 I'd like to spend today's presentation talking about a new endeavor I'm excited to introduce called the Float Research Collective. This is a nonprofit organization that I'm in the process of forming and I hope it's going to be a long haul effort, if you will, to bring floating to the clinical and medical community and allow this to be disseminated quite widely, actually, to all the patients who could benefit. So we'll be spending some time discussing the collective, discussing the aims of the collective, and so forth, and then after the talk, we're going to have time for some Q&A during your lunch break for those who have additional questions. So before we start, a couple updates. First of all, earlier this year, the first Float FMRI study was published, looking at the effects of floating inside the brain. I was really excited to see this paper finally come out in human brain mapping, a specialty journal, and last year at the 2020 Float Conference, I actually spent quite a bit of time presenting the results from this study, and I'm hopeful in the next few weeks maybe they'll be able to release the 2020 conference on YouTube so you guys could also watch that video. One thing I wanted to mention is one of the co-authors on this study, Dr. Yeji Bodurka here, recently passed away earlier this month. Yeji was a colleague of mine at Lloyd Institute. He's just a beautiful soul. He's a physicist by training, brilliant, brilliant mind, and there's no way we could have done this study without Yeji's help. He created all the advanced analytics, and that's really what he's done his whole life is. He's helped take FMRI and how to actually study the human brain using MRI scanners as sort of his legacy, and he's done amazing work in that domain. And I just wanted to acknowledge Yeji here and tell him that we miss him greatly, and I look forward to hopefully in the next year another FMRI study or two coming out once again because of the great help of Yeji Bodurka. The other update, if you remember a few years ago, I was telling you guys about a book that was written called Promise the Moon, and this was the untold story of the first women in the space race. And one of the interesting updates from this past year is Wally Funk, who is one of those women actually became the oldest person to ever go into space back in July of this year with Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin. Now she didn't get to go to space in the original space race, and part of what this book talks about is how these female astronauts were just as qualified as all the male astronauts, and they were able to do all the things the men could do. And in fact, they were able to do it even more than the men. So one of the anecdotes that they give in the book is that Wally Funk was in Jay Shirley's original float tank. This is the vertical sort of immersive float tank. And Wally was actually able to withstand this very difficult environment for over 10 hours, which was twice as long as any of the male astronauts that ended up going to the moon. So I'm happy to see that Wally Funk has finally made it up into outer space. And hopefully there'll be a woman on the moon soon. Now, this is not the moon I'm showing you, but in my opinion, this is the moon shot for the float industry. This is actually the planet of Ceres, which is a dwarf planet located on the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And that bright white spot on Ceres is actually a giant pool of magnesium sulfate. And so I view this as our moon shot and specifically the collective. And this is what I'm going to be focused on for a long time now. This is kind of what I'm going to be devoting myself to. And right now we're in the process of forming this as what's called a 501C3 nonprofit organization. And the 501C3 part is important, you guys. This is what allows us to accept tax deductible donations and allows us to conduct this research in perpetuity. Now, the four primary aims that I have set forth for the collective are as follows. The first one is to raise funds for the continuation of clinical float research. This is quite a monumental task. I've spent the past 10 years writing a ton of grants. We were lucky enough to get one of the grants funded by the National Institute of Health. This was the first time that the NIH had ever funded float research. And we need to continue to try to get funds for the continuation of float research and try other avenues of funding this because as you'll see later in the presentation, this is not an easy endeavor. It's very expensive to conduct clinical research. Now, the second aim is I would like to establish floating as an accepted medical treatment that can be reimbursed by insurance providers and prescribed by doctors and healthcare professionals. This would be an amazing achievement if we could accomplish it. Right now, there are no insurance providers who will reimburse for floating. And doctors and healthcare professionals typically have never heard of floating, let alone prescribe it. So I think there's a lot that we could do to try to work on establishing floating as an accepted modality. And that's going to become a primary aim of the collective. And I could tell you right now if floating were to become an accepted medical treatment that was reimbursed and prescribed by doctors and healthcare professionals, I don't think there would be a single open slot in any of your schedules. I think every day of the week, every time of the day would be completely booked because there's so many people that could use and benefit from floating. And this is unfortunately an untapped clinical tool. It really is not being utilized by Western medicine. And I want to change that. And that's one of the goals of the collective. The third goal is I'd like to help facilitate float research. We need a lot more float researchers. But then on top of that, I think there's a low hanging fruit here, which is there's so many float centers all around the world. And every single day I would venture to guess there's probably hundreds, if not thousands of people floating in those centers. So imagine if we could actually collect data in the float centers themselves and collect it in a form that would be publishable. There's so many things we could learn from getting data across multiple sites in a large group of people. And one of the things I'd like to do is create a cloud-based platform that will enable the collection of this data. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. And then finally, I want the collective to be an educational resource for the float industry. I would like to be able to communicate research findings, scientific findings to a lay audience, help you guys disseminate this to your clients, to your employees, to the people that come to your center day in and day out. And we're going to make a lot of effort towards that. Part of the effort is going to be an online presence. We have created a website that is kind of a holding page right now, but eventually it will become a much larger website, floatresearchcollective.org. And we've done something that never in my life did I think I would actually do, which is joining social media. If any of you guys saw my TED talk a few years ago, you'll know that I'm not a big fan of social media because of some of the downsides. But I think there are some upsides in terms of communicating quite rapidly and reaching a large group of people who are interested in that topic. So with that said, this past year we've actually launched social media channels across all the major outlets. And on the screen you'll see how to connect with us. I'd like to thank my wife, Brooke, who has helped really push this forward. There's no way I could have done this. I'm a total novice when it comes to social media. But please link to these accounts and help us share updates. I think this is going to be important as the collective moves forward. And there's been a lot of studies that have actually been published quite recently. And we've already started discussing them on these social media channels. Eventually what I'd like to do, this is sort of a goal for this upcoming year, is create what's called Research Explained, which will be a way of distilling these complex results from different studies down to something that's digestible. Something that any of you could interpret and explain to the people that come to your center. And this Research Explained segment is going to go through the different studies, talk about them, and try to communicate them in a way that's accessible. So that will be something that's coming up later. And hopefully this will be more accessible for you and help with both marketing and promotion of floating. So those are the social media channels. And as well, we have the Clinical Float website, which has a repository of all the peer-reviewed research that has been published on floating. And I encourage you to go ahead and peruse those pages. As I said, there's been several different studies that have come out over the past year. So here we are on our moon. And I wanted to kind of talk about the different areas of research that are being studied right now across the world. Now, for many years, the Lloyd Institute for Brain Research has sort of been the epicenter of float research. And it continues to be. Most of our research has focused on clinical psychiatric populations, really with a focus on anxiety, PTSD, depression, and anorexia nervosa. Yesterday, you got to see the first inpatient study that has ever been done with floating. Dr. Saib Khalsa, who's the director of the Float Clinic and Research Center at LIBER, presented on those data. It's very exciting to see that. For the first time, you guys, we have evidence, empirical evidence, in a randomized controlled trial that floating could acutely help inpatients who are quite severe. You know, the inpatients with anorexia nervosa are basically on their deathbed. They're malnourished, and many of them will actually pass away. And the more severe their anxiety was going into the experience, the more impact that floating had. So what does that tell you? It tells you that there's this whole unmet need of patients, rather severely impaired patients who could benefit from floating. Now, last year at the Float Conference, I announced that I was leaving LIBER. This was one of the hardest decisions I'd ever made in life, to be honest. But I'm still very close to the folks at LIBER. I still speak to Dr. Khalsa every week on the phone. We're still collaborating on all the ongoing research studies. We're still publishing papers. So that's the good news. You know, to me, the fact that I'm not at LIBER anymore gives me a little bit more space and time to actually devote to this greater cause of the Float Research Collective. And part of that is trying to facilitate more float research. And in fact, over the past five or so years, that's exactly what has started to occur. And it was really lonely being one of the only people in the world researching floatation. But like I said, over the past five years, that has now changed. And we're starting to see a trickling of new research happening all over the world, some of which is in the process of happening, some of which is already ongoing. And you see it covers a whole wide variety of topics, everything from pain to burnout to mindfulness and the study of consciousness. And you see different types of collaborations happening. You have places like the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University that actually has their own float tanks. Whereas you have people like folks at the Medical College of Wisconsin, right near where you guys are right now, who are actively collaborating with recreational float centers like Float Milwaukee to study acute trauma and PTSD. So it's very exciting to see these collaborations forming, to see these new float laboratories being built at different universities and research institutes. And this is what we're going to need, you guys. We need a collective of researchers in order to help establish floating as an accepted medical modality. There's no doubt about it. Now on top of that, I think a big part of what we'll be doing is collaborating with the other nonprofit float institutes and organizations. So for example, the float conference, we could be helping procure different researchers to be presenting their data. Some of you may have seen the FTA has actually organized a donation campaign to help fund our startup costs, especially the legal fees that are associated with getting 501C3 status. And I'm imagining we're going to do a lot of collaboration together. And then importantly, all the different float centers around the world are going to have an opportunity to join this collective and actually collect data at your center. And we'll talk more about that as well. So with that said, let's go into some more of the nuances of what the float research collective is. So first of all, it's an organization devoted to float research and trying to get more researchers to study this. I could tell you when I started studying this a little less than a decade ago, it was hard to figure out how to do this, how to actually set up a laboratory, how to make data quantitative, how to measure things in this environment. These are not trivial issues. And this is something that the collective could help with and something I'm happy to help provide to other researchers and scientists who are interested. On top of that, we need a lot more research and replication. I know a lot of you know that floating's been around for many decades and you assume, well, we've had a ton of science to back this up. It turns out we actually do not. There's some, there's some research, some of which I conducted and others like Tom Fine and Peter Sudfeld and so forth have conducted. But in terms of the rigorous large-scale studies that we're going to need, those really have not happened at a large scale. And importantly, there has not been nearly enough replication. That's the bedrock of science, you guys. If a finding at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research occurs, they need to see that that same finding could occur in another institute or another float center. And so they have something called multi-site studies in order to really show that whatever occurs in one location could also occur in another. And that's a critical step to getting approval to treat different medical illnesses. And I think importantly, the research needs to be published in respected peer-reviewed scientific journals. A lot of the early float research was published in non-peer-reviewed book chapters. That's not going to be sufficient. There's been studies that have been conducted in the float industry that didn't follow the proper protocol. And as a consequence, none of those data could actually be accepted in a peer-reviewed journal. And so one of my goals with the Collective is to make sure that whatever science we're doing, it's done to the utmost of ethical standards and will allow it to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. And I think we've had quite a bit of success in my laboratory doing that. And I want to help others. And then finally, collecting data at recreational float centers. This is a really exciting possibility. I think there's a lot of things we could do now that even five years ago would have been impossible. And part of that is because cloud computing has become so commonplace. It's actually quite easy to do. So essentially, the vision here is we would create an integrated cloud-based data collection system. And it would mainly be done using tablets. So if any of you have iPads or other types of tablets at your center, that's really all that it would require. You would have to have it connected to Wi-Fi. And we would help install basic database management programs like RedCap onto that tablet, which would allow you to collect data from the people coming into your center. We could collect different clinical measures, different self-report measures, both before people float and after they're finished. And all of this data would then get put into a central repository that could be mined, that could be published upon once proper analyses are done, and could become a very valuable tool for the float industry. And really, we want to obtain data in such a way that it's easily collectible at centers across the country and eventually the world could later be published in peer-reviewed journals. And easily sorted and analyzed to help answer questions of interest. And there's so many questions of interest, and that's one of the neat things about having a cloud-based system in place. As things come up, it's very easy in a cloud-based system to very quickly disseminate questions to the whole infrastructure with a push of a button. And then all of a sudden, all of those questions would go out to your tablets. And very quickly and rapidly, we could collect data from a large sample of floaters. And there's so many low-hanging fruits there. Just think about this past year with COVID. COVID long haulers are representing about 25% or so of people who've been infected. Now, that number is changing as we get more data, but that's millions of people who are suffering from chronic symptoms of COVID. And one of those symptoms, for example, that's quite prominent is anxiety. COVID long haulers suffer from clinical anxiety. So imagine if we had this system in place already, it'd be very easy to try to figure out who is floating that has suffered from COVID that has long call and is floating providing some benefit. You know, that's just one of many questions that we could answer with the cloud-based system that's set up in the Float Research Collective. And there's many others. So let me give you another perfect example. One of the most common questions I get asked is from doctors, from patients, from everybody is the following. Very simple. Is floating safe? And I think most of us would probably shake our head, yes, and say floating is safe. And for the most part in the research I've published and the research I reviewed, there does not seem to be any major adverse events or effects that we have to be that wary about. There's actually quite few, but it doesn't mean it's totally safe. And let me give you a concrete example. This was a study that came out earlier this year. It talks about the prevalence of meditation-related adverse effects in a population-based sample in the United States. And just to point out, the authors of this study are prominent and very well-known meditation researchers, very well-respected. And they wanted to understand, are there adverse effects when it comes to meditation? Now, most of you might think to yourself, meditation seems pretty safe. I would guess that there's probably not a lot of adverse effects. But take a look at what they found. They assessed over 434 people. And they actually found a higher proportion of adverse effects than they hypothesized. About one-third of the people, 32%, reported an adverse effect during meditation. And about 10% of those people said the duration of the effect lasted for over a month. Think about that. That's really incredible. I would have never guessed that. And when you look at the sort of top three adverse effects, people were reporting an increase in anxiety, an increase in re-experiencing traumatic memories, and heightened sensitivity of emotions. And this is over a quarter or so of the meditatives. So what does that tell you? It tells you that until you actually ask people, are you having adverse effects, it's hard to know. And if we had a cloud-based system in place for data collection, it would be very easy to collect data in 500 to 1,000 to even more floaters and figure out what are the base rates of people having effects like anxiety or traumatic re-experiencing or other adverse effects. And we just don't know yet. Now, another thing that kind of got me excited when I read this is if people are experiencing anxiety while they're trying to meditate, could you guys think of an environment that might help assuage some of that anxiety? You know, think about that. As I've shown many times without my own research, floating is sort of the ultimate environment to reduce anxiety quite acutely. And in that reduced state of anxiety, maybe that's the moment when people should be practicing meditation. So if anything, when I see data like this, it screams to me that we really need to be combining floating with meditation. So what kind of precedent is there to follow? What kind of models can we follow as we move forward with the float research collective? I think one organization which provides a good roadmap that we could consider is MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Now, a few years ago, some of you may remember Rick Doblin who had presented at the float conference. He is the director of MAPS. And just so you know, MAPS is a 501c3 organization just like I'm trying to do with the float research collective. And it's been around for 35 years, all right? And part of their goal is to find a way to get psychedelics, various psychedelics approved as a medical treatment. So there is some overlap there. And this past year has actually been unbelievable. I would say, you know, they've been around for 35 years. More has happened in this past year in terms of moving psychedelics towards a medical approval than in the previous 30 years combined. So it's really an exciting time for psychedelics. This was the cover of the New York Times earlier this year. The psychedelic revolution is coming. Psychiatry may never be the same. They're really looking right now at two different compounds, psilocybin and MDMA, mostly for the treatment of depression and PTSD. And I'm guessing that by next year, you guys, or 2023 at the latest, for the first time ever, MDMA will have approval by the FDA as a treatment for PTSD. And shortly thereafter, psilocybin will likely be approved for the treatment of depression. This is a really incredible change for the field of psychiatry who for decades has essentially banned these substances. And a lot of this is because of research. Really, that's what it comes down to. And this past year, there's been three really impressive studies that have come out all randomized controlled trials. And they were published in the best medical journals out there. New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Medicine, JAMA Psychiatry. So this is, in my mind, something we could strive towards. There's no reason that we couldn't do some of these same types of studies, but with floating. And just to give you an example, this New England Journal of Medicine study took psilocybin and they compared it to a gold standard SSRI for depression. This is quite similar to the study I had proposed a few years ago where you take floating and you compare it to a gold standard benzodiazepine and look at it for the treatment of anxiety. And that sort of head-to-head study is really what got New England Journal of Medicine excited. If you could take a novel therapeutic and compare it to a gold standard therapeutic and show that it's just as good if not better, people get excited. Doctors say, okay, this suggests that there is a new avenue, a new approach to helping these patients. And so I thought this was really noteworthy to see this past year and it's something that I think we could strive towards. And a couple other points of note, all of these studies were done by combining the psychedelic, whether it's MDMA or psilocybin, with psychotherapy. None of these studies allowed the patients to just take the psychedelic and then see what happens. They actually had very intensive psychotherapy that guided them through the entire experience. And I think it's something for us to consider. It's possible that at least with certain clinical populations, especially psychiatric populations, the combination of floating with psychotherapy may be more advantageous and beneficial than floating alone. And it's something for us to think about. And so what that means pragmatically is when the FDA approves these treatments, they're only going to approve the combination. They're not going to just say anyone who has PTSD could take MDMA or anyone who has depression could take psilocybin. They're going to make it so that it's only prescribed in combination with therapy. The other thing to keep in mind is these weren't extremely large studies. For example, the New England Journal of Medicine study, I believe only had 30 or so people in each group or maybe even less. So I think it's all doable. We just need to raise the funds to conduct these sorts of studies and then hopefully get them published in a journal like New England Journal of Medicine. That would be fantastic. Now, it's not cheap to run these studies and that's really what MAPS is all about. They're raising funds to conduct this sort of research. And one of the nice things about having a 501c3 non-profit is everything is transparent. So all money that is raised, you could see exactly where it's going and how much money that is. And so part of what the Float Research Collective will be doing is reporting everything in terms of our fundraising activities and how the money is being spent. But just to take a look at MAPS, you could actually look at the previous year's fundraising. And what's really quite amazing is they were able to raise about $19 million in fundraising from various individuals, corporations, foundations, philanthropists. I know Silicon Valley has been donating heavily to this. And they actually had a capstone fundraising campaign. Tim Ferriss was actually one of the main people behind this. And it raised over $30 million in 90 days. So last year alone, the MAPS organization had raised $50 million, you guys, to conduct these sorts of studies on psychedelics. And that just shows you what it takes to get to that level. $50 million is quite a bit of money. And when you look at other pharmaceuticals, when they have to conduct a phase three trial to get FDA approval, those studies could go into the hundreds of millions of dollars. So $50 million, even though it sounds like it's a lot, it actually gets a lot more expensive when you start doing these phase three clinical trials. Now we have an advantage. We're not a medication. Floating is a behavioral intervention. And as such, we do not need to get FDA approval. What we need to do is publish the proper randomized controlled trials to show that floating is beneficial. And then we could get approval from various medical organizations. So I don't think we need to raise as much money as MAPS is raising because we're not a drug. We're not a pharmaceutical. And that gives us a little bit more leeway in terms of our fundraising. And hopefully, we're not going to have to reach this same target to achieve the same results. I think we could do a lot more with less money. Now what does that mean to get approval? And I think this pyramid is important for you guys to understand because this is how science is conducted. It's conducted off of various layers of evidence. And as you move up to the top of the pyramid, you get more and more evidence that this is truly an effective treatment, not just an anecdote that happened by chance. And so as you see at the bottom of the pyramid, you have case studies. This would be sort of like the original research from the 1970s and 1980s where somebody floats with a various condition and somebody observes that they get better. Now, is it because there's something unique about that person or is it that floating is actually what's causing the effect? And so you have to conduct more and more rigorous studies. So you start conducting these various cross-sectional studies, case control studies, and then cohort studies. And eventually you build up a body of evidence that suggests, okay, floating seems to be effective for this condition, say for example, anxiety. Then you get to the point where you conduct what's called randomized controlled trials or RCTs. This is the gold standard for floating and for all interventions, whether it's a drug, whether it's a therapy, you need to conduct RCTs where people get randomized to do the active condition or some control condition. In medication studies, that control is usually a placebo pill. In flotation research, I think there's a lot of questions about what is the best control condition. And we can have a whole discussion about that alone. But nevertheless, once you publish an RCT, it then needs to be replicated by another laboratory or replicated in what's called a multi-site RCT where you have multiple float centers, for example, or research institutes doing the same exact protocol on a large group of people. And once you have several RCTs or some of these larger scale multi-site RCTs, you get to the point where you could have a meta-analysis or a systematic review that could make a more or less conclusive judgment on whether or not this is truly an effective treatment. And it's at that point, you guys, that medical organizations and doctors and medical and healthcare professionals will actually be able to start prescribing floating. But we're not there yet. We're not at the top of this pyramid. If anything, we're kind of right now in the middle of this pyramid. As you saw yesterday, Dr. Calza was talking about the first RCT that has ever been done on inpatients with anorexia nervosa. We have an ongoing RCT right now looking at patients with comorbid anxiety and depression. And that studies in its final year. But the thing with RCTs is it takes a long time. It takes many, many years to collect all the data. You tend to follow the patients up for months or even years later to see how long the effects last. And it takes a lot of personnel to actually bring these studies to fruition. So they're not cheap to do, but they're very important because without the RCTs, doctors don't even care. They think everything is basically snake oil until you could prove with an RCT that it's not. And that's where we're at now. I think right now floating is sort of somewhere here in the middle where we're beginning to conduct the proper RCTs that are going to be necessary for medical approval. But we need more of them and we need to raise the funding to conduct those studies. So in my mind, there's many areas of focus that we could consider. And I think there's a lot more than those that are just on this list. And I don't want to necessarily be exclusive to anything, but I think these are some areas with great promise that we could be focusing on. Now, the first thing is pain, stress, and anxiety. When you look at the evidence base of floating over the past few decades, those three things, that triad of pain, stress, and anxiety have probably the greatest amount of evidence to support that floating could help, at least acutely in the short term. Reduce pain, reduce stress, and reduce anxiety. So I think that would be areas that we should definitely try to focus on. Millions and millions of people suffer from these elements. There's a whole slew of conditions that are related to them. Just to give you some examples, PTSD, burnout, insomnia. Those are all conditions that would fall under this category. Interestingly, hypertension is related to this at some level. And a study just came out this month looking at the rates of hypertension over the past 30 years. And amazingly, hypertension has doubled in the past 30 years. There's now over a billion people on Earth who suffer from hypertension. And I could tell you from my research, one of the clearest findings we're seeing during a float physiologically is a precipitous drop in blood pressure. So if that has any prolonged effects that could extend beyond the float, I think hypertension would be a great area of focus. And then as I alluded to earlier, long haul COVID, there's going to be millions of people who are suffering from things like brain fog, fatigue, anxiety, depression. And this sort of panoply of symptoms that is what we're calling long haul COVID may get some benefit from repeated sessions of floating. And it's something that we should think about investigating. Now, the next area that I think floating could have a big impact on, but there's essentially no research investigating this yet, is drug addiction and withdrawal. You know, the CDC just released the data from 2020 and we had over 90,000 people in America who died of a drug overdose in 2020. And my suspicion is it may be even higher in 2021. And opiate overdoses, benzo overdoses, alcohol, these are all part of what's happening right now in society. And the physiological withdrawal from these substances is horrible. And I think floating might have a particular benefit on reducing withdrawal symptoms. And so I think this would be another area that we could consider focusing on. But once again, there's been no research whatsoever on any of those elements. And then finally, neurological disorders. You know, floating reduces stimulation of the human nervous system. That's what it does. And it does it more effectively than pretty much anything else out there. So we should be looking at various neurological disorders to see how that reduced stimulation could potentially impact them in a positive manner. And everything from traumatic brain injury to post-concussive syndrome to other conditions like ADHD or multiple sclerosis might find benefit with floating. There's certainly anecdotes about floating helping with these conditions, but there has been no systematic research. And so once again, we need to facilitate this research. These are all low-hanging fruits. Now, how are we going to do this? How are we going to be able to study all these things? How are we going to organize the float research collective? Right now, I've divided the organization of the collective into four committees. And each committee would essentially be responsible for striving towards the four different aims of the collective. So the first committee that's going to be very important is a fundraising committee. I'm going to need people who could help me raise funds for the continuation of clinical float research. I'm going to need people who are savvy at social media who could help with fundraising campaigns. We're going to need to think cleverly about how we could try to raise funds in this industry in a way that would create an impactful line of research. And to me, the fundraising committee is going to be paramount. And I'm looking for people to help with that endeavor. The second committee is what I'm calling the Medical Approval Committee. These are going to be people who are going to try to contact various organizations around the country and around the world and establish a line of communication. So for example, the World Health Organization would be one group that we could try to reach out to. The CDC, the NIH, various psychiatric and psychological organizations. These are groups that could help facilitate floating as an accepted medical treatment. And we could be talking with these organizations and try to understand what type of research are they going to require to accept floating as an actual medical treatment. And we could make sure that whatever studies that the float research collective is funding are actually the type of studies that will help get us that approval. And it will help make us much more efficient. And later today, you're going to see a great talk by Tony Basil from Australia, who's already made quite a bit of headway on this in Australia. And we'll be discussing some of that. And she's going to be part of the Medical Approval Committee. And we're going to need others as well to help join that committee and help get floating the approval that I think it's going to deserve. And finally, there's going to be two other committees. One is the Research Committee and the other is the Education Committee. The Research Committee is going to be primarily made of other researchers. I've already spoken with Tom Fine and Dr. Saib Khalsa and Flux, who you just heard from. And they're all going to be part of this Research Committee. We're going to make sure that there's great researchers out there who've already done float research, who could help guide the future research that's being done in this endeavor. And I think we're going to also need people who are savvy with computers because we want to create the cloud-based platform so we could collect data at centers across the world. And so I'm going to need people who are computationally savvy on the Research Committee as well. And then finally, the Education Committee is really about how do you disseminate the research to the float community. These are going to be people who are good with marketing, people who are good with advertising, people who are good with communicating to the lay audience so that we could then translate these findings into something that's actionable, into something that's going to be easy to disseminate to all of you. And so really, the Penn Ultimate Committee, which is the Education Committee, is about translating all of this in a way that will be understandable. And all of these committees are going to meet on a regular basis, okay? I don't know what that is yet. I think each committee will sort of set a course of meetings. Maybe they'll be meeting once a week. At times, maybe it's only meeting once a month. And they're going to be interacting with each other. I think that's going to be important. So people, for example, in the Medical Approval Committee are going to be talking to the Research Committee and saying these are the types of studies we need to be doing in order to get medical approval. And then the Fundraising Committee is going to be talking to the Research Committee and saying, well, these are the amount of funds we have to do this type of research. So what kind of studies can we actually afford to do? And right now, we just don't know. We have to see how much money we're able to fundraise. But I think all of these are going to be important. So when you join a committee, just realize you're going to have to commit to that committee, but then there's going to be crosstalk with all four of these committees. And then ultimately, all of these committees will report to a board of directors that will be really responsible for providing a compass, if you will, for the whole collective. So this is not a sprint, you guys. As you saw with maps, this is a marathon. It takes many years to conduct these studies, many years to raise the funds necessary. And it's going to take many years before we're going to have any sort of medical approval. But let's say best case scenario, we're able to raise a lot of money in the first few years. We're able to conduct those larger scale, randomized, controlled trials. And then maybe a decade from now, we're sitting in the same place that Maps is sitting this year. And so I think it's all feasible, but a lot of it's going to depend on fundraising. So right now in the year 2021, there's three primary goals. One is we're trying to get 501C3 status. And this is not easy. The IRS takes this very seriously. You have to get lawyers involved. You have to get accountants involved. And it's about a six month process once you apply for 501C3 status before the IRS actually approves you as a nonprofit organization. And right now I have found a lawyer locally who's going to be helping me with this. It's going to cost about $5,000 in legal fees alone. And I'm pleased to report that the FDA has officially achieved this goal. Right now they're matching donations up to $2,500. And we have achieved this goal in the past few days alone. So I can't thank you guys enough. I can't thank the FDA enough because we already have conquered the first part which is just getting this organization started officially. I'm also in the process of forming the board of directors. I think we're going to have a great board of directors and we'll talk more about that next year. And I'm in the process of forming the four committees. And this is something that I'm looking for help from you guys. If you want to volunteer and join one or more of these committees, please reach out to me and I'll show you how to do that in a second. Next year really is going to be about fundraising. And that's going to kick off our initial fundraising campaign and that's going to become a big part of what the collective will be doing next year. In addition, I would like to begin creating that cloud-based platform for data collection at float centers. This will take some time. There's going to be a lot of kinks we have to work out but I think that's going to be one of the primary goals for next year. And then finally, if all goes well, we're going to commence the first set of research studies probably in 2023. And these would be research studies that are funded and developed by the float research collective. They'll be happening at that collection of different float centers that I put up earlier in the presentation. And I think they'll also be happening at float centers across the world using the cloud-based platform. Now the type of studies we conduct, whether those are small-scale pilot studies or larger-scale RCTs, is all contingent on how much money we're able to fundraise. And so next year really is going to be a pivotal year for this collective. In terms of ways you can help, I think one of the easiest things you guys could be doing is help spread the word on social media, especially once we start fundraising. We're going to need a lot of help, a grassroots effort to get this campaign launched. Have your float center participate in research once we're able to create that cloud-based platform. We're going to need float centers to sign up and be trained on how to conduct this type of research. And I think if we could even get a few dozen float centers to sign up, that's going to be hundreds, if not thousands, of participants of data that we could be collecting. If you are interested in joining any of those different committees that we discussed, let me know. You could send me an email. My email address is down there. It's findstein.float at gmail.com. Please send me an email. We'll put you on a list. We already have about 20 or 30 people who volunteered to be part of one or more of these committees. I'm looking to get about 20 or 30 more people. It's going to take a group effort, you guys. I need a lot of help with this. So if you think you could contribute in any meaningful way and you're committed to this, please email me and we could get you into those committees. As I mentioned, we are getting startup donations via the FTA and you could do that right at the conference or on their website. And then the big thing, the big push is going to be next year when we start our fundraising campaign in earnest. So with that, I'll close my presentation. I know you guys have lunch now and I don't want to keep you from that. And I'm going to be moving into one of the think tank rooms. Jocelyn will let you know which one. To do a Q&A now for the next hour or two. So if you have questions, ideas, thoughts that you want to talk to me about, please join the Q&A session. We're going to have some nice brainstorming here. And we'll keep moving this mission forward. I thank you guys again. I'm excited about this next step and float research for me. I think this organization, the Float Research Collective could create a foundation for many things to come. And I look forward to having all of you join in and make this an amazing achievement for the whole float industry. So thank you guys. And sorry, I couldn't be there. Look forward to next year.