 Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. Floating has truly changed my life. In January of 2017, I floated for the very first time. But for you to understand a little bit about why it's made such a difference in my life, I have to tell you a little bit about myself. I don't advertise these things, but I have a physical degeneration in my spine that means that I've lived essentially in constant pain since I was 12, 13 years old. So back in 1983 in eighth grade, I had a surgery back at the Mayo Clinic where they attempted to reconstruct my spine. That worked pretty well. And I had four or five years of relatively pain-free, but the situation kind of re-evolved into itself. And I ended up having complete reconstructive surgery of my low spine here in Portland in 1998. So I just celebrated 20 years since my reconstructive surgery. I'm refused from L1 to L5, which is basically the entire small of your back that's reconstructed with parts of my hip and rib, four titanium screws, and so I'm kind of a bionic man in a way. I live a relatively minor life. A lot of people in my life aren't even aware that this goes on for me. I've worked here on campus where you guys all were yesterday at Portland State for over 20 years, have two kids and a wife and a family that I spend a lot of time outdoors and hiking and photographing and things like that. So for the most part, I live a pretty normal life, but it's always in pain. I'm not a believer in painkillers, and I've tried a lot of alternatives over the years, but nothing has really worked well enough that I've kept up with it. Had some testing where my pain tolerance has been measured as kind of off the scale. So that's basically what I count on to make it through my days. My wife here at Christmas of 2016 bought me a gift card to float on, and I've been thinking about it for a while. Had toyed with the idea, but you know, there's always some better use for that money, and I've just never done it for myself. So she made this gift to me, and on January 20th of 2017, I went and floated for the first time. I'm kind of a strategic mind. I like strategy games. I like spreadsheets, as my wife will certainly tell you, and building databases and things like that. So I did a lot of research into what floating would be like. I've watched Float Nation. I've watched blogs and vlogs and listened to the podcast from the industry and things, so I kind of knew what I was getting into, but I didn't know the kind of experience that I was going to have. I floated in the Room 3 at Float On, which is, I forget, Evolution Pod, so it's a smaller pod in that first float. And when I first got into the tank, I struggled a little bit with getting my neck to be comfortable, which kind of surprised me. Almost immediately, my back was almost as comfortable as it ever would be laying down at the end of a long day or getting comfortable in my own bed, but my neck was really problematic. So I tried different techniques to get that right, and it took about 40 minutes for my neck to find some level of comfort. At that point, about 40 minutes in, my neck was starting to get more comfortable, my legs and pelvis were pretty comfortable, my back was actually really relaxing in a way that I never could remember. My body was, it sounded very much like a bowl of Rice Krispies when you pour milk on it. It was snap, crackle, pop all over the place. I was hearing pops and noises from joints, and I felt like the muscles in my back were releasing in a way that they just never had. So now, about 60 minutes in, and I'm trying some different things with arm positions and trying to find that exact place that's going to get me over the edge. I'd heard these things about people seeing lights in the sky, and I wanted to experience those kind of things. And that's when I noticed my breathing was really starting to change, and my heartbeat, and the things that Justin was talking about earlier this morning, I was starting to experience those things. You know, my back wasn't 100% comfortable yet, but my neck was really getting there, 60 minutes into that float. At 75 minutes, some things started to happen that were really unusual for me. I put my neck, my head all the way back, and felt that water almost all the way up to my eyebrows, and that was kind of a magical position for me. That seemed to loosen things up in a different way. At that point, I felt something that the only time I've ever felt anything like it was having epidurals. It was the warm wash, and it was the endorphins kicking in through my body, and that isn't a completely pain-free experience for me, but it was something that was happening naturally in my body that the only way I'd ever experienced it was with an epidural in the past. So the floats that float on are 90 minutes. Now I'm about 80 to 85 minutes into the float, and I'm thinking about what's different, what's happening with me, and because I'm feeling my neck, but that's kind of all I'm feeling, and it finally dawned on me that what I was feeling was what I was not feeling. This was the first time since I was 12 or 13 years old. This is almost four decades that I wasn't feeling my back, and it was just a completely magical thing for me. I got choked up even thinking about it when I tell this story. You know, then the lights and the music come on because it's almost the end of the float, right? But I cheated, and I just laid there for about a minute and a half, and just like, is this really real? I come out of the float, and I go talk to the folks out at the counter, and you know, the float on guys are just really terrific in how they handhold you and treat their client. So they were really interested in this story, and I went home and I wrote about it, and that was as much for me. In fact, at that moment it really was for me. I never imagined that something like this day was going to happen, but I needed to almost re-experience it through writing about it to know that it was real, that this is really something that could happen for me, because you know, I kind of quite frankly given up searching for it. I thought that this is just the way life is for me, and so what you guys are doing as an industry is something that can really help people, and you know that it's become a real passion for me to share the stories and to get more people to know what kind of experiences that they can have in their own lives. So in the time since that first float, I've become a member at float on. I float pretty regularly. You know, there's financial realities about it, and I'd love to float every day. That's just, you know, not a financial reality, but I float on a real regular basis. People at float on have been great to me. They've treated me really well and made it to where I could float more than I would have been able to float otherwise, but I've really wanted to spend some time over the last couple of weeks experiencing other float centers, so I floated around at the other float centers here in Portland to learn what experiences are like at other places and try to put myself in a better place for this talk to talk from a broader base of experience. Recently, I've had some really terrific floats. Not every float happens that way. In fact, only probably one out of every four out of every five will I reach a pain-free state, but every float improves my life. Every float relaxes me in a way that I can't find relaxation anywhere else. It relieves me of the burdens of gravity, which are a real burden for me at times, and so I'm really pleased that I have found that. It's my hope that my story and stories like mine can be shared in a way that can get more people to experience floating, and ultimately the kinds of projects that Dr. Feinstein and some of the others are working on that can make this a more broad and widespread, something that ultimately down the line maybe insurance companies and doctors can literally prescribe and make it more accessible. There's a lot of people out there that could experience something really similar to what I did, so thank you very much for inviting me to be here. If there's something that I can do for you as an industry or as a float center to help spread a story that has been successful, I'm here, so reach out to me. I'd love to be a part of that. Thank you.