PADI Adventure App, DSMB Diving, Social media and scuba diving

Hello and welcome to Diversync the NetCast and podcast for scuba divers. My name is Rich Synowiecc, and you're listening to episode 517, recorded on October 29, 2023. And second one of our audio only. I'm gonna hopefully get some video in here. But what I've been doing is I have been really focusing on making sure that I have some things that are on video and pictures because people have to be visually. So I've been really trying to work on my own education as far as how to make this podcast better. Because as I've found for the past, since 2010, when I started this whole journey and with my little ending and it's come back is that man, podcasting and video, podcasting and social media has absolutely taken off. 

And I've been kind of hooked into the things where there's a lot of people have done way better at it than I ever could hope for, simply because they've had the time and they got in and the place that they entered was a whole lot better. But I'm not going to use that as an excuse. I'm taking it as a positive. Just like in scuba diving, I didn't have to be Jacques Cousteau, I didn't have to learn. I mean, I was at an era in Nitrox when oxygen toxicity was just being discovered and we found out deep diving on air wasn't all that great of an idea. So I kind of equate that to this in that I'm able to build on the shoulders of just absolute titans in this. 

And what I found is that even the best scuba diving influencers the best scuba diving podcasters, the best scuba diving gurus, the best scuba diving people that are out there doing this, they're tiny compared to people who are doing beauty and fashion and mean. I looked at a bunch of different so I found that in talking to people, they're not looking at YouTube. Some people are using YouTube as their primary form of education, primary form of I was using it as my spotify for a long time. I'd rather listen to music where it's easy to find and searchable. And that brings me to YouTube being a super search engine. So that's kind of where I've been going with trying to update you'll, see some updates with stuff. 

I'm going to kind of bring some videos back from old times and revamp them because the technology, again, is absolutely spectacular. But one of the things that I was suggesting is one of the guys suggested that if you want to make something good, use a documentary. And this is what this has been for the past few 500 episodes. It's been pretty much a chat where I've talked about the stuff that's going on. And oftentimes when I'm sitting down to do this podcast, I've completely forgotten about it or I've lost my notes. And so if you follow me on YouTube, you're going to see a couple of things that are new. I'm throwing out their shorts. I'm throwing out their car talks. 

If you follow me on Snapchat, you'll definitely find those because I'm finding that I just got into Snapchat and I kind of like the idea of Snapchat being not real or not permanent, let's put it that way. And I don't know about the permanence of things, but the idea behind it is fantastic in that I can throw something up there and if it really sucks, then people won't see it after the first time. So that's kind of where I'm putting my experimental stuff. TikTok is where I'm putting some stuff, where it's commentary and that sort of thing. I don't know that anybody's going to look at the dad bod diver that I am. 

I mean, there's a lot of really pretty and like one of the things I just looked at was I just looked at the PADI Ambassadiver program and I actually applied and I applied and then went back and based on my experience with PADI, I really like them. And I think that's a great company. And I've been a member for nearly 35, 40 years, something like that. I can't remember exactly. 1990, what's that come out to? 33 years, 43 years? I don't know. Anyway, the math is 33 years. So I'm almost 35 years into it. But math has never been my strong point. That's why I'm a tech diver. But the idea of becoming an ambassador, I am absolutely tried. True, I love PADI. So I went and applied because of my background. 

Then I went and looked at all the pretty PADI people that have been influencers in the past and I don't have a prayer. I mean, this dad bod is well over the hump of people that are there. I know way more about diving than most people. I can bring some to the table. I can do everything from beginner to super advanced to technical to instructor. And I find that I'm really good at it. So all these little things that I share, one of the things that one of the podcasters said is that he just documents his life now. He documents his life doing something other than what I do. But man, my life is pretty darn interesting. I love my job and I've got a lot of snippets. And so when I come up with something profound, I'm going to try to recreate it. 

Maybe like in the recent one I just did was in my car. I've done one sitting there talking about it. I listen to things. But because this is an audio podcast, I might just throw some audio stuff up there. Especially since with a lot of the new technology, I can close caption it and you can read it while you're listening to it or at night or something like that. So there's some really good information there and I'm bursting to let it out. So I'm trying some different platforms. So I have always been on Facebook. Since 2009. I've been on Facebook as a person. Facebook as a company came shortly after that with Divers Incorporated, and then the inception of Facebook and Divers Sync that's there. But I've not really been super active in a lot of my posting there, so now I am. 

I've also been on Instagram. You'll notice a real uptick instagram. I've made it a real effort to post at least once or twice a day. When I look at something, I'm going to post it. If you guys want to share stuff at this point, I'm so tiny. I mean, for the six or seven of you that are listening to this on a regular basis, I want to thank you for that. But you're there. You're my audience, you're my dive buddies now. And so if you're listening to this and you're taking the time to listen to this, I really do appreciate you and I want to give you more. So I kind of want to give you an education every time you hang out with me, and that's kind of a lot of stuff is really random. 

My staff giggles at me because I'm all over the board. I get a really good idea, and I have to share it with people, and then I lose it. One of the things I might start doing is I might start just wearing a tape recorder around or just hitting okay, hold on, stop. I know that many times in my lifetime I have really wished for the opportunity to have said, you know, that was a great conversation. I wish I was recording it. And so I'm going to start doing it. I don't know what the legality of it is as broadcasting it, so if there's somebody else's voice on there, you probably will never see it. But I certainly want to have the story, at least for my reference, because it's pretty darn awesome. 

So as the list goes on, I have been posting pretty regularly on a whole mess load of practical things. And so I can kid myself that the six of you who see me on YouTube, five of you are also seeing me on Instagram and liking it. Four of you are on TikTok, and then six of you are on Facebook, and then seven of you might be on Snapchat and show your friends, and then even if it's a joke, the threads and Tumblrs and all that. So I am now on I'm doing a blog on Tumblr. I'm on threads x, Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram So whatever your favorite platform is, find me and follow me. And I'm trying not to repost stuff, but you might see five or six, seven, eight different things. 

They're not going to be a lot, but it's all going to be cool. It's all going to be relevant. And what you're going to do is hopefully get the word out that I'm a dive instructor that loves to teach. And I can make you I have a real mission in life now and I think I've talked to you about it in past podcasts, but you're going to hear a lot more stuff about this is how it's done. And I'm not going to talk about this is how I do it, because I've made way too many mistakes. And so if someone says, man, you should have done this, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to talk about what I should have done. But PADI as a business is huge, and PADI as a business in the world is huge. 

But what I'm finding is that the thinking along the lines of dive business is seriously archaic. There's nobody on social media that's a dive shop owner doing what I'm doing. There's a lot of really good social medias. And you'll see me circle it. I had a really good conversation with I'll throw it out there. It's circle H scuba he's out in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a really good conversation on Facebook. I asked him a couple questions. I saw something that he was doing, and it was interesting to hear him talk about what his aspirations are. And I really want to help him. But in a world that has a business model that loves to eat its young, I'm going to say that diving is probably the number one, because most professionals have a two year career, and then they find something else to do. 

Now, some of it's health related, and there's going to be topics about that. I've got a friend of mine who had to quit diving because they had a health issue, and it's killing them because they had built their entire world around it. I don't know what I would do if that was the case. And I've had a real big journey in the last year about getting my health back into shape, and you'll hear me talk about that. I'm going to talk about PADI as a business, though, because most of the people that are real excited about I look at some of the really cool stuff that I've seen on YouTube, and some of it is just fantastic. 

You know that they went and they did all the tutorials and they found all that because their thumbnails are pretty awesome, their tie ins are pretty awesome. They're doing stuff way better than I am. And I don't even know where to begin on some of that stuff other than, hey, what's going on with YouTube and Facebook and all that. But a lot of them are like me. They haven't posted in six, seven, eight months. They're not posting on a regular basis. Some are out there posting on a regular basis, but they're only posting one platform. That's kind of weird because I want to be out there for everybody, and I'm also way too busy to be posting all this stuff. So I found the time. 

I'd find the time between the hour between when I get out of the gym and when I get into the shower, and I've make it an hour. And I don't always get good at it, but that's what I'm going to do. So I'm hoping that a lot of people click on this so that if I don't have a prayer for this year's Ambassador Diver, maybe I have a prayer for next year's Ambassador Diver. Maybe they look at it differently. Maybe they find something a little bit. Maybe they want the whole dad bod, 55 plus guy that knows way more about diving. I've forgotten more about diving than most people ever know, and I'm not even one of the big guys. So, anyway, that's kind of where I was going with this. But the PADI Ambassador Diver thing is something there. 

But PADI is a business. So there's a couple of things that are really cool. If you've been following me on social media, you know, I've already talked about this a little bit, but I taught a course that was new to me and when it first came out. What it is it's a distinctive specialty from PADI that's written by PADI. And you can find the distinctive specialty outline on the PADI Pro site if you're a PADI instructor or higher. And what the delayed surface marker buoy program was. Is it's two dives to teach you how to use a DSMB or an SMB or different kinds of marker buoys on the surface? 

And I went, well, we teach that in open water, and I teach that we actually in our open water class, we require a person to buy a DSMB or an SMB, not a DSMB. And the reason that we do that is because of the movie Open Water. If they had a whistle and a DSMB, the chances are that movie would have never happened. And so it's a piece of equipment that we really do make people dive with on every dive and just clip it to your BCD, take it with you, put your name on it first. And now what we have is we have a whole idea behind it. And I got to turn off Facebook notifications when I'm doing this. We got a whole idea behind it is that this was a course around the DSMB. 

And when the DSMB came out as part of the requirement, I didn't expect them to come up with a specialty on it, but the specialty is really cool. And so I taught it for the first time. And I would not call it a DSMB course if I was recalling it. I'd call it a how to use reels and how to use lift bags and how to use things that are there because it's a really cool tool to teach you how to use a reel to blow a bag from your safety stop. And I really enjoyed it, and I want to teach it. And we're going to incorporate it into our courses, I think, as one of the main things, because it was a really good course. So I highly recommend you go out there and look at it seems is really simple. 

It's two dives with an instructor, and at the end of the first dive, you got to blow a bag and you got to dive with it for towing it for 15 minutes or ten minutes. And the second time you got to do it for midwater and tow it a little bit, doing your safety stop. But it's all about diving more with an instructor, which I thought, and it gave me an opportunity also in this case, to help somebody with dry suit. And I taught a dry suit specialty, and I'm really good at that, and I really enjoyed that. But I like teaching a little stuff. I've taught a couple open waters in the past couple of weeks. We're pretty much done with the open waters this time of year because the water, it's a really crappy day out today, and the water is awful. 

But big thing, look out for the deloitte laid service marker. Booie. Again, if you're a PADI pro, like if you're dive master or higher, I honestly recommend that you look at the PADI updates. There's some really cool stuff that just came out in that I get a little bit of an early touch on the updates. And these are done through for you guys that aren't PADI pros. These are done through a magazine that we get that's a membership magazine that has some training bulletins in it. And it's things that PADI updates and trains and kind of dials in. And like in the January, they dialed in the dry suit diver course, and they made it very specific that you had to be a dry suit diver specialty instructor before you taught dry suit divers now. 

And that came around because there was a problem, a lawsuit that came about because somebody was using a dry suit and making their students use a dry suit without proper training. They didn't have proper training to teach it, and there was a fatality. And so this was part of, I guess, the settlement. Anyway. I'm speculating irresponsibly, but if you're not a dry suit instructor, you can't teach dry suit at all anymore. You used to be able to do the first dive of the adventure dive of the advanced open water, but now you can't do it at all unless you're a dry suit instructor. So we didn't have that issue because all of my instructors were dry suit instructors, but I'm now putting it as part of my IDC. 

And when I do teach it's a really big deal because people want to get I'm getting that there are people that come to me where they're not good dry suit divers, but they've found me as an instructor, and so they want to tag along. So the tag along is learning just as much as the student is. And it's bizarre, but that's part of the training bulletin from January. But the training bulletin that just came out is the Project Aware is now PADI Aware. We knew this was going to come for about a year, but now the entire specialty, the whole thing across the board. And they've changed the way that the course is taught. Now as an extra added value, we teach this as part of our open water diver course. 

And so when we do the course and the person does the elearning as part of the lecture they do with the instructor for the hour that we get together, they get to learn how to save the planet and make the oceans better through the PADI Aware program. It's. Project aware is what they've done. Now we're moving it to PADI Aware, and it'll be revamped. It's got an implementation date of immediately, but you got a little bit of time to get rid of the old stuff. So we're going to kind of dial it in to make sure that it fits in our schedule and makes it seamless come January 1. But another thing that was brought up in my conversations with my PADI rep, I want to talk about the PADI Adventure app. 

And in the world of social media, an adventure app doesn't seem like it's that big of a deal, but this thing is pretty darn cool. And it's been out for two years. And my rep has been got to get stuff on the app, got to get stuff on the app. And last summer, I just threw something up there randomly. And what I did was every weekend that I was teaching at the quarry on a open circuit side of things, I put down that were going to do a Discover dive, like a guided dive. I knew that if I couldn't do it, somebody probably could. But I was shocked. One day someone showed up. I didn't have anything planned. 

I had all my gear there because I was going to do some maintenance on platforms and things like that. But this couple showed up and they said, we're here for our adventure dive, our guided dive. And I was like, really? And they said, yeah, we signed up online. I didn't even get notifications on it. And that was the first hiccup. So if you're a PADI pro or you're attached to a dive center, I would say that your PADI guy needs help with this. And it's such a big, huge potential and you're on the ground floor that I'm going to tell you that you probably should go in there and do it, even if it's just for fun dives. You can put a free event in there. 

And in this case, were charging for the entry fee for the quarry, and were given the guy guiding at $25. So it was pretty much a relatively cheap guided dive. These people had signed up, so I made $100 gross off of the PADI app. But the PADI Adventure app. So it was like, well, there's some potential here. So I went in there and added a couple of courses. I went in there and added a whole bunch of things. As far as me, I've added, like, five different things, and then I was like, okay, well, I got to get ideas. So me surfing YouTube, bringing this full circle to what I've been talking about, me searching YouTube, has brought me to finding people who I think are doing stuff better than me. 

So in this case, I wanted to find someone doing stuff better than me. I was shocked to find out that there's nobody in the Midwest except our dive center using the PADI Adventure app. And when I pulled, it was I don't know where I was at to pull it up, but only seven dive centers showed up. Now, there's probably about 20 dive centers across the United States that have actually put stuff on there. And I don't know if it was that over one weekend, everybody got active, but from one weekend to the next, there was nothing. And then the next weekend, there was something. So there's a couple of things that I want to throw out there. First of all, if you're not a PADI dive shop doing this, you need to I found out an interesting statistic. 

In one area of the United States, most of the people don't even upgrade their free stuff. This is all free. You don't have to do much. Now I know why two years into it hasn't got much traction. It's buggy as hell. So if you're going to sit down and do this, sit down with a cup of coffee. I would not recommend sitting down and doing this with bourbon, but recommend this is coffee. Recommend dramatic sip of coffee. But I want you guys to sit down and do this with a cup of coffee because it's there and you need to do it. But it's not easy. They didn't go through the last ten years that TikTok and YouTube and Instagram have done to post stuff. They have not gone through the 20 years of Facebook to post stuff. 

And so you got to go with a grain of salt, and you got to go with the fact that you're jumping back into the Dark Ages as far as computers are concerned. But it's worth it. Now, for you guys that are consumers, I would really recommend that you go and look at the stuff that's there. And the reason being is I want to see the traffic. It's kind of like for you guys that are really long time listeners of this program, if you go back to season three or season four, I didn't change anything. If you're listening to the audio. A lot of that's going to get revamped in the next year and a half as I clean everything up. But it's all the raw footage. I mean, back with talkshoo and back with all the stuff that I did back then. 

But I made up my sponsors because I wanted to promote things that were there. And today, if I was making up sponsors, I'd probably be promote other YouTube channels just because some of them are really good. They do it completely different than me. I'm way too random and I'm way too unpolished. And some of these guys are so polished, it's frightening. They're, like on an unbelievable level. And seeing people, especially some of my friends, like, I'm going to give a shout out to Dive Sega, look up Divesaga and follow them. I mean, Nick does an incredible job on his stuff, and it's seriously polished. And just like I said, circle H Scuba. I'd never even heard of these guys. And Thomas there is seriously polished. And I've never met Thomas in person. 

We've got a meet and greet at Dima this year because I really want to get to know them. But man, some of this stuff is so polished. I'm never going to catch up to that. I'm not making this a full time job. I'm running a dive shop. So it's gonna be a lot more random than this, but it's gonna be content that I'm gonna throw up there. But some of these guys are so good. But at the same time, what I'm finding, though, is when you go to look at the PADI Adventure app, there's nobody there. And it goes along the lines of what I tried back when I was doing going. I mean, like, I get squirreled. So Access Scuba was one of the sponsors, and it was because I was one of the opening investors for Access Scuba. 

And what I did as an opening investor is this was going to be a Facebook type place simply for divers. But you know, what happened is after four months, the founder and the creator pulled the plug because it wasn't getting any traction action. We only had 800 people on it. Well, that's the same thing that goes with the PADI Adventure app. If no one's there, no one's going to come to it to check it out. I want you guys to come check it out. I want you to get the traffic. And if nothing else, it's going to give the PADI Adventure app people, PADI Travel Network people the opportunity to go, hey, look, now you can book a trip with a dive center in there. 

I don't suggest you book a trip other than your own dive centers, but you can book a trip with a dive center if you're onesies or twosies. There's some really good stuff there. But I'm also finding that people are only going to be putting out their high end stuff. I've got my municing trip on there now. I've got my Municing ice diving trip on there now and I have to give a commission to them. So if you go through my page, that's great, but that's kind of here nor there. So anyway, the last thing that I want to talk about the PADI Adventure app is that give it some patience if you are a creator there and go in and create. 

And what you're going to do is make sure that you have a couple of things that will get you frustrated if you don't. Number one, get all your descriptions right because it's easier to just cut and paste. Second thing is get all of your price lists in line. And then third thing is you have the opportunity to put lots of pictures up. Get pictures so you're not randomly hunting and pecking for bullshit because you don't really want to put crap up there because you want to showcase what your destination is in that and put your local dive centers there's. Local dive sites, they have a PADI dive site thing and I've looked at it and there's a little bit of a delay sometimes when you click on it. It takes a lot to populate. 

It's not a real fast website, but boy, it's worth it. So get out there and do that, especially if you're a pro. As I get to the end of this podcast, as I get more stuff, is I really do appreciate those six of you that are following me on a regular basis. Four of them are family members or dive buddies or people who just listen to it in the background. One of them might be my dive shop that listens to it in the background. I'm not going to say that, but I'm trying to throw some stuff up there and it's going to be a lot. Some of it will be really good, some of it might not be good. I get squirreled easy, I get excited easy, and I jump around in topics. 

And if you know my staff, if you know people that know me, if I don't have an outline in front of me, I jump from A to Z and back to X and then back to R and then back to B and then back to T, and I bounce all around. But I'm trying to get my point across. And for those of you guys that have listened to me for years in the background, appreciate it. You're coming back to the podcast. I did get a lot of comments saying I'm coming back to audio now. I'm going to subtitle this, so if you want to watch it's just going to be pictures, but it's going to be captioned and subtitled and that so at least now we can that's an experiment. 

It's all things that are technology that I didn't have ten years ago and hopefully it's something that I can make work this year. Last. Thing is there's a lot more content going up on Patreon, the guys on Patreon that are following me. I appreciate that the even a little bit that you give is a lot. I haven't cashed in on it yet because I haven't quite figured out what I'm going to do with it yet. And it's not a lot of money, but it's going to combine me a cup of coffee around the holidays. So I appreciate that. But I'm putting stuff up there that I make mistakes on. I'm putting up stuff there and it's really easily searchable and you don't have to do it. 

And a lot of times I'll do stuff and I don't know where to put it because I'm trying different things. I'm trying to different cameras, I'm trying different sensors. I bought a microphone that is freaking amazing for my camera and I want to make sure that it's got longevity before I promote it out here. But I'm going to do that. On the promotion side of things, I now am an Amazon influencer and it's a little bit I mean, I'm doing it mostly for the things that I randomly buy. But if you want to help out and you go in there's a search engine in the captions at the bottom of this, you can do me the huge favor of subscribing. Get all your friends, family, and that to subscribe. I need a thousand subscribers to be able to get ad revenue from YouTube. 

I really don't care that much about it anymore. My goal in life is two things. Number one is my daughter wants to buy my dive center. So I want her to have a better foundation than I did. I also want her to have a better diving community than I did and a better understanding of the dive community. The second thing oh, I wanted to talk about this too. I'm going to talk about this too, is I don't want the negativity that's out there. There have been a couple of people when I've posted stuff out there and I do I mean, a friend of mine said that all attention is good attention, but some of the attention is detrimental to other divers. So if you've seen it, I apologize. 

A lot of times I'll try to block and delete it, but there's two things that I think in the closing that I want to throw out and if you're waiting for 30 minutes, this is going to go over 30 minutes. Sorry about that. But there's two things that happened to me. First of all is that I put a comment out there of why do you dive more? And one of the people essentially said he doesn't dive more because he doesn't like how it feels after he does something that's completely dangerous. And I didn't think that was appropriate, so I pulled it down. I don't want people to think that it's okay for someone to do what he was doing, even if it was farcical. 

I'm a jokester like everybody else, but I also know my audience and there's people who do listen to me and follow this that are brand new divers or like who are my Godmom, who doesn't really know that much about diving and wouldn't want to know that it's stupid dangerous if you do this, but it's also stupid to do that. So we don't. And the other thing that I get is negative comments. And there's a bunch of really negative comments. Oftentimes I'll leave those up because people do weird, stupid things about shooting themselves in the foot with it. But one of the things about negative comments that I get in my lifetime, and I'm trying to get around this because I used to internalize a lot of that, is that it comes with a story for you guys that know, I run Scubacrap.com. 

It's a place to buy and sell used equipment or buy and trade used equipment. And I tend to sell a lot of it. But the idea is that you're trading it. So if you don't like the color blue, you send in your blue mask and I get you another mask and give you credit for it. Problem is that over the years, we've gotten so many mask, snorkel, fins and wetsuits that can't be sold that we end up recycling and scrapping it or giving it away. And now the places that we've given it away to has gotten so much stuff from us, they don't want it anymore. And it's disheartening when a charity that you're supporting has some of the Boy Scout troops and that sort of things that I'm supporting said, hey, you know what? We already have 50 or 60 masks. 

You've sent us a ton. Don't send us anything more. We need this and I don't have that. Whatever they needed, I don't have a lot of those because people don't get rid of them or they've gotten worn out like size 20 boots or size 14 boots because some of these kids are built huge. But with this Scuba crap thing, we get some stuff that really is not worth anything. And what I find is that people attach emotion to what they're sending. And sometimes they send me only masks, snorkel, fins or wetsuits when the website@scubacrap.com specifically says, don't send this stuff without calling. Well, in the summertime between June, July and August, we're slammed. Now, the problem with Scuba crap is I pretty much haven't been able to find a way to take myself out of it because I am the company, pretty much. 

And so I've kind of painted myself in a corner when it comes to it. So if I'm not in town, I can't do the evaluation patients and I can't tell people what they're going to do. And so my staff knows that if a person calls and says, hey, why is it going to take so long? We tell them hey, look, it's taken so long because we don't have anybody to evaluate them. You want us to send it back, we will. Because the idea behind it is if you send it to us, you pay the shipping, we evaluate it. If you don't agree it, we pay the shipping back. Can't get fairer than that, in my opinion. But, man, some of the people get really upset about that shipping cost. 

And one guy turned me in to the Attorney General as a fraudulent company in the state of Michigan, and he didn't even live in Michigan, and it was BS. I mean, there was a contract you have to sign before you send your stuff in, that you have to include your stuff, or would you just turn around, send it back? And he even put that he didn't assign a contract, so he was being fraudulent himself. But the part and he'll never listen to this, I don't really care. And the problem is that they're getting out of diving. I never really think that there's that much of a passion for someone who's got a pile of scuba equipment that they're getting out. And this was only a mask, snorkel fins in a bag. He even threw in his erdpml. 

So he probably bought all this stuff, let it sit in his corner, never dove again, looked at it in thing and wanted to sell it. And that's what we're there for, right, is we don't want to sell it. We want you to trade it, but we'll take it and we'll give you pennies on the dollar to sell it because you to trade it. We'll give you a fair market value for trading it, okay? Because we don't have to worry about shelling out cash, we shell out product. But anyway, this gentleman was so upset that he wrote a four page letter to the Michigan Attorney General wanting us to be prosecuted for fraudulent practices. And I had to address that. 

And as I'm driving home after spending an hour and a half of doing an email, basically what I just told you about what we do and how fair it is and hopefully it comes to it. I mean, I don't care if it doesn't. I don't think it's going to come to a thing where we're going to crack down on that. And if it is, it's a DBA, I just flip it and that's it doesn't have any assets. But as the part of it, I was like, man, this guy is really upset. 

And then I thought to myself that I really felt sorry for him because anybody not in scuba diving, I feel sorry for in general, because I think that if you're not into scuba diving, especially if you're listening to this and you're not into scuba diving, come on, guys, you need to be into scuba diving. It is freaking amazing, and it's a pain in the ass until you get good at it. And I just did a little snippet about that, and I want to talk about that later. But you got to dive a lot in order to make it not a pain in the ass. It's like, imagine if you only drove once a month. You'd be scared to death to get on the expressway. In this case, I felt sorry for this guy because he's not diving. 

But I felt even more sorry because the amount of pain a person has to be going through to have a rejection about the value of a product that they knew was value less, that they had completely misassumed the value and had made and jumped to conclusions that were completely off basis. The pain that this guy had to be going through, I felt sorry for him. I wish I could do something for him. I mean, I get it. Every once in a while, we get somebody, man, I have to talk off a ledge because they're sending us gear because they were told by a doctor they could never dive again. That's my biggest fear. And that's why I do more of this podcasting thing and why I'm looking down this room. 55 years old. I got 30 more years ahead of me. 

I hope that's another lifetime. I mean, people are in the industry for two years. I've got 15 more regular scuba diving instructor. Lifetimes to go, man. That's just something. So anyway, I wanted to share that with you. I should have led with that. But anyway, not to leave you on a bad note. Follow everything, guys. Subscribe. Go down to the click button. If you've gotten this far down, go ahead and do that if you got this far down. So go ahead and hit the subscribe button. Go ahead and hit all the things. Go ahead and follow me on Instagram TikTok facebook. Snapchat. Instagram is more be about pictures and video snippets that are going to be fun. TikTok is going to be a lot of fun because I have no idea what to do with it. 

Facebook is going to consistently be the same thing. Snapchat is going to be something. I have no idea what I'm doing because it's for a lot younger crowd, but it's there. Oh, I'm on LinkedIn too. So if you want a professional side of me, that's more of that. And then Threads is new and up and coming, and I'm putting a blog together. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle a blog. It's being helped by AI a little bit. It's helping me reword some stuff and do that. So it's not all me. But if you got stuff that you want to say, god, I'd really love to hear from you. 

So I appreciate you guys, all six of you that listen to me, understand that because only 60 of you listen to me, I'm more apt to answer all the messages and emails in that sort of thing. So reach out and touch me somehow. As far as mean, you can even pick up the phone. So until next time, guys, thanks for listening to me and thanks for being here and I look forward to seeing you out diving. See you at the shows. Find me on DEMA if you're going to be there and hopefully I'll see you next week on this and try to keep it more consistent. We'll see you.