it all the oxygen, what it does is it retards its growth. We are in preclinical trials right now in glioblastoma, hyperbaric oxygen combined with beta-hydroxybutyrate and doing like a ketosis sort of a thing. And we're finding great results. Preclinical, totally preclinical, non-publishable data at this point. However, comma, If we can get a handle or do this much on glioblastoma, which is freaking killing our kids, I'm done. You had me at hello. As long as you're applying it safely, as long as you're doing it properly, as long as somebody knows about hyperbaric oxygen and can spell it and has gone through a course— and I teach these courses, but if somebody needs to or wants to, tell them to call me. I'll give— I give everybody free advice all the time. Please.

So where do you think the concern comes in? Like, sometimes the— it's not real concern. Sometimes it's very similar to what happens in like the BHRT realm where bioidenticals are badmouthed just because pharmaceutical companies can't make any money off of bioidenticals. So they, they like villainize them. With nonsense. Why do you think hyperbaric is being villainized? What, what, what is dangerous there?

So, look, unfortunately, this year alone, we had 2 hyperbaric explosions, which caused a couple of people to die. And that is unfortunate. But that is the outlier. In a 102-year exhaustive analysis of all hyperbaric accidents, Worldwide, there are less than 150 deaths worldwide. Worldwide. And there are hundreds of millions of treatments going on, I'm sure. But worldwide, 150 deaths in 102 years. That's a better record than vitamin C deaths, right? Like, that's a better record than the most innocuous, you know, death from getting hit in the head with a coconut.

Well, think about, think about the Tylenol deaths, right? Think about the Tylenol deaths. And where, where is the reservation around recommending Tylenol?

Every day, twice on Sundays, take 2 Tylenol, call me in the morning.

What? Yes. Right.

Yeah. So one of those in about 5 years. Tylenol? No, none of that crap.

No, no, I don't. I don't take any of it. And people think I'm Well, whatever. It doesn't matter.

I'm okay. I'm 6'1", 200 pounds. I don't care what you think.

Yeah. Okay, so just out of morbid curiosity, like, what happened with the two explosions?

Yeah, unfortunately, in, in my opinion, there were people that knew better that were doing wrong in that environment. So in a pure oxygen chamber, a patient must be grounded. I mean, look, it's wintertime in the Northeast, right? You walk across carpet, what happens when you touch somebody?

Static.

Static electricity, right? That happens in a recompression chamber too. If it's 100% oxygen environment, that patient shall be grounded. That's the wording in the ASME PVHO rulebook. That you shall be, right? No, no, no, I don't believe in grounding. Wait a minute, you don't believe in physics? Oh, we don't believe in that here. Oh, okay. Oh, let me know that that works for you. Right. And unfortunately, a little boy paid the price at that point. And then another thing, you know, if you're following me on social media on Dr. Deepak Chopra, you'll find that I am the advocate that says, please, please First of all, take this freaking phone, take it out of your pocket, take it out of your life, get it away from you as far as you can. Do not take this in the chamber. If you take this or this or this or this or this, why do I have 5 phones? Because everybody needs to get a hold of me. Why? I have no idea. But get rid of them. Do not have them in the hyperbaric chamber. And it's not the phone. The phone is part of the reason why you're not healing, by the way. But it's not the phone, it's the battery. Guys were taking their phones into combat with them and they were getting shot. And when you shoot this, everybody wants their phone to last a long time, right? That's called energy density. So you put that energy density in the battery. What happens when you break that battery? An uninterruptible chain reaction wherein all of those need to go off. and now you're trapped in a thing with this burning device that even if you put it in a bucket of water, it makes its own oxygen and it will continue to burn. The batteries are the worst thing in the world for you. And if you're trapped in that small environment, pressure, volume, temperature, you're going to have a problem. So the second one, make sure that you don't have those electronics with batteries chambers. And then you'll be fine.

Can you talk about the indications for hyperbaric?

Oh, sure. I mean, there, there are on-label and off-label, right? And let's recognize that every single, every single indication was off-label at one time. We started treating in the 1800s for— we, you know, the first treatment was in 1664, but You know, the smart people got together and started treating diving decompression sickness or arterial gas embolism in the late 1800s, early 1900s. So when you're treating those, everything else was off-label. And then they said, hmm, I wonder if it's good for this. Let's try it. And then we do double-blind randomized placebo-controlled stuff. So gaseous gangrene, carbon monoxide poisoning, crush injury, compartment, compartment syndrome, problematic wounds, selective enhancement of problematic wounds, you know, things like oxygenating the eye. You know, you have macular degeneration. It can help with things like that. There are so many. And that's just the on-labels. There are 15. Avascular necrosis. Goodness. Sudden hearing loss, sensorineural hearing loss. Idiopathic in nature, right? That kind of stuff. These things were all off-label and now they're on-label. Those 15 on-label indications, they're FDA-cleared, CMS pays for them, and they are like, they— it works. And from that, we have derived a list of 13 mechanisms of action that hyperbaric oxygen is known for. Peer-reviewed literature supported. Now, what I teach the physicians at this point is I grab them and I go, okay, listen, like any other drug, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory does what? That decreases inflammation if used as designed. It does a whole bunch of other junk, but we're not going to talk about that. But same with this. The mechanisms of action are known. Now, can I take an off-label indication such as I don't know, Crohn's, Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, or breast cancer.

We can use breast cancer.

Breast cancer. Right, right. But I'm just talking about the inflammation category. Right. But, but so like breast cancer, let's take the off-label for breast cancer, right? If you have a cyst of some sort, I can basically hinder the cancer's progression by oxygenating it. Now, does it cure anything? Hyperbaric oxygen doesn't cure anything. It helps your body heal itself. It is the naturopathic thing that helps your body to get itself in the right frame to heal itself, which is the best form of healing. Now, you may have to have some sort of surgery to get the cancer cut out. I have a dear friend that I went to high school with, a girl that I knew very, very well, that unfortunately developed breast cancer and Her methodology of treatment was not to do chemo, not to do radiation, which I applauded her for. But she also chose not to do anything about it and just ignore it and smoke pot and think that the pot was going to reduce the— but that just doesn't work, right? So sometimes you got to do something. Yeah, whatever that is. Hyperbaric oxygen could help with that, right? It can keep the cancer at bay, reducing the propagation of that cancer. And help with anything else that you're going to do. You're going to cut the skin open. It's going to help you heal, right? You're going to help with that collagen synthesis, you know, diminish the drug resistance. Like I said, cancer thrives in that hypoxic or less oxygen environment. So I want to give you the least habitable environment for you to live in, cancer. I'm going to hyperoxygenate you.

Yep.

It's that easy.

So talk to people a little bit about how much, how often, and what to expect. What is the experience like?

So here's the answer, and this is the God's honest truth. Nobody knows. Nobody knows what you're looking for because you're a doctor is you're looking for minimum effective dose.

Yes.

We don't know. We don't know because there is no drug company sponsoring trials for hyperbaric oxygen therapy, right? There is nobody that has deep pockets that's gonna make a billion dollars off of this drug that the trees make, for instance, right? So we're not able to do these research. We're not able to do that. I would suspect that you need at least 10 treatments to do anything in the human body. 10 treatments at about 2.0 is about the bare minimum you can do. Get in the human body. If you want to do more, you might be able to do a less partial pressure. You might be able to get down to 1.5, 1.4, 1.3. That's twice— 2 atmospheres is twice the amount of oxygen that I'm getting right now. Or if I'm dealing with 100% oxygen environment, you know, it's multiplied by that, right? So you're getting a lot more oxygen when you push this in with the pressure, with the added pressure. So if you embrace this entire life, for instance, if I'm going to reduce your inflammation with hyperbaric oxygen, then what I want you to do is come out and eat an anti-inflammatory diet and do things that aren't going to stress you, like stress that causes—

Bad stress.

Right.

Not the good stress.

That causes inflammation. Right. I want you to chill. I want you to breathe. I want you to do all the things that you need to do. When we say mindset, mindset, faith, all of this stuff, this whole community thing that you spoke of earlier. Oh my goodness. I am so happy that people are starting to talk about this now because we need to get that together. So that kind of stuff, you know, and we know simply, like, if I want to get in a fight, I'm going to back up and I'm going to start mouth breathing. Why? Sympathetic nervous system. That induces fight or flight, right? That's the— if I want to induce parasympathetic, what do I do? In through the nose, out through the nose. In through the nose, out through— calming breaths. Slow. Joe, take it down a notch. People that loves me in my life, they tell me, yo, you got to relax. Take it down. Calm down. And I'm like, okay, you're right. You're right. So if you can induce that kind of mindset to start breathing the right way, it'll help the hyperbarics continue to do its job. But this is not a one-trick pony. You got to do hyperbarics and you got to eat right and you got to go to the gym and you got to drink water and you got to get the water in through your body.

You got to do all the things.

You got to do all the things.

You got to do all the things.

There is no easy path. There is no—

How long, how long did the treatments take?

Usually about an hour. I would suggest that most treatments will be at least an hour. Some of the longer ones can go up to almost 2 hours, but anywhere between an hour and 2 hours is the common time. And twice the pressure is the common pressure.

And how frequently do you do them?

Usually 5 times per week, taking Saturday and Sunday off because too much of a good thing is not good, right? We don't want to give you too much oxygen, right? So that's where the naysayers are correct. You can have too much of a good thing. So take Saturday and Sunday off, chill, go vegetate, go breathe in your garden, go take a walk, go get your step, whatever you want to do that's not that, right? But then come back. So you probably do about 5 a week and you probably do about 10 sessions. So about 2 weeks worth and you'll start to see a difference. And if you're not seeing a difference, the medical doctor should be modulating the treatment and doing the doctoring. The problem is everybody's looking for a protocol. Well, doctors don't do protocols. Emergency medical technicians do protocols. Paramedics do protocols. Physicians practice medicine. So permission granted.

Well, they're supposed to, but most of them do protocols.

Yeah.

I mean, this is the problem. This is the problem that there's no individualized medicine in medicine.

Lazy. I call it being lazy. And that's—

I kicked the can down the road. What's the kind of doctor that administers this?

So a physician knowledgeable in hyperbaric medicine, you just need a 40-hour course. You can, you can learn the physics and physiology pretty easily, and then you are a registered physician that's knowledgeable in hyperbaric medicine. Now, I'll tell you a dirty little secret. There is no actual requirement for a physician. Any physician that graduates medical school can write a prescription for hyperbaric medicine. And I've had these guys do it. They write the prescription and they give me the prescription and they just write on a prescription pad, hyperbaric medicine. And then they give it to me and I'm like, well, that's like saying give the person antibiotics. How much? What kind? How often? BID, QD, QID? What do you want? Tell me, right? So they have to know how to prescribe it. And know what the mechanisms of action are so that they can prescribe it according to the mechanism of action. If you want toxin inhibition, you need to be at 3.0 or so, maybe even 2.5. But if you want things like antibiotic synergy, you should be at 2.0. Stem cell proliferation, you can get that as low as 1.3, that kind of thing. They got to know.

And is this something that if you're trained you know about and you know how to write the protocol?

If you're trained by me, you know all that stuff. It's a 5-day intensive course of me beating you with a fire hose and going back over human physics and human physiology and, you know, all that pressure, volume, temperature stuff, you know.

And then what does it feel like? What are you going to notice when you're in there?

If you fly in a plane, you have been in a hyperbaric chamber because the plane flies at 35,000 feet, but they're pressurized at usually 8,000 feet. So you're in a hyperbaric chamber, right?

Okay.

So as you go up in the plane, you get that little popping and crackling in your ear. Uh-huh. As you come back down, you have that increase in pressure coming back down to Earth. So you feel that, oh, I have to, I have to clear my ears a little bit. So that's the first thing. So either the Valsalva maneuver or the Frenzel maneuver, and you can clear your ears. That's the general feeling that you have.

For someone with bad ears, is this an unpleasant experience? Like for someone that that part of flying bothers them?

Yeah. No, it doesn't really. Oh, I could work that through with you. First of all, there's, there's a bunch of things that we can do, the best of which is hydration, right? If you're hydrated to 4 liters of water a day, you're probably going to have a better time clearing. Is my, is my overall opinion for, for having treated thousands and thousands of people in hyperbaric chamber. Right. So as you see this, there's ways to get around that. Go slow. We use things like a curvilinear descent instead of a, you know, a straight line descent. We go slower in the beginning and then a little faster towards the end, right? So go slow. It should never hurt. It should never be uncomfortable. That's the, that's the thing that we need to preface. Okay.

And what if you are not experiencing any disease, but you're looking for health optimization? Is there a role for it? Like, are you getting into your hyperbaric chamber?

This morning I did. Yes, I do. I do regularly and all the time, but I'm playing with it as you can. So, the interesting thing, the thing that happened that has changed since we last met is I entered and joined an XPRIZE Healthspan team. So, we are going to do the cure for aging, which is everything that we're talking about here, all of this autophagy, all of this hormesis, all of this hyperbarics and hypobiotics. We're using a combination of these to reduce a human's age from whatever they are by 20 years. And we're going to win. We are in it and we got it. We have the right— oh, this is going to be great. And once we win the X Prize, then there'll be no living with me. It'll be over. I mean, I told you guys.

Wow. That's really amazing. I'm rooting for you.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. But it's all just doing all the stuff that you've been talking about, that I've been talking about, that everybody who, who is a little well-informed, who has a little bit of an education, who has an educated opinion on all this— yeah— wants to do. We want to live more better, right? I mean, that's the ultimate goal here, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I want you to tell me about your book and what impact it had on you.

So the book is loosely titled Why My Traumatic Brain Injury Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me, and it's in, it's in editing right now. So The editors are fighting me on it. But so it's written. And what it is, is it chronicles my particular journey on healing my own traumatic brain injury, which you're not going to be surprised that everything that I use to heal my traumatic brain injury, you know, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, neurofeedback therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, structural energetic therapy, physical therapy, all that stuff is the stuff that we should be doing on a daily anyway. Right. So all of the healing and anti-aging stuff that I've come through, is all from my traumatic brain injury. That's, that's literally the reason why I say that's why my traumatic brain injury is the best thing that ever happened to me. I was doing research the wrong way and God said, make a right. And I said, no, no, no, I got it. And he said, make a right. And then he threw a 6,000-pound SUV at my head, cracked me wide open. And I woke up in the back of the ambulance going, now I have a TBI myself and I better figure out how to fix it or it's going to be lights out.

When did this happen?

So September 7th of '21, I got T-boned. I woke up in the back of the ambulance and I spent 7 days in the hospital. I got out of the hospital on September 14th of '21, and I started this. I'm just going to do hyperbaric oxygen therapy and that's it. A month later, I fell into a wild and vast depression. And I mean vast, like I had never had in the military, like nothing I'd had for. So I, frankly, I became suicidal and I set a date and the date was December 8th, which is my birthday. But now we're talking October. So I said, well, but I got to do everything because, you know, I'm religious. So before I get to the pearly gates, I got to know that I did everything. So I didn't have enough time to do it scientifically one at a time. So I just did everything in combination. Red light, beamer mat, ice bath, neurofeedback, cognitive, hyperbarics, everything that people said might help. I did it and it all helped. And I was back. The idea of suicide was off the plate by the end of November. And then by the end of December, I was sitting at a fire pit that we have once a year with a bunch of brain trust guys that I have that are my best friends. And we're like, okay, what are we going to do next year? And they were like, hey, why don't you do something with that that brain stuff and what can we do? How do we start a clinic? How do we help people? It's like, yep. So we all jumped in together and we started healing traumatic brain injury and then anti-aging people. It's freaking amazing. So I'm blessed and highly favored. And like I said, best thing that ever happened to me was, you know, and a small thing like I was engaged to a beautiful young Bulgarian immigrant who was a fitness model. Hardcore. She could not find her way to the hospital, but 2 times in the 7 days that I was in the hospital. So I was like, you're not my person. Thank God that we didn't marry because you're not my person. Like, I should be number 1 for you and you should be number 1. Like, that's only one of the things that was the best thing that ever happened to me. Right? Like, thank God all that happened.

It's kind of amazing the messages that we get from God.

Plug in. Plug in and what are you going to get?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That— so when does the book come out?

So the book should be out. It should be done with editing by the end of the year and out first quarter of next year.

Wow, that is so exciting.

So it's at the editor's now. So it's out of my hands.

We'll do, we'll do a live when it comes out. So everyone knows about it.

Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Okay, my last question for you is, why did you stop drinking coffee?

So I got a call to go lecture in Morocco. So I was doing hyperbaric medicine lectures in Morocco, and towards the end of the trip, I got really sick. And during that time, it was bad enough that I wasn't drinking coffee because coffee does a certain thing to me, and I didn't need any more of that certain thing to happen. So I basically had to be 5, 6 days off coffee. So I went through the headache, I went through the misery, and then I was just like, I don't like coffee that much anyway. What the hell am I doing? I don't drink coffee. I don't drink foo-foo coffee. I don't go to Starbucks, right? We're talking black coffee with maybe a little bit of salt in it. That's about it. That's my coffee. Yeah. And I was just like, I don't really like it and it doesn't really do anything. So, I have switched to bone broth in the morning.

Amazing.

I wake up, I, you know, and I, I render bones. I don't buy bone broth. I render bones. Right. So like 3 days in the crock pot bones, you know? Yeah. So when I do something like that, I would love to have my morning cup of bone broth and that's it. But Yeah. So interesting, right?

Wow. Yeah. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any, like, you know, new revelation.

No, you know, look, you know that it's modulating hormones, right? You know that if caffeine— caffeine is a drug and caffeine modulates hormones. It does. It does mess with you. Now, some people just need it. And that 5 days was not only bad because I was sick, it was bad because I had a horrible caffeine headache. And I mean, So, unfortunately, it's something that I got over. And once you get over it, you go, I don't really like it that much. I don't really need it. What the hell am I doing? You know?

Yeah.

Yeah. Got it. Right now, this year and last year and the year before that, I just have time for hell yes energy and that's it. So if it's yes, it's hell yes. And if not, it's hell no.

I love it. You're, and you're absolutely right. I just want you to mention, you said if people are going to go— well, tell us how people can find you if they want to learn more, and tell us how people can know what, what kind of center to go to if they're going to get hyperbaric, because you mentioned some accreditation and that is a great— that kind of thing. Like, how do they know they're going to the right place?

All right. So first thing, if you want to get a hold of me, it's www.drdpsea.com, D-R-D-E-E-P-S-E-A.com, or just Google Dr. Deepsea. It'll come up. Or that's usually my handle on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. And you just, just find me, look for me. Yeah.

And definitely follow him. He's amazing.

Follow, please. And if you are walking into a hyperbaric facility, the easiest thing to do It's a no-brainer. One question. You walk in and you go, show me your red book. Your red book is the emergency procedures binder. If they don't have an emergency procedures binder, they weren't trained because you're required to have an emergency procedures binder. So if they don't have a red book, turn around and walk away. I don't care if the doctor is amazing looking. I don't care if the tech is like the coolest guy in the world. I don't care if they got the best beard ever, doesn't matter. Turn around and run away. The red book is everything. That will tell you right away that they have been trained and that they are, you know, they are trained and qualified by a proper source. Now, I happen to be one of the owners of the International Board of Undersea Medicine, and we train physicians and we train all of the people that do hyperbaric medicine. So you can walk in and ask them that they're IBUM certified, but That doesn't matter. I don't care if they swear in this church, just that they go to a place that has a red book and that red book has emergency procedures in it. And that's it.

Okay. Easy enough. Easy enough. Dr. Deepsea, this was amazing. I loved getting to spend time with you. And I know that my audience is going to eat this up.

I don't usually get that worked up on podcasts. So just trust me, I'm not that worked up usually. I'm not this animated, but there's something in your podcast that you bring out of me.

We love the live ones around here.

Let's do fun things.

So I'm sure you enjoyed it too. If you were listening, if you were just listening and not watching, I advise you to go to YouTube and watch it because It's, it's worth, it's well worth seeing. We got bicep. We got a lot of stuff here today. It's well worth seeing. And thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you.

Make sure that you are sharing this with someone who needs to hear it. And I am 100% certain that you have someone in your life that needs to hear this. Like it, comment, we'll give you an answer and know that I will be back next week. Same time, same place. It's Dr. Jenn. Bye for now.