To celebrate 50 episodes, Inflow flips the format: instead of interviewing a guest, hosts Joe Arlotto and Dr. Jeff sit down to interview each other. Between them they bring over 60 combined years of aquatic animal life support systems experience — Joe's path runs through Brookfield Zoo, Albuquerque Aquarium, San Diego Zoo, and SeaWorld Abu Dhabi, while Dr. Jeff's began in October 1989 at Walt Disney World's The Living Seas before moving through Walt Disney Imagineering and independent LSS consulting.
This milestone conversation traces how a casual chat on a bus to a zoo conference turned into a podcast documenting the history of the LSS field, and digs into the technical topics that have defined both hosts' careers: denitrification (batch vs. continuous flow, carbon sources, and digester design), wetland and salt marsh filtration, the early days of ozone and ORP chemistry in seawater systems, and the shift from operating life support systems to designing them — including how CFD modeling shapes sump and skimmer placement today. Along the way, Joe and Dr. Jeff share the career stories behind the science: a midnight resume drop at Brookfield Zoo, a round-the-world trip after the Navy, a PhD finished on a Thursday and a start date at Disney the following Monday, and a 30-year full-circle trip through the Persian Gulf.
Whether you're an LSS operator, designer, or aquatic life support enthusiast, this episode is a rare, candid look at how two very different paths led to the same field — and what both hosts have learned about designing, building, and operating the systems that keep aquatic life thriving.
This episode is brought to you by Aquatic Equipment and Design, Cloward H2O, and Longhorn Organics — thank you for supporting Inflow and the LSS community.
Inflow is the podcast where we discuss all things related to aquatic animal life support. Subscribe, leave a review, and find more episodes, show notes, and sponsor info at https://inflowlsspodcast.com/.
Chapters- (0:51) Episode 50 Milestone
- (1:36) Origins of the Inflow Podcast: The Bus Ride at the AALSO Conference
- (4:25) Joe's Background: Navy, Backpacking, and Landing the Brookfield Zoo Job
- (6:12) Navy and Military Backgrounds Shaping LSS Careers
- (16:40) Joe's Career Path Through Albuquerque Aquarium and San Diego Zoo
- (17:48) Dr. Jeff's Background: PhD and Starting at Disney's Living Seas in 1989
- (22:58) Ozone and ORP: History and Chemistry
- (29:27) Denitrification Deep Dive: Batch vs. Continuous Flow, Carbon Sources, Digesters
- (35:34) Wetland and Salt Marsh Filtration, Steady-State Nitrate
- (37:22) Dr. Jeff's Path Through Walt Disney Imagineering and Independent Consulting (EEG)
- (42:14) LSS Design vs. Operations: Why Joe Moved into Design
- (49:23) CFD Modeling for LSS Design
- (50:45) Joe's Move to SeaWorld Abu Dhabi and Construction-Phase Realities
- (52:52) Dr. Jeff's Broader Environmental Design Work: Coatings, Substrates, HVAC, Penguin Habitats
- (56:05) Closing Advice
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Greetings all.
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Joe Arlotto here with Dr. Jeff Keto.
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Welcome to InFlow, the podcast where we discuss all things related
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to aquatic animal life support.
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This show is sponsored by Aquatic Equipment & Design, Cloward
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H2O, and Longhorn Organics.
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You can learn more about our sponsors by clicking on the sponsors page at
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inflowlsspodcast.com So kind of a special, kind of a special day today, Dr.
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Jeff.
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We're doing something a little bit different.
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We're winding up the first half of, uh, 2026.
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Summer is here.
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I'm getting ready to go on vacation.
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And the crazy thing is, is this is our 50th show, our 50th Inflow episode.
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It's kind of crazy.
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What, what does it, what has it meant to you, Dr. Jeff?
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It is sort of amazing that it's number 50, and I think back, uh, you know,
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all 49 shows before this one, and all the different guests, all the different
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disciplines we've had represented, the history of LSS, all the way to where we
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were 40 years ago to where we are today, and, and everybody working in the industry
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the way they are, vendors, engineers, designers, aquarists, and LSS operators.
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It's really been a joy to do all those shows and, and have
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you on, Joe, for number 50.
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Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a different thing.
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Remember when we were at the Also show at Pittsburgh, and we were, I think
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we were on the bus, like, going to the zoo for the zoo night, remember?
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And, and I think you said, "Man, we gotta, we gotta interview.
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We, we, we gotta talk to some of these people and get some of their
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conversations sort of documented because they've done so much in LSS."
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It sort of s- it sort of started as, like, a, like, a history thing, right?
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That's right.
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It was a casual conversation, and I was just sort of spitballing with you and,
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and deciding that, you know, the…
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It evolved into what became the podcast ultimately.
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But I was… It was all about trying to document some of our history and, and
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that's where it began, and it was riding on that bus to Pittsburgh Zoo and, and
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our conversation, I remember, continued right on through the evening at the, uh,
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at the social event there at the zoo.
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It did.
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We, we were excited, I remember.
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And, and, uh, you know, the, the interesting thing about the history
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is that, and now, of course, things were done obviously way back when
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probably that, that I didn't know about, but for me, it was a very
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finite history really, you know?
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I mean, when I started, th- there were people that you could, that I
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dealt with that you could arguably say started LSS, or when they started
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designing these systems, there was kind of, there, there was no LSS.
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So you can, you can kind of see the beginning, or we could
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kind of see the beginning.
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That's right, Joe, and I want to think about that because our paths
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first crossed and we met in the early '90s, somewhere around 1992.
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You were at Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.
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And, but tell me a little bit more about prior to the LSS
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world and prior to Brookfield.
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I know you were in the Navy, but, but, uh, talk a little bit about growing up.
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Yeah, yeah.
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That's, that's, well, I appreciate that.
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You know, we're-
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For our guests, you know, this 50th show, there is no guest, just you and me.
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And, um, it got me thinking a little bit when we decided to do this, that
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we know each other very well in an LSS sense, but maybe not before that.
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And, and that goes for many of the people that I know in LSS.
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So this'll be interesting to talk a little bit about our histories.
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But yeah, I, I find when I was thinking about this, it's fascinating
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to me because many of our guests have had something early on that told
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them they wanted to be involved in oceans, marine life, LSS, aquariums.
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And for me, I have to say, there wasn't really, I didn't really grow up like that.
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I, I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, Silver Spring, Maryland.
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I'm a Maryland boy, you know, sort of classic Irish Italian,
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big family, Catholic family.
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Grew up public school kid, running around the neighborhood playing sports, you
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know, causing trouble, breaking into, you know, swimming pools at midnight
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and, and going swimming with my friends.
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I mean, sort of your general low-level criminal background, you know?
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But you did get a start in swimming pools that way.
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There you go.
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There you go.
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So maybe that's what it all was.
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You know, in high school I kind of had a knack for math and science and, and,
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uh, went to college in Boston at Tufts University, got a, a Navy ROTC scholarship
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through, uh, I cross-town enrolled at, at MIT 'cause they, they had the,
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uh, the Navy ROTC, um, uh, unit there.
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And, uh, I studied engineering, mechanical engineering.
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I was taking Navy classes and doing Navy training.
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You know, I, I wanted to go in the Navy really just because I was
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super patriotic and, and wanted to have kind of an adventure.
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And so I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree, went into the Navy,
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was stationed various places, Newport, Rhode Island, Charleston, South Carolina,
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eventually Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
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I was on a, I was on a frigate, first the USS Garcia FF 1040 in
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Charleston, and then USS Whipple FF 1062, old steam plants, you know.
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And I, I was learned how to run a, a steam plant on the, on the ship.
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Joe, this is fascinating because I'm finding even within SeaWorld and my
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organization that a lot of people that have a Navy background, whether
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it's in the steam plant or the engine room or on a sub which has to have a,
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a high level of life support, all of those disciplines in the mechanical-
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field certainly played into what became your LSS career, would you say?
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Definitely.
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Ve- very good insight there.
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There are two things I think that I learned in the Navy that
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I brought into my LSS career.
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One was I was not afraid of small spaces and plant rooms and loud
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machinery, and it just didn't, it just didn't bother me, you know?
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And so, you know, when you first get into LSS and, and you see those big,
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those big, uh, equipment rooms, it can be intimidating, but for me it was not.
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The other thing that I learned in the Navy really was managing people.
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I mean, I was an officer.
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I was a lieutenant.
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And I had to manage equipment, but I had to manage people managing that equipment.
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And so, you know, very similar to when I started in LSS, I had a team a- and I
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had a system, and I had to manage those things, manage the maintenance, manage my
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team, and, um, I had a lot of experience in, in that in, in, in the Navy.
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To follow up on that, Joe, I, I, what I hear in the military in general and
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in certainly in the Navy and on a ship or a submarine, chain of command is
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really an important thing, I think.
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Is that correct?
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Oh, yeah, of course.
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Chain of command is everything.
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Uh, you, you talk to your direct superior, and you also talk to the
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person directly below you in rank, and delegation is the key, right?
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My days in the Navy were so busy, so busy that I thought when I started I could
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do it all myself, but you just can't.
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You have to delegate to your team, and that's the key to being a,
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a naval officer, is delegation.
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Not unlike what we have in the aquarium and zoo world with regard to, um, the
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way we, we work with our habitats, work with the other teams, work within
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our LSS group or water quality team.
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There's a, certainly there's a hierarchy.
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It's a little bit looser maybe in an- Right … aquarium world, but it still
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exists, and that communication up and down the chain's very important.
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Yeah.
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I remember a funny story.
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I was start, I had started working at Brookfield Zoo, and we were called in
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because we had to do a procedure on a dolphin, and the LSS, the LSS team was
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called in because we had to arrange the valving so that the med pool could be
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isolated and then drained and filled.
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So we were in, and, and the guys that I was working with, Greg and Marty, they
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were like, "Man, this stinks. It's 8:00 at night. We got called in." And I was
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thinking to myself, this is great because, I mean, I never got this in the Navy.
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I, you didn't get overtime in the Navy, right?
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I said, "This is awesome 'cause I'm getting paid for it.
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I'm gonna be home by 10:00, so I'm gonna get a good night's sleep." And it's not
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like I'm on a ship that's rocking around in, in, in heavy weather, you know?
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So it was, for me, the Navy made the LSS really m- much easier,
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and, uh, I wasn't intimidated by the people or by the equipment.
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E- exactly, and I was wondering on that d- specific example, my mind just went
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to med floors and, and lifting med floor.
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Did you happen to have that technology, uh, back at the zoo?
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No, we didn't.
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We had, back at Brookfield, we had three back pools that were connected to the
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main show pool, and the middle back pool was the med pool that you could
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put the, the watertight gates in, right?
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And then it had a shelf, a built-in shelf, so there was a s- you could have a high
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water level, then you could get in there, you could hold onto the dolphin, put him
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on the shelf, which was still underwater, and then drain the system, so now you
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were standing, you were standing in a place where you could work on the dolphin.
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He was on the shelf, and the water could be drained out.
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But I know what you're getting at.
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It's, it's, at SeaWorld Abu Dhabi we had those special floors.
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That's right, and it, so it required very little, uh, in the way of
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adjusting water level because you can move the floor, right?
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You don't have to worry about dropping the pool.
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And what you're getting at there, in case people don't know, we had some
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very seriously big holding pools that had pneumatically… Right?
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They were pneumatically operated floors that would just, that would just rise.
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And hydrostatic pressure, uh, uh, Joe, because water
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actually was the, the source.
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That's right.
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That's right.
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So yeah, I mean, we've, we, we've come a long way.
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We've seen a lot of things change.
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But, uh, but the Navy for me w- was a great experience.
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I, I was over in the Persian Gulf in '90, '91 for Desert Storm,
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and I'm proud of, of being there.
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It was a, a long, long six, seven months.
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But, um, in '91 I got out of the Navy, and interestingly enough, I
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wanted more adventure, so I, I…
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This is something that most people don't know about me, but I, I took a trip for
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a year, a backpacking trip around the world with my friend Devin, a kid that
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I grew up with and went to college with, just o- one, one of my best friends.
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And, um, Devin and I traveled to Australia.
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We, we worked on a sheep farm there for, for several months.
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We traveled through Australia.
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We went through Malaysia, Thailand, uh, Nepal, South Africa, Zambia,
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Zimbabwe, Egypt, Israel, and then on into Greece and on into Europe.
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So that was a whole year, and it was a, a great trip and, and, uh, a, a nice sort
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of, uh, segue from being in the military.
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And then, um, and then I moved to Chicago with Devin, my friend,
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'cause he had been living there.
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I moved to Chicago, and I was gonna start my career as a, as an engineer.
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Yeah, and I, I just think about the, on your trek through those areas,
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all of the animals you must have encountered and different habitats
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that you went through on your way through Africa and into Europe.
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Yeah, we did.
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We saw, I mean, we saw a lot.
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It wasn't so much a sightseeing trip, but more of like a, a backpacking nature trip.
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But, but you're right, we saw all kinds of ecosystems.
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I, like I say, I wasn't really so into those things.
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I was never thinking that I was gonna be working at a zoo or an aquarium.
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I thought I was gonna, you know, move to Chicago and get a job for an engineering
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firm and be a mechanical engineer.
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It's, it's what I wanted to do.
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And interestingly enough, you know, my, my friend Devin, who, uh, he actually
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passed away in 2016, but, but back when I moved to Chicago in '90, I was
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living with him, I was applying to a bunch of different engineering jobs,
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and he walks into the living room and says, he, he was reading the Chicago
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Tribune, and he goes, "There's a job opportunity here at the Brookfield Zoo.
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They're hiring an engineer to run their water system, and he needs to be scuba
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diver qualified." And I looked at him and I said- I don't wanna work at a zoo.
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Why, why do I wanna work at a zoo? He said, "No, Brookfield Zoo's so cool.
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I've been there." And he's like, "You're a scuba diver, you've done a
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lot of scuba diving, and you could go diving with the dolphins, you know?"
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I said, "I don't know, man. S- I, I, I don't think so." He said, "Look,
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you gotta do it. The, the deadline is tonight." So I kinda rewrote my resume.
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I, I doctored up my, my, uh, cover letter and, you know, there was
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no email or anything then, right?
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So I borrowed his car, I drove out to Brookfield.
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It was probably midnight at that point, so the zoo was closed.
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I handed my application to the guard at the shack and I said, "Get this to
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Seven Seas, uh, it's for the job there." He's like, "Okay." I thought, "It'll
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never find its way there," you know?
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But I didn't care.
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And the next day I get a call from John Linn, who was-- We'd had-- John
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Linn was our very first guest, right?
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And we worked with him at SeaWorld Abu Dhabi.
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We know John very well, obviously.
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And, um, I got a call from John Linn, he's like, "I'm, I'm here, uh, with Enertec.
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We are the, the, the en- the, the designers of the filtration system here.
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I got your resume.
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Let's interview you." And I went for the interview.
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I didn't want the job.
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I didn't think I did.
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I thought it was not gonna be professional enough for me.
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And, um, I got there, and the people that were interviewing me, besides John,
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who was an incredibly smart, sharp guy, there was the curator of mammals, there
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was the assistant director to the zoo.
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All very, very sharp people.
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And, um, I was impressed.
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And after-- I went into the interview not wanting the job, and
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I left totally wanting the job.
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And I got it, and that was my first LSS job.
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Yeah.
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And Joe, I think about, uh, Desert Storm, Persian Gulf, Arabian Gulf on
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the other side of the body of water.
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But 30 years, essentially- From that period of time, you found yourself
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back at the Arabian Gulf 30 years later, uh, on SeaWorld Abu Dhabi, and
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again, we crossed paths with John Linn.
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So he has been a staple in and out of your 30-year car- plus career.
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For sure.
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I mean, John, you know, he's just been a, a person that I've relied on a lot.
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He taught me everything at Brookfield, and then he was available for
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quest- and I had a lot of questions.
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Uh, he was available for questions.
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He … W- when I drove out to my second job at Albuquerque Aquarium
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in '96, I stopped to see him in St.
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Louis when he was living there.
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He's always available.
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I've been talking to him for years, and then got to work with him again.
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It's funny you mention 30 years in the Middle East because when I was in the
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Navy in the Persian Gulf, we stopped for R&R for, like, a little four-day vacation
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In Dubai, and there was nothing there.
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And 30 years later, I'm flying in and out of Dubai going to Abu Dhabi, and
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it, obviously it looks a lot different.
00:17:14
Yeah, and I mean, if Dubai looked like that, imagine what Abu Dhabi
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looked like at that time because- Oh, I know … you know, it was lagging
00:17:23
behind Dubai, um, in development.
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But I, you know, on the show, um, we talk a lot about what I do and, you know, and
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it's not, unless you're, you've tuned into the right show or the right few shows,
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there r- there's probably listeners out there that, you know, that who's this Dr.
00:17:43
Jeff, and what's the doctor in?
00:17:46
And, and I know I've alluded to this and, and my background is in chemistry,
00:17:51
but the, the point of the matter is that I'm a life support system scientist, but
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you don't go to school for that, right?
00:18:00
Right.
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That, that doesn't exist.
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A- and so, uh, you know, uh, h- this is an interesting story in, in my case.
00:18:07
I'm in graduate school, University of Florida, finishing my PhD and
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trying to get a job, uh, as a research chemist at a, at a chemical
00:18:16
company or a petrochemical company.
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And so I, I interviewed for jobs and had job, got jobs at ExxonMobil, Dow,
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DuPont, all the typical places you would think a PhD chemist would go to work.
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And my PhD was in physical organic chemistry, and the physical
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part was kinetics, and it was the rate of chemical reactions.
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And I think about LSS and salt water and all the reactions going
00:18:45
on in the salt water, whether it be with ozone or something else.
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It's all related to the concentration and the temperature.
00:18:55
And I think about our, our polar, our penguin systems, all the way up to
00:18:59
our tropical warmer water systems.
00:19:02
There's a temperature gradient there of, that's pretty vast, and there's
00:19:07
also different concentrations of dosing, whether that is sodium
00:19:12
hypochlorite or ozone or anything else we put into the water.
00:19:17
Uh, all of that led to a new job, and, and I was going down to the job board
00:19:23
in the chemistry department at UF, and there was a sorcerer apprentice Mickey
00:19:30
on a piece of stationery letterhead for a job at Walt Disney World in Orlando
00:19:38
at Epcot, and specifically to be based at what was called The Living Seas at
00:19:44
the time, arguably at that time, uh, the largest aquarium in the world.
00:19:51
A- and so I thought, "Well, gee, that's not petrochemical, that's not fertilizer,
00:19:56
that's not pharmaceuticals. That, that's-- What is this about?" So I went down there,
00:20:03
I interviewed, and, uh, got that job.
00:20:06
So now I have this decision to make, right?
00:20:08
I've got the, the traditional chemist jobs, and then I've got this one-off, and
00:20:15
I took the one-off And I mean, n- not to, I don't know, not to really make a big
00:20:21
deal out of money, but w- was the money at Disney comparable to what it would've
00:20:26
been, what it, it would've been at Exxon or, or one of these bigger companies?
00:20:31
It was the low offer, believe me.
00:20:34
I bet.
00:20:34
Um, 1989, right?
00:20:36
Okay.
00:20:36
I, I finished my, I finished my PhD on a Thursday in October, and I was
00:20:41
at Disney on Monday, following Monday.
00:20:44
Took no time off.
00:20:46
They moved me down there.
00:20:48
But there was a big delta in salary between what I was offered at Disney
00:20:53
versus the other larger companies.
00:20:56
And, um, well, Disney was a large company, but certainly not, uh, adept
00:21:01
at hiring scientists or chemists.
00:21:04
So, um, I, I took a chance and went with it.
00:21:08
And was there somebody there before you?
00:21:10
Or like, what, uh, did you have any idea what you were gonna be doing for Disney
00:21:16
and The Living Seas as a PhD chemist?
00:21:19
Yeah, that came out in the interview actually.
00:21:21
And, and- Ah … that, and the very first thing we had, of course, this being
00:21:25
an inland closed life support system, backwash recovery, no water changes
00:21:32
whatsoever because of the, the sanitary sewer couldn't handle a discharge of salt.
00:21:38
Uh, and so nitrate became the issue, and, and denitrification
00:21:44
was just coming onto the stage.
00:21:46
And, um, so I was, I was really hired to solve that problem and, uh, lead
00:21:52
that effort to, uh, to do a nitrate digester process at The Living Seas.
00:21:59
And how long had Living Seas been in operation at that point?
00:22:03
Because we've, some of our guests, I mean, Paul Cooley, right?
00:22:07
Uh- Joel Johnson … uh, Joel Johnson talked about Living Seas.
00:22:10
It was, back then it was the aquarium.
00:22:14
That's right.
00:22:15
It, it opened in 1986.
00:22:18
Oh.
00:22:18
And so, so Joel and Paul Cooley worked on that in the design phase
00:22:25
in the run-up to the 1986 opening.
00:22:29
So when I arrived, it was roughly three years later.
00:22:33
Jim Pappas was there at the time.
00:22:36
He was, he was just about one month, I think, from leaving to,
00:22:41
to, uh, take on a venture at Texas State Aquarium in Corpus Christi.
00:22:46
A- and so I came in to a role that had been created specifically to,
00:22:53
to, um, denitrify the living seas.
00:22:56
But I quickly transitioned into the ozone world to try to understand ozone and ORP
00:23:03
and the reactions that occur, uh, when ozone gets dissolved in our seawater.
00:23:09
Uh, and th- these were the days where they were dealing with air diffusers,
00:23:14
air stones, things like that to deliver ozone to the water with large low
00:23:21
surface area bubbles and hoping you got some ozone dissolved into the water.
00:23:26
And this was really before the, the injectors, uh, were coming onto the scene.
00:23:32
And this is really interesting.
00:23:35
I, I didn't really n- know this about you, which is I guess why
00:23:39
we're having this conversation.
00:23:40
But what… Was there anything you did in your undergrad or your graduate or your
00:23:45
PhD studies, did you specialize in water?
00:23:48
Did you specialize in nit- nitrification?
00:23:50
I mean, was this something that, that you use?
00:23:54
Obviously, you used your, your PhD chemistry studies, but was it familiar
00:23:59
to you, or was it totally new?
00:24:01
It was quasi-familiar.
00:24:03
In other… By that I mean, yes, I, you know, I, I had had aquariums as a kid.
00:24:09
Mm-hmm.
00:24:09
I knew, I knew about a biofilter, and I knew how, that ammonia was a
00:24:13
problem, and we needed to oxidize ammonia to nitrate, and then that's
00:24:18
why you do water changes at home.
00:24:20
And, you know, my 200-gallon aquarium, I just sort of did water changes on it.
00:24:25
A- and we didn't have to deal with, uh, nitrate removal in the classical
00:24:30
sense, where you take bacteria and you do it under a, a low-oxygen environment.
00:24:36
I had to learn all that, and so I relied a lot on the water, wastewater treatment
00:24:41
industry to learn the chemistry of those processes, and I applied it to LSS.
00:24:49
So this is '89.
00:24:50
Now, did you go to undergrad at U- University of Florida as well?
00:24:55
Yeah, I went to undergrad at a small private college at Manchester University
00:25:01
in I- in Indiana, where I'm originally from, and I, I was a pre-med in undergrad.
00:25:06
And, but I grew to love chemistry and decided to apply for PhD programs, and
00:25:13
that's how I found my way to Florida.
00:25:16
Let's take a quick break here and, and, and hear from one of our sponsors.
00:25:21
We're here with Mr. Nuritin Ersu from Matt LSS.
00:25:27
Uh, they're one of our… They're one of Inflow's, uh, level three sponsors.
00:25:32
We really appreciate that.
00:25:34
So Mr. Nuritin, um, what, what makes Matt LSS special?
00:25:40
Or, or what, what can a client expect when they work with Matt LSS?
00:25:46
Um, so the, the beauty for the client is he comes to Dubai, uh, to, to
00:25:52
Matt Filtration, and basically under one roof he can find every equipment
00:25:58
he needs for his, uh, aquarium.
00:26:01
Not only aquarium, we are talking about aquaculture, onshore, RAS projects,
00:26:06
or zoological projects, or zoos.
00:26:09
So any product that we are not producing, like pumps or, or heat generators or
00:26:16
chillers, we would source it also for the client, so the client will basically
00:26:21
deal with one supplier for all his, um, um, requirements on equipments.
00:26:26
And how about your client relationship?
00:26:29
How is that, how is that special for you and, and w- what does it,
00:26:34
what does it mean to Matt LSS?
00:26:38
And I can, um, proudfully say there's no single project that mom-
00:26:45
that Mert, uh, left unfinished.
00:26:49
Every project that Mert started, we finished successfully.
00:26:52
There is not a single project where we end up on a court case with the client.
00:26:57
There's not a single project where we left unpaid.
00:27:01
We stay friends with our, uh, clients after the projects, and I think this is a
00:27:06
success, and that brings another project.
00:27:09
Okay, we're, we're, we're back now, and, uh, let's, let's continue.
00:27:13
So you're at, you're at Disney World, and you've been given this, this challenge of
00:27:22
this, basically this closed system that you backwash your filters into a basin.
00:27:30
You process that water and reu- and reuse it.
00:27:35
Obviously, nitrates build up.
00:27:36
So how do you get technical?
00:27:40
H- How do you start to figure out how to lower nitrates?
00:27:46
Well, there, you know, I d- had to do a lot of research, right?
00:27:50
This is before Google, right?
00:27:51
And for- Right … for, for any other, it, the, you know, the
00:27:54
internet wasn't even around.
00:27:56
And so you're, you're spending a lot of time in libraries and, and
00:28:00
reading a lot of books and journals.
00:28:02
But I get … Long story short, it was clear to me that th- this is often
00:28:08
thought of as an anoxic, not truly anaerobic, but very low oxygen, li-
00:28:16
less than one part per million dissolved oxygen, is where a, a group of bacteria
00:28:21
called facultative anaerobes, which means they aren't true anaerobes.
00:28:27
Facultative, their ability is to, they breathe oxygen if it's around, but if you
00:28:33
starve them, this bacteria, o- of their oxygen, they find oxygen somewhere else.
00:28:42
And nitrate, the ion, negatively charged ion, is NO3.
00:28:47
And so it goes in there, the bacteria grabs the oxygen out of the nitrate
00:28:55
and reduces it to nitrogen gas.
00:28:58
You know, 79% of our atmosphere is nitrogen gas, and it's N2.
00:29:05
So the bacteria are very efficient at stripping oxygen out of the nitrate
00:29:10
ion to convert it to nitrogen gas, and the filters, the denitrifying reactors
00:29:17
or digesters, sit there and burp gas.
00:29:22
So now I know that, I don't know it so deeply, but I know there's
00:29:28
batch denitrification and there's continuous denitrification.
00:29:32
Now, I think back in the day, we did it batch wise.
00:29:36
So describe the difference between those two, the pluses and minuses of those two,
00:29:44
and sort of the how it's moved through the years, I think from batch to continuous.
00:29:49
Sure.
00:29:50
Sure, Joe.
00:29:50
I think exactly.
00:29:51
So let me just back up one more step.
00:29:53
The process also requires, uh, a group of…
00:29:59
This, the group of bacteria are called heterotrophs that use carbon.
00:30:04
There's another group of bacteria in this facultative anaerobe group
00:30:08
called autotrophs, and they utilize inorganic, and in most cases, sulfur.
00:30:14
So let me talk about both of those a little bit.
00:30:18
My first go at this, at the Living Seas, was a batch process where I
00:30:24
dedicated a quarter of a million gallon basin, and I would batch out water.
00:30:29
Uh, you know, the, the Living Seas was almost six million gallons, and so you
00:30:34
can do the math on that and see that you, you really need to do 24 batches, uh,
00:30:40
before you process all the water, right?
00:30:42
And so we did one batch at a time, and the carbon source for these
00:30:48
bacteria was initially methanol.
00:30:52
And now everyone listening out there thinks, "Well, that's crazy.
00:30:56
Why would you add methanol?
00:30:57
It's toxic.
00:30:58
It's gonna kill fish." This is why it was the batch process first-
00:31:04
Right … where we could control the chemistry, dose in the methanol at the
00:31:10
right, uh, amount to match the balanced chemical reaction, don't overdose, make
00:31:17
sure your ORP goes to about negative 200 millivolts, you're actively
00:31:23
denitrifying, a- and you don't overdose.
00:31:26
And so you've got a controlled environment batch, if you will, where
00:31:32
you can keep an eye on all that.
00:31:34
And then on the way back to the aquarium or the habitat, you refilter it, you
00:31:41
oxygenate it, you, uh, ozonate it, you kill off anything, and you… And then
00:31:47
once it's cleaned up and reclaimed, like you would a sand filter reclaim, you
00:31:53
can ship that water back to the habitat Yeah, and that's, but like you say, I
00:31:59
mean, it, y- you know, you take a batch, you lower the nitrates, you clean it up.
00:32:07
Obviously, the more water, the longer it takes.
00:32:10
But in the meantime, your water that's in the LSS still, that's in the, that's
00:32:14
in the, uh, the habitat, is increasing in nitrates basically- That's it … right?
00:32:19
That's right.
00:32:20
And so what happens is you, you get a decay, you drop the nitrate.
00:32:24
It's a series of dilutions, basically.
00:32:27
You're- That's right … you're sending a zero nitrate batch of
00:32:31
water back into a water that contains significant nitrate, and you feed every
00:32:37
day, and you're generating nitrate every day from the nitrification
00:32:40
process in, in your sand filters.
00:32:43
A- and so you're fighting it all the time.
00:32:46
And so what happens in the batch process is you reach what's called
00:32:49
a steady state concentration.
00:32:52
Now, in mathematics we call it an asymptote.
00:32:55
You know, the curve, the d- the nitrate reduction curve kind of levels out, and
00:33:02
it doesn't, it doesn't go any lower.
00:33:05
A- and that number might have, might be 100 parts per million.
00:33:09
So we took it from 700 down to 100, and we couldn't get below 100.
00:33:14
Um, and the desire was to have as low as you could go.
00:33:18
A- and that began this whole, uh, segue into continuous flow processes
00:33:24
and a move away from methanol.
00:33:27
Uh, uh, the carbon source now that I use in our nitrate digesters is glycerin.
00:33:34
Um, I, I still have one nitrate digester, uh, on sulfur.
00:33:39
The sulfur needs to be replaced over time, so that's a sand filter with
00:33:44
sulfur in it, and a buffer because you do, uh, form some acid in this process.
00:33:50
And so you put some scallop shell or aragonite or calcium carbonate in
00:33:55
there to help absorb the acids that are produced, and the sulfur just gets
00:34:00
chewed up by the bacteria reducing out and taking away the nitrate.
00:34:07
So that's the sulfur process, and there's a lot of those out there.
00:34:10
Georgia Aquarium, Disney today has sulfur, uh, nitrate digesters.
00:34:16
I have one.
00:34:18
I've got several glycerin digesters.
00:34:21
Glycerin, of course, is a very safe organic molecule.
00:34:24
It's basically the, the backbone of triglycerides or fats.
00:34:30
Um, and so it's, it's very safe in our environments.
00:34:33
And so we've got sulfur, which is tested, tried, m- and true, and very good,
00:34:39
and we've got carbon-based glycerin.
00:34:42
So it just depends on which way you wanna go.
00:34:44
But these are both very suitable for continuous flow.
00:34:49
But this, but you still run into the issue of- Possibly if it's not a, a large
00:34:57
enough denitrification filter with n- not enough flow, or correct me if I'm
00:35:03
wrong, but, or if you feed more than you actually designed for, then, and
00:35:09
you have more nitrates, then you still risk getting to a steady state and,
00:35:13
and you just can't get it any lower.
00:35:15
Yeah.
00:35:16
The, the, it… You still get to a steady state, but it's, it's lower, a
00:35:20
lower level steady state, lower- Mm-hmm … concentration than the batch process was.
00:35:26
So, and, and, and then over the years, as you know, Joe, we, we started
00:35:31
developing, uh, less energy intense, uh, salt marsh wetland type filtration
00:35:37
systems that, uh, that can knock the nitrate down to very low, and you can
00:35:42
get to invertebrate levels that way, especially in a closed system where you
00:35:48
can't do water changes, or you can't do water exchanges like Abu Dhabi with, with
00:35:53
a natural water source from the Gulf.
00:35:56
But you still run into that issue with the wetlands that the water has to move
00:36:02
not too quickly to actually denitrify it, and if it moves too quickly,
00:36:07
then it's just, it's not gonna work.
00:36:08
That's right, Joe.
00:36:09
It's called low and slow.
00:36:11
The- Mm … these wetlands are basically a, a gravity, vertical gravity filter.
00:36:16
A- And so that water moves slowly over the plant root systems that contain
00:36:22
both the nitrifiers, the aerobic zones, and the denitrifiers, the
00:36:28
more, uh, anoxic low oxygen zones.
00:36:32
So I, I love this about the podcast that's happening here, even though we
00:36:35
don't have a guest, and the dynamic here that I love is that we have a certain
00:36:41
plan for this podcast, and we have certain subjects we wanna get to, but-
00:36:48
But when Dr. Jeff starts talking about some, some other things that are super
00:36:52
interesting, uh, that I like to get into those deeply and then bring us back
00:36:58
to, to, to what we were talking about.
00:37:01
So we went into denitrification a- and batch versus continuous versus wetlands.
00:37:07
But so let's go back.
00:37:09
So you go to Disney, and how… I'm assuming you assu- you, you
00:37:15
solved their denitrification problem and worked on that.
00:37:18
How long were you there, and where'd you go after that?
00:37:20
Yeah.
00:37:21
So after, um, I, I, I transitioned away from, uh, the, the seas and LSS and
00:37:27
went into Walt Disney Imagineering, which is the arm of the company
00:37:32
that does theme park development.
00:37:35
And so my-- I shifted gears a little bit in there to go to environmental
00:37:41
science side of the business.
00:37:43
In other words, everything you have to do to a site to, to make sure you
00:37:47
preserve ecosystems, wetlands, and whatnot to, to build a, a, in this case,
00:37:53
Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World.
00:37:56
And so I went to the Imagineering side, and, and when I, when I left
00:38:00
there, you know, I, I started a small design company called, uh,
00:38:05
Entertainment Environments Group, EEG.
00:38:07
You might remember that, Joe.
00:38:10
I do.
00:38:10
Um, you know, and so I went out, basically, I went out on my own
00:38:14
and be- became a consultant But, and you moved from Orlando, right?
00:38:18
Did you, you came to California Yes, I moved to Orange County, uh, Laguna Beach,
00:38:23
and based my business out of there.
00:38:25
Yeah, I remember that very well because I was at Brookfield i-in
00:38:30
'92, '93, '94, '95, and at that point we were, we were starting also, we
00:38:38
were starting that organization.
00:38:41
Pat Case, along with a bunch of people at Enertec, started that, and then
00:38:46
he asked me to help plan the first also show, along with Greg Case and
00:38:52
Stuart McDaniel and John Waters, and I know that he was encouraging
00:38:59
you to be involved in that as well.
00:39:01
And so I was in touch with you, and you started this EEG, this, this
00:39:05
company EEG, and you started…
00:39:08
I mean, it was very innovative 'cause y- this was, like, the, the first
00:39:11
days of the internet really, and you started, like, a subscription-based
00:39:18
consulting, uh, website that we could ask LSS questions there, right?
00:39:23
That's right.
00:39:24
I, I did do that very early on in the internet phase of our lives.
00:39:29
But it was, it was where I would write articles too.
00:39:32
You could certainly pose questions, and I would answer them, and you,
00:39:36
it would generate an email that was sent back to, uh, the client.
00:39:41
Uh, and but then I would write articles on ORP or ozone reactions
00:39:47
in seawater or the bromide ozone reaction that we need to be aware of.
00:39:53
So all of that was, it was a vehicle for me to get some of the science
00:39:57
of LSS out there into, uh, into use.
00:40:01
Yeah.
00:40:01
I, I joined it and I, I, you know, for me, my original discovery when I started
00:40:09
LSS, and I was, I was totally into it, I thought it was so cool because it, for me-
00:40:17
It just combined this idea of engineering, of solving problems, but also, you know,
00:40:24
using your hands and dealing with people and dealing with water and dealing with
00:40:29
animals, and it just, it had all-- it just swirled with all these different
00:40:34
things that were always changing.
00:40:35
And I just, I just never got bored of it.
00:40:37
But I was frustrated because there wasn't anyone, there wasn't anywhere
00:40:41
really to go to study it, to really sort of get academic about it.
00:40:45
And here you were, an academic, saying basically, "Here I am to help answer
00:40:50
questions." And I took advantage of it.
00:40:52
I called Greg Case a lot at SeaWorld Florida.
00:40:55
I called Stuart McDaniel a lot.
00:40:57
I called John Linn a lot, and John Waters at Enertec, and it's just,
00:41:02
just, um, we needed people like you to move things forward, don't you think?
00:41:09
Well, I, I'd like to think that, Joe.
00:41:11
One thing I think about your career arc and your trajectory and, and, and while
00:41:16
we were communicating and talking back to one another and, and with Enertec's
00:41:20
involvement, John Linn, everybody you just mentioned through those mid-'90 years, we
00:41:27
were sort of all kind of moving together.
00:41:30
And y- you know, your, your career arc went Brookfield Zoo, Albuquerque,
00:41:36
San Diego Zoo, and you were o- operations all the way through.
00:41:43
But, uh, one thing I, I wanna get into a little bit more is what compelled you to,
00:41:49
to go back to your engineering, well you were using your engineering all the way
00:41:53
through, of course, as an operator, but to go to the design side of the business?
00:42:00
Yeah, it's, it's a good question.
00:42:02
I, I was an operator for, you know, a long time, you know, t- 20 years almost, and,
00:42:09
um, but I had this engineering degree.
00:42:11
And it's a good question because- I was motivated to get on the design
00:42:17
side because I needed to understand why those systems that I had been
00:42:24
operating for so many years, why they were designed the way they were.
00:42:30
Because I operated systems that were done by different design engineers over the
00:42:35
years, and I could never understand why they put this pump there, or why they put
00:42:42
this valve there, or why did they have the ozone injection this way or that way.
00:42:49
And so I just, because I had that engineering degree, and I just, I
00:42:54
wanted to be involved heavily on the design side to figure out why
00:43:00
things were done the way they were.
00:43:02
And it's funny because I did, I did go to work for, um, MWH at that point,
00:43:08
turned to PCA, now it's Ardura, Chris Eccles, John Kahmeier, Paul Cooley, and
00:43:14
I, I worked with them for years doing the hardcore design, and I learned that
00:43:19
there's so many things on the design side that the engineer has to deal with that
00:43:25
the operator doesn't really understand.
00:43:28
Things like Budgets, things like scope, things like the way specs are
00:43:36
written, things like space, you know?
00:43:40
I, I know a lot of operators say, "Well, why don't we get much space
00:43:43
here? What, how come this is such a small, a small area for all my pumps?"
00:43:47
But back in those beginning design meetings and the architect is trying
00:43:52
to divvy up space, you fight for it, but sometimes you just can't get it.
00:43:56
Yeah, you know, Joe, to take this one more step and to a technical outcome, one
00:44:02
thing I notice is the design engineer, the LSS engineer on the design side,
00:44:10
often, you know, you, you know you have to do this hydraulic analysis on
00:44:16
the whole system- Mm-hmm … because we've talked about it on the show with
00:44:19
several of our guests, where we've got LSS processes and equipment on multiple
00:44:27
levels throughout whole buildings.
00:44:30
Uh, a- and so hydraulics becomes extremely important, and you… a- and
00:44:36
as an operator, you don't do hydraulic analysis all the time, so the design
00:44:42
engineer actually, you gotta prove that it's gonna work, right, hydraulically?
00:44:48
Sure.
00:44:48
Oh, yeah.
00:44:48
The, the hydraulic, uh, calculations are incredibly complex.
00:44:54
I mean, we have a spreadsheet that we use, but you have to, um…
00:44:59
Yeah, you have to basically, you have to understand the pipe routing, okay?
00:45:05
You don't do hydraulic calculations early in design because things
00:45:08
are always changing, right?
00:45:10
But once you solidify where the pump is going to be, what the elevation
00:45:15
of the pool is, where the degas tower is going to be, and then every pipe
00:45:21
route, because every pipe fitting and every foot of pipe is more head loss.
00:45:27
And so, you know, we try to make pipe routes as efficient as possible so
00:45:33
that we don't have high head pumps and we don't use a lot of energy
00:45:37
and we don't spend a lot of money.
00:45:38
And that makes a good, good sense.
00:45:41
Gotta do it.
00:45:42
But then what happens when MEP puts a duct somewhere and your
00:45:47
pipe wants to go through there, uh, and you have these clashes?
00:45:51
Can you talk about all those meetings that put me to sleep, but you guys were
00:45:57
just grinding away on the clashes that occur between the disciplines around LSS?
00:46:08
Yeah,
00:46:13
I got one word for you.
00:46:13
It's called coordination, and th- this is key.
00:46:13
This is totally key.
00:46:13
Structural, mechanical, electrical, HVAC, LSS, even the controls engineers, you've
00:46:22
gotta coordinate because, as you know, there are three very distinct sides of
00:46:27
LSS: design, construction, and operation.
00:46:32
And all of these need to be working together because if I don't know about
00:46:38
this duct and I run my pipe going up to the degas tower, and then I size my pump
00:46:45
and it's, it's a 300 GPM pump at 45 feet a head, if I have to switch that and I
00:46:53
need to go around something, or if I don't know that duct's gonna be there because
00:46:57
the mechanical overlay or the, the, the computer program doesn't show it, and
00:47:02
then at the end I need to reroute that pipe, that's gonna add head, and it's
00:47:07
gonna change the kind of pump I need, and it's going to change the motor size.
00:47:13
And so electrical then has to make changes, and all these things cost
00:47:16
money, and it's a large pain in the butt.
00:47:20
Yeah, and it could change where you arrive on your pump curve or not.
00:47:24
And the point is, I mean, every fitting, right?
00:47:27
And not… If you had to put some 90s in on the path, I mean, that, that
00:47:32
adds, uh, extra head loss too, right?
00:47:34
Definitely.
00:47:35
And so this is why coordination is so important.
00:47:37
That's why the LSS has gotta be on the same page with the mechanical,
00:47:42
on the same page with the structural, on the same page with the electrical,
00:47:45
even architectural, right?
00:47:47
'Cause architects are putting walls places
00:47:51
Now, Joe, I wanna-- There's-- I've always thought that we do it on our
00:47:56
experience a lot, but placement of skimmers and sumps or the bottom drains
00:48:03
in a, in an aquarium, there, there are advanced modeling techniques that can
00:48:08
help us determine where they should be.
00:48:12
But in our experience, we kinda know where they should be.
00:48:16
But describe what techniques we use to sort of model, uh, the flow through the
00:48:24
The aquarium or the habitat, ha- uh, where, and it kind of help us inform
00:48:30
where skimmers and sumps should be placed.
00:48:35
Well, you know, back in the day, the design was, you know, we, we needed
00:48:39
to know the flow first, and then, and we needed to know the geometry
00:48:45
of the pool, and we would place, place and size sumps and skimmers
00:48:51
where we thought, you know, where we thought, where inlets come in, where
00:48:55
we thought would provide the best flow.
00:48:58
Now we, we have certain calculations we make for the size of the sump.
00:49:02
We don't want it to have too high a velocity, right?
00:49:06
We want to have a high enough velocity to suck things down, but not too
00:49:10
high a velocity to suck fish onto it.
00:49:13
Skimmers, same thing.
00:49:14
We want the water to flow over the weir of the skimmer at a certain velocity so
00:49:19
that it can skim the top of the water.
00:49:23
Now, we moved into CFD modeling, which is basically, um, you model the inlets
00:49:31
and you see where the flow is going, and you place sumps and skimmers where you
00:49:38
think they should go, and then you s- then you run the model and you see by
00:49:43
colors, blue versus red, you see if you're actually getting good mixing in the pool.
00:49:48
That's right, Joe, and I think about short-circuiting.
00:49:51
If, if the, what the- Right … CFD computational fluid dynamic modeling
00:49:56
does, it really helps you identify the potential for short-circuiting so you
00:50:01
know where to put your inlets, skimmers.
00:50:03
You just don't want to have a, have flow coming in and you just
00:50:06
get sucked right into a skimmer or a sump down at the bottom.
00:50:10
So that, that's really valuable.
00:50:13
Problem is then the architect puts all this rock work in there and it,
00:50:16
and it sort of throws our model off.
00:50:20
It does.
00:50:20
It does sometimes, and that's, that's, again, it's all about coordination, right?
00:50:24
And I was talking about design versus operations versus construction
00:50:30
and, you know, you asked why I went from operations to design because I
00:50:34
really wanted to understand how these systems I had been operating for so
00:50:39
many years, how are they designed?
00:50:40
And then the third part of it was I wanted to get into construction, and
00:50:44
that's really what, what motivated me to go to Abu Dhabi for three
00:50:48
years, because I wanted to see how these systems are actually built.
00:50:54
And I mean, like, on a day-to-day basis, and of course, we had a lot of systems
00:50:58
in Abu Dhabi, but my point here is that- When you start changing things
00:51:03
in construction and they aren't the way they were designed, then you have
00:51:09
to start making changes on the fly.
00:51:11
Like you say, if there's this big piece of rock work that I did not count on
00:51:17
when I ran my CFD model, it is going to change things, and you need to
00:51:23
understand how things in construction will change things that you did in design
00:51:28
and could have a disastrous effect.
00:51:31
That's right.
00:51:32
I think about that all the time with respect to thematic
00:51:35
elements, wave ball, you know, mechanical devices that move water.
00:51:40
The animals themselves are mixing the water, right?
00:51:44
And so all of these processes that are occurring to get water, uh, directed
00:51:49
towards sumps and skimmers complicate the original model, which is just
00:51:54
a, a, a con- a concrete tank or body of water with fixed geometry, right?
00:52:03
Yeah, exactly.
00:52:04
So we're, we're, we gotta start wrapping this up.
00:52:07
Of course, we always say that, and we, I didn't get to all of your
00:52:10
history, Jeff, but I, I do wanna get into something very quickly.
00:52:14
I know you can't say it too quickly, but, 'cause it's a big deal, but- You
00:52:19
know, we talk about this a lot on the show, but y- you're sort of a living
00:52:21
example of somebody who combines a lot of parts of the habitat that are, that
00:52:30
affect LSS, and that LSS can affect.
00:52:34
So for you, LSS means a lot of things now.
00:52:37
You just mentioned wave machines, uh, you know, water movement devices.
00:52:44
These are all part of creating a, a, a bigger and better habitat.
00:52:48
What, what are some of the things that you work with directly?
00:52:51
Yeah.
00:52:51
So Joe, I, I deal with what's called environmental design, and so it's
00:52:56
all of the elements, the design elements that affect the, uh, the
00:53:01
environment and the animals in the environment, or the habitat as a whole.
00:53:06
So that could be LSS specific or it could be LSS adjacent, like pool coatings or
00:53:13
lack of pool coatings, substrates, crust coral, sand, what kind of flow you get
00:53:20
through that substrate, what chemistries could be going on with the substrate.
00:53:25
All of LSS, of course, is part of an environmental design of a habitat,
00:53:30
but also terrestrial habitats and, and various elements that go into ch- choosing
00:53:36
plants or, or trees, or, or biological elements that might find their way
00:53:43
into a habitat that might potentially be toxic to animals that live there.
00:53:48
So, so it's, it's a pretty wide-ranging, it's all in the zoo and aquarium world,
00:53:54
but it's, it's environment specific.
00:53:57
Um, you know, I often talk about the pillars of life support, and it's, it's
00:54:01
in a building or in a enclosed habitat.
00:54:04
The lighting systems, the HVAC, all become part of LSS.
00:54:09
And then, yeah, the, the, like you say, the lighting and, and, um, you know,
00:54:13
the, the, the way that we filter the air.
00:54:16
I mean, some of these animal habitats need specially filtered air, correct?
00:54:21
That's right.
00:54:22
In a penguin habitat, for example, we might turn that air over 25 times
00:54:27
an hour through HEPA filtration, Cosatron filtration for or- odor
00:54:34
control or ammonia odor control.
00:54:36
These sorts of advanced filtration technologies are needed because, uh,
00:54:41
penguins and other birds, uh, can develop respiratory disease primarily caused by a
00:54:47
fungus that can come in from the outside air, and so it needs to be highly treated.
00:54:53
Yeah, this is, this is one of the reasons, there are a lot of reasons why I, I wanted
00:54:59
to, to, to do this podcast with you.
00:55:02
First of all, I just, I just love LSS.
00:55:04
I just think it's super cool, and I love it so much that I want
00:55:09
other people to know about it.
00:55:11
I want other people that go to zoos and aquariums to understand there is somebody,
00:55:16
a team of people, who have not only created that, that habitat, but also help
00:55:23
it operate and keep the animals healthy.
00:55:26
So I've enjoyed this, this podcast a lot, and I think what you are saying
00:55:31
here about all the different parts of LSS, because we, you know, we need
00:55:35
to keep it sustainable, we need to keep the animals healthy, we need to
00:55:37
keep it looking good for the guests.
00:55:39
And so there's a lot of parts to that, and I think that having you talk about
00:55:43
all those different parts of it, because you do it on a daily basis, I think
00:55:48
it's super interesting, and I've really enjoyed these first 50 episodes, and I,
00:55:52
and I'm looking forward to the next 50.
00:55:55
I'm looking forward to 51, Joe.
00:55:57
You're a great co-host.
00:55:59
Oh, I wanted to ask you one last thing that we ask our guests, uh,
00:56:03
you know, and you know this question.
00:56:05
What advice would you give to a young person who's looking po-
00:56:10
perhaps to get into the LSS world?
00:56:14
Wow, I should have prepared for this.
00:56:16
No, I- it's-- that's, for me, that's, that's pretty easy,
00:56:19
and that is just say yes.
00:56:23
I think a lot of people in the LSS world maybe sometimes, or I guess in,
00:56:29
in life in general, they're sometimes-- they don't wanna say yes because they
00:56:33
think they're gonna get a lot of work thrown on them, so they hesitate.
00:56:38
I told myself early on in my career, someone needs help, if a marine mammal
00:56:43
trainer says, "Can you check this out?"
00:56:46
If the curator says, "Can you check this out?" If a- anything, if Pat Case
00:56:51
says, "Do you wanna help organize the next conference and come up with a,
00:56:56
with an organization?" I just said yes.
00:56:59
And I believe there's a lot of opportunities in LSS.
00:57:03
And my other p- piece of advice is always put your eye bow- eyeballs on anything.
00:57:11
If something is not working, go look at it, go touch it, go feel it, go
00:57:17
feel that pump motor, get to your spaces and look at your equipment.
00:57:22
So those are-- that's my advice.
00:57:24
How about yours?
00:57:25
Well said, Joe, and I'm gonna say it, I say it all the time, be curious.
00:57:28
And what you're getting at with all of what you just explained about eyes
00:57:32
on a- and use your senses, right?
00:57:36
And you're gonna be able to diagnose, uh, and find corrections and actions you
00:57:41
can take to make, uh, improvements in your overall systems and their processes.
00:57:47
Joe, you're a great friend.
00:57:49
Uh, I have had a wonderful time working with you, uh, on these 50
00:57:54
shows, and, um, I, I can't wait.
00:57:57
Have a great vacation, and, uh, I'll see you on the other side.
00:58:01
Sounds great.
00:58:02
Thanks, Dr. Jeff.
00:58:02
I wanna take this opportunity to thank our sponsors for this show,
00:58:08
Longhorn and Cloward and AED, and also thank all of our sponsors,
00:58:14
because we have, uh, 10, 11 sponsors that really help us create Inflow.
00:58:23
And we work with a company, The Podcast Authority.
00:58:27
Scott and Jason, great guys, have taught us a lot about podcasting.
00:58:31
We knew nothing.
00:58:33
They take care of a, a lot of, uh, the, the, the-- they take care of all the
00:58:36
sound and the editing and, um, it's really-- it's fun to work with them.
00:58:41
It's fun to work with you, Dr. Jeff.
00:58:43
And for all of you listening, we're gonna keep doing this.
00:58:47
And please leave us a message.
00:58:50
If you wanna be a guest, let us know.
00:58:52
We'd love to talk to you.
00:58:54
And thank you all for listening to Inflow.
00:58:56
Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review.
00:58:58
And don't forget, you can always stay connected with us at inflowlsspodcast.com.