Unveiling Crucial Dive Safety Insights; Gareth Lock Shares Tips - Part 1 .

Good morning, Benjamin Hadfield, Teach Me To Dive. We are honored and blessed today to have Gareth Locke from The Human Diver joining us today to talk about one of my most passionate subjects, and I'm sure his most passionate subject, diver safety. As you know, I am huge on this. Our channel is dedicated to making safer divers, making more competent divers, and making sure we prevent those kinds of accidents that are just easily preventable. Gareth, thank you for joining us this morning. Thank you very much for the invite, and thanks for the chat last week while we were out to DEMA in New Orleans, so that's really cool. Thank you. Absolutely. How did DEMA go for you? It was really good. One of the hardest bits of being a sort of solo entrepreneur, trying to create change out in the industry, and the industry at a whole, at a high level, doesn't necessarily get what I'm trying to do because it's a bit abstract. Having people come up to me at the stand and talk about the changes they've made inside their dive training programs, their dive center. I had a course director saying, you know what, I start in my open water classes now, and I talk about a mistake that I've made, and we start talking about mistakes, open water dive one. To me, it was fantastic. He was saying that we then get to the stage where all the way through their training, they're talking about mistakes. It's normalizing it. If somebody at a course director level can introduce such a fundamental shift, absolutely fantastic. Scientific diving coming up, technical divers, cave divers, everybody going, you know what, this is really good, keep on doing it because it needs to happen. That's awesome. Let's just back up just a little bit. Can you tell us about your background, how you became involved in diving, in particular dive safety? Yeah, so my background is 25 years in the Royal Air Force flying on a Hercules transport aircraft, about two and a half thousand hours flying as an operator and then a flight instructor, and then went into flight trials, research and development, the equivalent of DARPA, and then into systems engineering procurement. That gave me good insights as to what, I'm going off operational safety from the front line, how do we operate in uncertain combat areas? And then also, how do you create safety at a system level through the procurement systems engineering side? But in 2005, I was on one of the trips on the master's degree. It was at the West Coast of the States, and I had a near miss. I had some equipment failures that I hadn't picked up, ended up at 100 feet in a wetsuit and no BC that had any buoyancy in it, and we resolved the issue at depth. And I got back to the UK and it's like, okay, how do I share this story? Bearing in mind, I'd only got nine dives to my name at that stage, I was still open water qualified, I shouldn't have been doing that dive, and I was definitely a didn't know what I didn't know. And I found it really difficult to try and get that story out there. And that's what piqued my interest. So since 2005, I've been interested in developing concepts in dive safety, dive performance. 2012, I started a PhD and then gave it up in 2018, because it wasn't going anywhere, the industry wasn't supporting it, it's costing me money, the university wasn't really interested in it either. So I was then really at that stage, delivering training, face-to-face training, online training, and that was validating my purpose. And it's this piece about trying to raise the bar in terms of diving safety, using methods, tools, processes, evidence from high-risk industries, and just repackaging it into the diving space. And so since 2016 is when I first started teaching, probably taught about 500 people face-to-face and about 2,000 people online. Published a book in 2019, that's probably, I don't know, I've lost track now, somewhere around four and a half, 5,000 copies. And then in 2020, put a documentary together, which is a great learning tool, learning product, that's called If Only, and that allows you to run a workshop in your own dive center, your dive club, to actually start understanding that adverse events are not simple, linear, cause-and-effect chain of events. There's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into them. That's awesome. So how do your experience really in aerospace influence all this approach to diving accidents? It's kind of hard to see the connection between that. Yeah, so people think that the big difference between aviation and diving is, you know, aviation is highly regulated. There's lots of processes in place. And so that's why aviation is as safe as it is, and diving isn't necessarily safe. You know, diving is not regulated in the main. There are some countries that have got standards that have to be followed from a government level. But the majority of diving is self-regulated, which in poses a problem for a point, if you want to put sort of the conflict between money and safety as a point for discussion later. But the real reason of bringing sort of aviation safety into the diving space is the recognition of human fallibility. So it wasn't until sort of 70s and 80s where they started looking or listening at cockpit voice recorders that they recognized that actually the captain was doing something, and the first officer or the flight engineer knew that something wasn't quite right, but they couldn't speak up. And so they started to analyze these things, because previously it was like, well, pilot's the last to touch it, pilot error. And then they start listening to these stories and go, you know what, there's more to it than this. So they brought in something called cockpit resource management, which is about improving communication and assertion skills between the flight deck crew members. And then a number of accidents happened where cabin crew knew that something wasn't quite right, and they weren't able to speak up. And the language at the time was, you know, sky gods and trolley dollies. That was the sort of, you know, language that was being used. And so there was a social barrier, and it was the days before a secure door, before 9-11. So there were social barriers that prevented that. And so they started to realize that actually, you know what, everybody makes mistakes. And if you start building that concept in right from the very start of flying training, or cabin crew training, or engineer training, anybody that's involved in aviation now, air traffic management, air traffic controllers, all have some form of human factors training to understand their own fallibility, the cognitive biases we have, how to communicate effectively, how to close that communication loop, the roles of leaders that create a safe environment where people can speak up. And so what I've done is basically said, right, this is the same stuff that happens in the diving space. All instructors are leaders. They have followers within their team of students. How to build a team quickly, how to create a learning environment where actually the instructor's not perfect, you might make mistakes. So the students need to be able to speak up and say, or just ask that question, is that right? Is that how it's supposed to be done? But often the way that I perceive a fair chunk of the diver training happens is about compliance. It's about ticking boxes that says, done this, done this, done this, but there isn't necessarily a skill or a mastery that's been developed. And because the industry doesn't talk about events, adverse events, we don't know how many things go wrong. Whereas the aviation industry has fundamentally shifted that. And yes, there are some legal protections in place. So if you report a safety-related incident, a mistake, an error, even a violation of a standard, if you report that within 72 hours, you are then protected from legal prosecution when it comes to punishment that's coming down. Because there's a recognition that if we start to punish people for making mistakes, the stories stop and we stop learning because we can't make all those mistakes ourselves. So we start learning from others. Wow. That is a lot of amazing information and something that we work with in our training, where we talk about not just buddy diving, but we add it to the point of team diving and we make sure we're team diving to the point. But it's interesting to get to the point. I certainly take a lot of my students out in extended range and a lot of times I feel like they follow me blindly and there are mistakes I make. I'm the first to admit there's little things. I took a little deeper than I was anticipating, got them to a point where it took a little longer to get to deco point than I thought. And they blindly followed me. I had an incident where we had an accident with an inflator malfunction that caused a pretty serious concern. So we broke complete plan from our dive safety and I brought them to a different point and they just said, oh, okay, this looks good. And I think I would have liked to heard and looking back on that and stepping up and saying, hey, wait a minute, my plan is this. Why are we doing this? Instead of just following blindly like little lambs, because in the real world, when they get out there, they're going to need to be able to justify this, understand why we did this and move past us. So it brings more to my team diving. I love that. I absolutely love that. So building on that, what do you consider the most pressing issue today in dive safety? Fear. I would say fear is the most pressing thing that's out there. The inability to talk about mistakes that have happened. When I talk about incidents or accidents, people immediately jump into the concept of a really severe outcome. And then there's fear of litigation and there's fear of peer pressure or peer judgment. There are sites, Facebook groups, sites out there, which make fun of people making mistakes. And to me, fine, that's entertainment. It is not learning. And that's a real frustration because I know there are a number of people who say, I don't want to appear online as that person who's made the mistake. And you sit there and go, look, we're all making mistakes. Now, the fear of litigation, how real is that? Now, in the UK, we don't have that same concern. I know in the states, there are certain states that are just so heavily litigated that people are just afraid to tell a story. And I would find it, and even if that litigation is thrown out, there's a cost associated with it. And that is a real issue. We don't get to hear the stories. Often people focus on fatalities and say, look, we've got to dig into those. We've got to find out why that fatality happened. And the safety science says, actually, the fatalities, the causes of fatalities are the same causes as near misses. We just don't have a couple of things that close the loop right at the end. So if we can learn from the near misses and understand the conditions surrounding those, time pressure, peer pressure, lack of money, that the lack of appreciation of risk because we don't share those stories, those are things that we can certainly do something about. By the time it's got to a fatality, it's too late. You can't really learn from those. And we count outcomes. We don't count conditions. And there's an example for that. One of the sources of information for diving incidents is the British Tobacco Club diving report, annual diving report. And they have somewhere between 150 and 300 reports submitted each year by the population that's out there. Now, from a human point of view, we would like to categorize those so it's easier to jump to, say, decompression events or surface events. And the way that they categorize them is by the most serious outcome. So you could have a decompression sickness event captured, which is caused by a rapid ascent, which is triggered by somebody running out of gas because they've had a separation, they've had some task loading, and they haven't planned the dive properly. Now, if you classify it as DCS, you miss a whole bunch of the learning that's happened beforehand. So actually, what we should be doing is counting the conditions that lead to the event, not the outcomes. Because if we count DCS events, whoopee, as far as I'm concerned, yes, there are some which are going to be down to rapid ascent or uncontrolled buoyant ascents. There are also a whole bunch of them that are just going to be physiological variabilities that we just don't know about. So even if we have a DCS that's caused by uncontrolled buoyant ascent, that's the bit we need to be looking at, is the buoyancy control and why that's not happening in a way. But if we just count DCS, it's the same as people running out of gas. You basically turn around and say, don't run out of gas, Ben, and don't get bent. Great, thanks. That doesn't help me at all. So those are the bits. The fear prevents the stories and the stories are what can help us learn. It always brings to mind, how many near-misses do we have to have before we had that fatality? And I'm sure it has to be a substantial amount of the near-misses that get us to the actual fatality. It's why I studied the tail, let's study the dog. Oh, absolutely. And there's a quote from a guy called James Reason, the guy behind the Swiss cheese model. He said, you can't change the human condition, but you can change the conditions in which humans work. And he was talking about professional safety environments, engineering high-risk environments. Stop blaming the worker for hitting their thumb or making a mistake because they're distracted. Take the distraction away. Telling someone to be more careful when they have a finite capacity doesn't help at all. It's like saying, don't run out of gas. Yeah, thanks. That doesn't help me at all. What we've got to understand is, what's the reasons that people are running out of gas? Planning, monitoring, distraction, workload, teaching people a surface consumption rate. In the UK, it would be litres per minute. Well, actually, my gauge doesn't cover litres and I'm not at the surface. So teaching somebody bar per minute or bar per five minutes at depth is a much more useful skill because now you can say, if I'm going to end the dive at, say, 80 bar on a 30-metre dive or 100-foot dive, then I know if I get 150 bar on my gauge that I've maybe got 20 minutes to go. So I can now project ahead roughly how long I've got until I need to ascend. But if I'm working in 18 litres a minute and I've got a 12-litre cylinder on my back, I can't do that mental gymnastics at depth, especially if I'm at 30 metres and I'm close to narcosis. Absolutely. My favourite thing, I mean, just happened yesterday. My son kicked his toe and the first thing everybody says, be careful. Really? No kidding, huh? Oh, I know. I know. I have the same thing with people go, I've been doing a lot of flying. People go, have a safe flight. There's not a lot I can do about it. I'm going to wear my seat belt because that's going to keep me in my seat when we hit turbulence. But in terms of the rest of it, well, I'm going to trust the guys at the front. Absolutely. Let's study the dog. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So Gareth, looking back at current dive trading for open water diving, what's missing? What's missing? I would say probably gas planning, gas monitoring, buoyancy control. And that, I don't mean thin pivots. I mean the ability. I had a great quote on Tuesday. If you're able to do nothing, you can do everything. And what this instructor was talking about is if you can sit stationary, sit hover stationary in the water flat, and then just see what's going on around you, you can do anything else. We were talking beforehand about going through GUE or RAID UTD type training where very much heavily focused on a stable platform. And people sit there and go, but why do I need to do that? Because it builds capacity. It builds that stable platform. And that means you can do pretty much anything else that's out there. If people are busy flapping their arms, they're going up and down, they're bouncing off the bottom, they haven't got the mental capacity to see what's going on. They're also working hard, which means they're consuming more gas. And if they're working hard consuming gas, they're probably not paying attention to their SPG to see how long they've got. And then we end up with a surprising, out of gas. And then now what do you do? So it shouldn't be a surprise when you run out of gas. I've run out of gas breathing down bottom stages, but I know that I'm breathing them down because I can feel the regs going tighter. There's some squeezes, but that's because I've got more capacity because I'm comfortable in the water. And people say, you can't do that on open water classes. You can't teach flat trim neutral buoyancy in open water. You can, you can do it. But the instructor also has to be skilled. So talking about the tail versus the dog, you sit there and go, we focus on the students. Actually, let's raise the bar on the instructors because the student can only learn as good as the instructor can teach and the skills that they're emulating. And so there's that piece that says, yeah, let's fix the students. No, no, no, let's go back. And I wrote a couple of blogs just recently about learning in loops, first loop, sorry, single loop, double loop and triple loop learning. So single loop learning is fix the broken things. You don't do it again. Double loop learning is going back and saying, do we need to change the rules, the processes, the values? Triple loop is actually, do we fundamentally need to shift something? So instead of fixing the diver, let's fix the instructors. Completely agree. And all the instructors that I bring up, I make them go through technical dive training with me prior to becoming an instructor so they can get that good trim, that good buoyancy. And then I tell them everything we do in the pool is what the students are going to learn to do and how they're going to learn to do it. We have to be in trim. We have to have good buoyancy and we have to teach them to do nothing. And I actually stole that from dive talk and from Woody Alpert that I'm teaching you to do nothing. And the more you can do nothing, the better off you're going to be. And so I can't agree with you more. So how is decision-making, situational awareness and communication skill contribute to dive safety and how do they relate to each other? Yes. So there's a framework that I use within the training programs that ultimately is about making the best decisions we can. Now those decisions are made because of the information that we've collected and the previous experiences we have. And that's really about situational awareness, what's going on now, what I sense, what does it mean now and what is likely to happen in the future. So the difference between a novice and an expert really is the ability to project into the future. So an experienced diver will notice maybe the current's picked up and that means now they're going to have to fin a little bit harder, which means they're going to use a little bit more gas. The novice won't necessarily pick that up. Or it could be that they could see a diver goes into a wreck and then they see a sort of a plume of silt come out or they then see some rusticles in that. You sit there and an experienced diver would sit there and go, I know what's happening inside there. They can, to quote a guy called Gary Klein, they can see the invisible. Experts can see stuff that's missing, novices can only see the stuff that should be there or that's incorrect. So situational awareness is this ability to collect information, make sense of it. Communications comes in a number of different forms and that could be your buddy, it could be the instructor, it could be your dive computer or your rebreather controller, it could be the dive guide's brief to you. And so what that's doing is helping you get an idea about what's going to happen next. So an effective dive brief is a communication of what is expected to happen and then what to do when it doesn't go well. So we've got to look at contingencies and brief those. Often dive briefs end with, right, anybody got any questions? Nope, brilliant. Right, let's get ready. And as soon as you say, nope, let's get ready, you've shut the conversation down. A much better way of checking understanding, because a closed question doesn't check understanding, would be to ask an open question. And often people turn around and say, okay, Ben, tell me what I've just told you. And if you just repeat that back, all I'm doing is checking your short-term memory. But actually, if I say to you, Ben, in your own words, what are we going to do when we enter the water and then when we get to the bottom of the shot line and visit the wreck? Now I'm asking you to process the information that I've given you and then come back. So you could have tell me, explain to me, describe to me. TED are three ways of starting an open question that then checks the understanding. So that's how they link together. And then there are two other elements that make up the framework in a positive way, and that's teamwork and leadership and followership. Teams are made up of leaders and followers. They've got to communicate effectively together. They've got to share that mental model. And then once we've done the dive, we finished it, we then debrief the dive. And the purpose of the debrief is to understand how close did the plan match reality? And sometimes it's really big, and sometimes it's small. Very rarely does a dive match the plan. And that's one of my sort of frustrating phrases. I get frustrated when I hear it, is plan the dive, dive the plan. The problem with that is you end up driving people into following a plan where actually sometimes they need to deviate, or no plan survives first contact with the enemy and it has to deviate. People get worried because we're not following the plan. Actually, let's look at where things are. So the debrief is to catch what happened on that one, and then to set you up for success on the next dive, to give you better situation awareness to say what's happening next. So this, you could teach these skills discreetly, but actually they're interdependent in how we create good outcomes, which is what the decisions should be about. And even if we have bad decisions, let's reflect on those. And how did it make sense for us to make a bad decision with the context that was going on? That makes perfect sense. Absolutely. And we do, we talk about that all the time, dive the plan, plan the dive. And in technical training, we come pretty close to what following the site, I shouldn't touch my watch because following the plan, but there are absolutely times we need to deviate the plan and make it increase the safety level because of whatever that might be. We've noticed this, it's been colder than we know. Here in the Northwest, we dive a lot of cold and I keep my Delta plus five up on my computer specifically for that. If I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to feel cold and I look at the Delta plus five, that if I stay at my current depth, it's going to increase my DECO by five more minutes. Do I really want to do that? Yeah. No, thank you. And we definitely need to deviate the plan. Oh, totally. And so even that sort of thing of planning, often we plan for optimal conditions. In the UK, there's a lot of hard boat diving rather than zodiacs ribs. And getting off a hard boat is pretty easy, even when it's in poor weather, getting back on the boat in poor weather is a different game. And so we're very optimistic in, yeah, yeah, that's fine. I can get off. Now get back on, now get back on with a casualty. You've got a diver who's now needs to be recovered back on the lift or up the side of a hard boat. Now that diver might be, and I might get criticized, I don't care. The diver might be 300, 350, 400 pounds. How are you going to get that diver back on the boat now? Have you got like a Jacob's ladder that you can roll down the side of the boat and bring them on? Because you're not going to be getting a backup, a herringbone ladder or a normal step ladder. No, no, not at all. And you're right, getting off a boat in a heavy current or heavy swell is, gravity takes care of a lot of that for you. Absolutely, gravity doesn't work in reverse. No, no. And if you've got additional gear, so a lot of time, you know, diving one, two, three stages in a camera, this bit of, right, hold your mask and hold your reg. And it's like, yeah, okay, I'm just going to basically try and gracefully fall off the back of the boat. Because a lot of the time we've got current and limited slack windows. So we don't have an opportunity to just basically anchor up and pass stuff down. So again, the sort of the optimal plan versus the real plan. Right on. So can you provide an example of a non-technical aspect that significantly contributes to diving accidents? Yeah, I suppose miscommunication is probably one of those things. So we go underwater and we lose the majority of our communication skills because our vocabulary is seriously limited. You know, we've got a regulator in our mouth, even if we've got a rebreather loop in our mouth and you are shouting and you're thinking it's too loud, the other person doesn't hear it very clearly. So there's this, a physical barrier gets in the way. I noticed you were doing hand signals. So you were talking about this in terms of the plan. So to me, that's cut the drill. So it's this bit of, what does that mean? So for a recreational diver, that might be 500 PSI or 50 bar, but for a technical diver, a cave diver, that's hold or stop. So being very clear about what we mean when we get in the water, I'm not a fish person, so I don't really care for all of these different hand signals and whatever for the fish that are out there. But it's making sure that if you've got a new team that's come together, that you know what the critical executive controls commands are going to be in terms of the hand signals. Now, I saw you also talk about having a slate to where your runtime is. Well, that's what I guess. That's my assumption because you did this. And so I'm guessing you have a slate with your runtimes. I have wet notes, and that provides another conversation capability. But it's quite funny looking at what people write in their wet notes and what they think they've written in their wet notes when you get back on the surface. And it's like, how on earth did A, I write that, and B, you understood what I was talking about when I wrote this out. So communication, when we're stressed, we make assumptions about what the other person knows. And actually, we have to slow right down. We have to simplify the communications massively. And we need to close that communication loop. So as an example of that, if I'm on a decompression dive, and we're moving up our stops, we would go ascend, decode, two minutes. And the response back is not OK. It is ascend, decode, two minutes. So now I know the other person has seen what I've communicated, and they've come back to me. Because just saying OK, that's an easy response when you've got poor trust, poor psychological safety. Oh, I didn't see what Ben did. So you know what? I'm just going to say OK. I'm going to cuff it after that. And hopefully, I can follow what his plan is. And if we don't have psychological safety in the team, and we've got limited time, that's an easy answer. And actually, it then takes me to turn around and say no, ascend, decode two minutes, and get the confirmation back from you. So communications is so common, we think it works all the time. But then it then cascades into other things that are out there. That is such a great point to bring up. I mean, as we go on to our slates, I mean, I have poor handwriting to start with. On the slate, with a slight amount of narcosis going on, I'm sure my handwriting is even worse. And I know for me that I try and keep it super simple, as simple as I possibly can. But I wonder, did I make it too simple? Did I tell them blue? Yeah. And hope they understood that I meant blue, or whatever I was trying to say, right? Or with that, I use that just to be funny. But that's what I've got. An example of that, a friend of mine was diving a rebreather and a scooter in a cave system in Florida. And there was miscommunication because one of them was saying slow, the person at the back going slow, and the other person thought they heard go. So they basically thumbed it, and they put their finger on the trigger, and off they went. And they're like, oh, no, that's not what it was. So slow and go sounded just the same in terms of the receiver. Absolutely. My wife tells a story of a friend that was on a big dive in Palau, and the dive master asked him, are you okay? And he's like, yes. Oh, I'm going to go up. I'm going to go down. And they, okay. And they all went to the surface, and the diver who gave the double thumbs up says, what? What's going on? Everything okay? He says, when you gave the double thumbs up, we thought you were double thumbing the dive. That's it. Clarification. Clarification of communication is definitely huge. And it's interesting, as we start moving in with working with new divers as instructors, I had a diver recently that we were doing our pre-dives, our shakeout dives for an XR class, our very first dives. And we got to a specific point where I was going down the hill from 60 to 90 feet, and we were in terrible viz. From the 60 to 90 feet, there was two feet of viz. And we got separated. We were separated for less than a minute, so I turned, came back up the hill, and he was gone. So I did my 360, looked around, looked around, up and down, and started my direct ascent. We weren't in deco, so I wasn't terribly worried. When I finally, after three minutes safety stopped, popped the surface, his safety market buoy, which, good for him, he'd launched, was at least 100 yards away. And I was like, how in the heck did he get that far away? And I started watching, and it was continually moving. And so I tried to swim to it. I couldn't catch up to him. He was swimming that fast. And so he said, when I asked him, I said, why did you leave the scene when you lost me? He says, I thought you wanted when we got lost to launch an SMB and get to shore. No. But it would, I didn't even think that that was a part of the communication I needed to make until that moment. I was like, okay, maybe I need to pull this back, be a little more clear. Well, I would ask the question then from yourself about the decision-making process. How did it make sense to do a three-minute safety stop? What was in effect a potentially emergency situation? It wasn't, I didn't feel like it was an emergency situation, but I wanted to make sure that I was safe and we'd been down long enough that I felt like just, I was close enough to in value and close enough to that point that I wanted to make sure I was safe. And then I use that as a point of up and down. And during the safety stop, I continue to do my search in case he's below me. That's because I figured they're going to come up. Maybe he got, he was just far enough away that, or just below me that I didn't see him. And he would come up to my point, give him that extra time. So that's my thought process at least. No, that's cool. And so one of the bits then is actually the clarification before we get in, there are very, very few people talk about buddy separation processes before we get in the water. And there's just this assumed knowledge that this is what we're going to do. And so it could be actually they could have been up on the surface somewhere else and actually then struggling. You sit there going, okay, I know the guy's going to take, you know, my buddy's going to take three minutes, team members going to take three minutes to come up plus whatever the ascent time is. But again, that's, you know, it's the clarification that needs to happen. It does. Absolutely. So, Gareth, as divers move more into advanced training, what are some of the key lessons that they should be studying and learning to ensure they have a good handle on safety? I would say one of the first and most important pieces is self-awareness of your own performance, of your team's performance, and then creating, I'm going to say an internal environment so you can reflect on your own capabilities, but also the team one. You're never going to make all the mistakes yourself. So, actually, let's observe others. And that really comes down to running an effective learning-focused debrief. So, every dive has got a learning opportunity within it, even if it went perfectly well, because you can turn around and say, that went well, let's replicate it because it provided this successful outcome and whatever it was. And we need to look at details, not generalities. So, there's four questions that I ask as much part of a much longer debrief framework. But the simple one is, what did I do well or what did we do well and why? What do we need to improve on and how are we going to do it? And so, you've got four questions there. What do we do well and then why? What do we need to improve and how are we going to do it? And the observation questions are relatively easy, i.e., what do we do and what we need to improve? The harder questions are, why did it go well and how are we going to make that improvement? And don't be sort of fobbed off with generalities and, yeah, we had good teamwork, right? What was good about the team? What could we replicate? Well, actually, when we had the brief, we created an environment where I asked the question, I didn't feel stupid. So, thank you. And when I asked that question, you went, brilliant. And somebody else in the team went, thanks, Gareth, because I wanted to ask that same question again. So, we congratulate people for what might appear to be obvious things. And then the improvements, the light communication needs to be better. Well, how are we going to do that, right? What I need you to do is put the light in front of me, or at least where I can see it, because where you had it on the dive, it was underneath me and I'm flat in the water and I'm looking forward and I can't see it. In your eyes, it looks like it's in the right place, but it needs to be further forward. So, looking at specifics, not generalities. That's absolutely so true, making sure we're clear on communication and understanding where we're at in this as well. So, Gareth, when it comes to decompression safety, can you explain the most significant challenges or areas where there's still room for improvement and what steps are you taking to address those issues? I suppose the biggest thing about decompression sickness is its variability. So, it's trying to get rid of the stigma that's associated with having a decompression sickness event or getting bent. Even if you follow the tables or the computers, the profiles that are there, there is so much internal variability that on one day you can be really good and another day you feel rubbish because you're subclinical or actually you've got bent. And there was a presentation given in Portugal at the start of October from a guy called David Dulette, who does a lot of decompression research for the US Navy. And he gave a presentation and said, here are hundreds of divers, here's the sampling. And on particular days, these people were scoring zero bubble scores. And then on the next day, they'd score a grade four bubble score. So, lots of bubbles, uncountable when it comes to an ultrasound monitoring process. Same person, same profile, different day. So, you're in this bit that says, A, just because you get bubbles, it doesn't mean you're going to get bent. And just because you've got no bubbles on one day, it doesn't mean you're not going to have loads the next day and you could end up getting bent the following day. So, just this recognition that there is huge variability that's in there. What we can do is then stack the odds in our favour, having good buoyancy control, holding stops. And I think it would be a fantastic exercise, and I'm in conversations with some of the manufacturers about this, is actually looking at the data within dive computers and say, if there's a 70-foot stop and a 50-foot stop and a 30-foot stop, whatever the stops are, how accurate are people holding those? So, are they going up and down three or four feet on the stop that the computer is holding? And then that would provide some really good evidence back to the agencies, because yes, the agencies control what happens in the training and they don't control what happens outside, but they can set the mindset inside the training system that says, stop accuracy is important. And then we can start to see what's going on. But there are other things like hydration is an important factor, but not being overhydrated, because then we get to immersion polymery edema risks, which have also got other medical marker factors or triggers that trigger for that. So, being seriously overweight, high blood pressure, being on medication, all contribute or make it more likely you get IPO, as overhydration does as well. Absolutely. It's interesting that you bring up IPO, because I hear about IPO a lot more from British divers than I ever hear from American divers, period. Why do you think that is? Because the person who discovered it really in diving is a British guy called Peter Wilmhurst. So, probably about 10 years ago, 10, 12 years ago, I think was the first sort of understanding that this was in effect, internal drowning that was happening and fluids secreting from the lungs inside as opposed to aspirated fluids. And it was sort of considered a surface thing, surface swimming thing. But then, and part of the problem is that why it may have been dismissed in the past is it's very difficult to detect in an autopsy. So, the fluid, because actually, if the person drowns, they then aspirate the water that they're in, which will then dilute whatever the fluid is that's in their lungs. So, there's a lot of, marketing's the wrong word, publicity, raising the profile of IPO, IPE in the diving community, because there's a high number, they've gone back through the fatalities and said, is this somebody who's looks like they've got tight chest, they're coughing, something isn't quite right underwater, but there doesn't appear to be anything else that's triggered that. And so, there are some definite IPO cases and there are some high probability IPO cases. And that also might be something to do with shaping of the diving population, getting older, getting more overweight, the dietary habits of a diver are probably not the highest quality when it's out there, when you look at the diving community that's there. So, there are a number of factors that will increase the likelihood of having an IPO. Right on. Well, Gareth, I'm gonna break this into two interviews and this will be the ending of part one. Guys, this is Gareth Locke, the human diver. If you haven't picked up his book, you're missing out. If you haven't listened to his podcast, you're definitely missing out. And if you haven't taken his course yet or signed up for it in some way, it's not expensive. And what is the value of saving one of your diver's life? I would say this is pennies on the dollar. So, Gareth Locke is absolutely amazing. Thank you very much.