 I need you to remind me of two things that I want to do on the very last slide. We'll discuss the tie and remind me of the question, what is life in that order? Because that is very important. Well, we all have our routines that we do every day and I've had a routine that I've done maybe for 50 years and I know that's older than many of you in this room. And it's like, when I go to bed at night, I'm going through the process of what happened that day. And I try to do it in a chronological order, I process everything, and I go, what did I do right? What could I have done better? I avoid the things that I did wrong, I just, what did I do better? And it's like, and then I say, well, what's going to happen tomorrow, what's going to happen then? And I prepare myself for the near and long term future. And I was doing this in January, and a thought came up somewhere around midnight or 1 a.m. and it's like, oh my God, I got to talk at FloatCon again. What the hell am I going to talk about this time? And I say, what does Justin do, and what does Flux do? And McKenna and Emily, who joined us for the first time, they go, I'm not that kind of scientist. And then I think about what you guys do, and I say, you're dealing with things that I don't do, because I'm just a pool boy after all, you know, and I say, drive around on my Ford Transit truck and go to Burger King and have a good time, you know, I control the radio, whatever, you know, and it's like, all right, so what do you do versus what do I do? Your focus is on living, on the process of living. My focus is fundamentally on the physiological process of life itself at the cellular level. This is not a grammatical difference. This is not a philosophical difference. This is a physiological difference. And if we apply that life process to the process of living, we learn, we gain experience, we become better individuals, and I want to share an experience that I've learned in the last three years, and it's like, you see this light, it's like the difference between all y'all and me. I was born in Kansas, and you know, if you're an American, you know that everybody born north of the Mason-Dixon line, by definition, is a Yankee. Even though you're not born in Maine, you're a Yankee. Well, Peter Sharp said he's left, but we're going to throw him in with Yankees, and it's like if you're from the UK, you're going to be a Yankee for the purpose of this experiment. And if you're from Canada, sorry, we're going to make you an American Yankee after this is over. You can go back to being a Canadian and forget you ever got insulted by this, but that's a different process. And so we need to learn that the phrase, all y'all is different than y'all. I always thought y'all was plural. So I address you, I should see proper grammar for a southerner, all y'all. Yankees, repeat after me, because this is the way we learn. Repeat after me, southerners, you are excused, because you know this. Yankees, repeat, all y'all, all y'all, southerners, you got to pitch in, these damn Yankees ain't doing it right, southerners help us, all y'all. The north is saved by the south once again. That is an experience of learning. Now we move to the process of life itself. So what is the essence of life? Well, there was a new shop that opened down the street from where I live in Swanee, Georgia. No, it's not the same as the swamp, and it's not the same as Swanee, Tennessee. They're all spelled differently, but it's Swanee, Georgia. A new shop, my wife and my daughter, and I went down there and had some really cool stuff, and I bought me something that I really liked. So I've got a question for you. I bought a rock. And you can see the tool marks on the back of it, because you want to let it sit flat on your desk. Here's the question. If you think the rock is alive, raise your right hand. Now I can't see, it's like we'll get ahead in 10 minutes. So if the rock is alive, raise your right hand. Keep it up. All right, let's turn the rock over. This is a trilobite. It's a really cool fossil, one of my favorite kind of fossils. If you think the trilobite is alive, raise your left hand. Keep that hand up. I can't see you. I know what most of you think. This is where I need a little bit of help, and you learn through life when you need help to reach out to people you can count on. Jocelyn, Catherine, will you go tell Graham and Ashkahn to put their hands down because they missed the question once again? Guys, it's a damn rock and a fossil. They're not alive, some people. But this is a trilobite. It was alive. It is no longer alive. At one time, it was a vibrant, dynamic creature, marine. We don't know how old it is, maybe 250 million years old. It was alive. Something changed. What changed? That is the definition of life at its very basic. And so we can look through the things, and we can come up with all sorts of things, and it's like, you know, the general properties as a physiologist, I'll say, it's got to do all of these things. If it is missing one of these properties, it is not alive. Okay, so what does that mean for you as float center operators? It means that if we just block one, one of any one of these processes, we have a control mechanism for the microbes that grow in float solution. Not float water, float solution, it is not water, it is a salt solution. We need the terminology right. We can control the growth in the corners of the room. We can control the growth inside the coffee pot or the refrigerator or the laundry by using these control mechanisms. And so we could go through all of them. We'll be here until Thursday. We've already drank the holiday in out of alcohol a couple of nights in a row, so we're just going to pick on three. We're going to pick on water, we're going to pick on metabolism, and we're going to pick on reproduction, and we're going to do these quickly. And it's like water. Water, every cell in every organism controls the amount of water by Osmo regulation. Now, this has got the most syllables in any one word. And so we need to slow down because it's like, Jen, you're writing this down. I know you chemists are a little bit slow. I've never let somebody go last, never. All right, but every, it's the solvent of life. And every cell and every bacteria need more water than fungi. Some bacteria need more water than other bacteria. E. coli is more sensitive to salt than Staphylococcus. And different salts have different impacts. And this is basic, absolute, fundamental physiology that health departments are ignoring. And every health inspector has been trained on this and they are ignoring it. They know it and are choosing to ignore it. It's a basic experiment and we've seen it like, and I'll bet you at least 50% of you have done some sort of experiment where you made some sort of dialysis tube and suck one in salt and one in make. My own daughter did one of these experiments in the eighth grade. It's basic. It's taught in every basic biology course in college and in every microbiology class. And you know those health inspectors have had more than one microbiology class. So it's basic. And so we can take this and we make the information out of food science and we know how much water is available by measuring the vapor pressure and we measure it in a phrase called A sub W and you've heard me talk about it. And it's like if, if the A sub W from MagSulfate, it's about right there, the organism above it will not grow, will not reproduce and it will not create disease. Period. End of debate. But the organisms below it can. And so the major pathogens don't grow. But we see these things down here. Aspergillus, Niger, it's a mold that goes black. We know it grows in float solution. We'll get to that in a minute. So none of the pathogens can grow in there. Some yeast and molds can. There are no test kits that you're ever going to find that are going to be able to pick up the yeast and molds, but you have a device that you can pick up the yeast and mold. It's called the nose. Now, if your nose is so bad that you can eat moldy bread and not know you're eating moldy bread, you are not qualified to run this test. But there's somebody in your shop that has a very sensitive nose that can walk in, stick their nose in a float tank and know, yep, mold, plant. That is your test of when to clean out your float tank. We don't have any other better data, but the concentration of smells is in the parts per million or less the nose with the right person is very sensitive. Metabolism. Another control point. We can stop it in several days. We can limit nutrition uptake. Humans, we call it a diet. We can stop metabolic processes. We can destroy the membrane and basically spill the guts of the organism outside of the environment and leak it back and forth. Let's go through a couple of these processes. I am not nearly as talented as Dr. Flux in my illustrations. I just copy mine off the internet, and that's exactly what I did here. You've got pseudomonas on the left and you've got a diagram of a bilipid, bilayer membrane on the right. These are just standard. Every health inspector knows this, but we can select various control mechanisms on here based upon what we know about the basic structure and physiology. This is a little bit better diagram. Let's stop uptake using this one channel right here, a protein channel. We block it. Or we oxidize structural proteins. Or we slice the membrane open and leak it out. Now, I can use this slide because I know an awful lot about this particular stuff because this is what I did my Ph.D. on, on a bacteria called zymomonas mobiles. You've never heard of bacteria, but you know a lot about it. Some of you know more than others because zymomonas mobiles is the bacteria that makes tequila. So I have a Ph.D. in tequila that is the physiology of it. Some of you have the Ph.D. in consumption, not my skill set. So I am not the same as Justin and Flux and McKenna and Emily. Different kind of doctor. Probably just as crazy, but that's a different story. All right, so we talk about oxidized. We have a lot of oxidized as we could use chlorine. I've run as many chlorine studies as probably anybody in the world under the age of 90. I don't know whether it works in this float solution. It might work. It might not. It's never been proven. If they tell you it works, ask for the proof. It's not documented anywhere in scientific literature whether chlorine will kill anything in float solution. You could use hydrogen peroxide, except that you're only using 100 ppm or so and you need to be using 3,000 to 5,000 ppm to be effective. And then you're going to get out and you're going to be all tingly and even worse and you're not going to want to be doing that. You could use quats, you know, the bathroom, kitchen, cleaners, except they're very sensitive to salt. They won't work. You could use enzymes from the pool and spa industry. Only those products don't have any enzymes in and they're deactivated by salt. Well, we're striking out over four at that point. You could use ozone. Well, ozone is used in some incredibly nasty food waste streams and it works potently. I don't have any good studies on it, but I have absolute confidence that the way we're using ozone is a potent oxidizer and sanitizer disinfectant. Or we could use the AOP systems, which are even more potent. So if we're going to use best available technology that Jen was talking about, there's two right there. The top four are garbage. We can talk about reproduction. I mean, we've got different ways of reproduction. You've got, you know, free living things like whales. You've got parasites like Giordia, Cryptosporidium. You've been in CPO. You've been in those classes. So we can block contact. We can sterilize your... You can sterilize the float tank by putting a Cobalt-60 can in your float room. The problem is going to be the Department of Homeland Safety is going to come out and arrest everybody in there. So you're probably not wise to use Cobalt-60 as a sanitation source. But we could destroy DNA. And we could do that. And DNA, you remember this, and you know it's like, yeah, fortunately there's no test on this. It's just double helix. It was written... The book was written by Watson Crick and Franklin in 1956. They discovered them out. It's this complex thing, and it unwinds in this peculiar thing, and we know how to do it. And it's a very complex... But every living cell in our terrestrial sphere relies on this process. There's variations. But we can block this. And we can block it. And you'll see it's UV, not UB, but I always have one typo in there because that's not my skill set. My skill set is standing up here and making a total ass to myself, which I'm qualified to do. All right. But it's like the UV comes in. We shine the UV on the DNA. And if there's the A bonds to the T and the C bonds to the G, but if there's two of these T's together, like right here, the yellow ones, the UV links the T's together and forms what's called a thymine dimer, and it blocks that replication process. And if we use the light long enough with enough intensity, we break the DNA process, and that cell cannot reproduce. It dies. That's how UV works. But you need the right UV. So if you're starting to make your own units, don't do that. This is a serious engineering task by the unit. Okay. So theoretical infections. I'm not talking about ones that have actually occurred. I'm talking about theoretical infections. And one of the ways we can stop contact is by filtering. And the best filter technology, best available technology right now, is the one micron bag, and now I've seen the one micron cartridge filter. Now, because cryptosporidium, which causes 89% of the infections in pools, is the one the health inspectors complain about, it will not happen in spas. There's never been a documentation. It's 1978, according to CDC literature, in a spa. Float tanks are more similar to spas in the air pools. I'm not concerned about it. Health inspectors don't know the literature. They're too busy doing other things. But if we are going to use best available technology to keep the health inspectors happy, this is it. Now, the cryptosporidium is bigger than a one micron spore. Now, imagine a Ford F-250 super-duty pickup truck trying to park in a bicycle rack. If you can't park the truck in the bicycle rack, crypto cannot get through the filter. It's the same thing. It's too big. So you couple technology with technology and you develop a system. But there are breakthroughs. There are failures. And there's human action and inaction and mechanical failures and biological shifts. And let's explain some of those. Well, in 1986, there was a little incident in a manufacturing plant. Well, it's a power production plant in a little place called the Ukraine. And they were doing an experiment that was authorized by the government. They started on the second shift. They weren't exactly following the manual. It continued in the third shift and they weren't exactly following the manual. And a little thing happened and they shouted a 1,000 ton lid. Had a 3,000 foot tall fireball, caused perhaps 4,000 fatalities and had an exclusion zone around Chernobyl that still exists today because they didn't follow the manual. But what they didn't know, there was another incident that almost occurred the same way about 15 years before that at Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg. But all these reactors inside the old USSR were designed the same way. So it was the common mistake, but it was a state secret. The KGB wouldn't put the information in the operating manual. So these guys were operating blind and then operating outside the manual. Human action and inaction leads to failures. Mechanical failure. Have you got a filter? Well, there was another facility also in the USSR. I'm not picking on Russia. I just haven't had really good notes on these incidents and they were easy to find at the last minute. Well, they were making biological warfare weapons and they were specifically making anthrax, which you inhale and die. And so you would think the idea is you want to keep these anthrax spores out of the air, right? So you would have filters. The filters failed. It was in the air. And then the filter on the air leaving the plant failed. It was a double failure. We don't know how many people died there, but we do know from the literature outside the plant in the downed wind pattern there were multiple fatalities, mechanical failures. And then there's what we call biologic shifts. Now you have heard more about biologic shifts in the last two and a half years than you really want to. This one really kind of hits home. Now SARS-CoV-2, COVID-coronavirus disease 19. The virus mutated to form the Omicron VA-5. Now the individual that this occurred to was very well educated, fully immunized, double boosted, two and a half years wore a mask. Very minor infection. This individual traveled off to a major national convention with people that were similarly immunized and boosted, did not wear a mask. This individual got home about 36 hours after the end of the event and became symptomatic and ran one of those self-tests, and you know you run the self-test and it's like you're supposed to wait 15 minutes to see if the line appears. Well this individual ran the test and it went positive in 30 seconds. This individual was loaded. I mean loaded with antigens from SARS-CoV-2. That was me. I did not have a very pleasant 4th of July weekend. Then my daughter caught it, my wife caught it. All right, different breakthroughs. So how do we avoid this? So we have multiple control systems we consider all aspects of our operations. We well engineered systems, not home engineered, well documented, properly documented. We have multiple layers of protection and we build these layers of best available technology. We have knowledgeable trained staff and what we see in the pool industry that doesn't happen often is knowledgeable managers. Everybody needs training. So what is life when we look at the microbial level? It is metabolically extremely diverse. It is resilient beyond our expectations and it frequently escapes our man-made containment systems. Final thoughts ladies and gentlemen. I think I will finish. So the question I ask you is your brain like this guy frozen in time 250 million years ago, fossils. Or is it like this guy 100 or 200 years ahead of your contemporary? So I ask you when you get home, have you learned anything and are you going to re-evaluate your sanitation systems? But life is about learning in the process of living. I asked you at the beginning of this as I finish. What were the two things I asked you to remind me about? The tie and what is life? The tie. It's brown. You've been in my talks. You know where this is going and yes I am going there. You may not be able to see it but there's these rod shaped things on here. They're about two or three times longer than they are wide and they're rounded on the end and they have these little hairy things coming out of them. The hairy little things are called flagella. That is the plural of flagellum. The rod shaped things are called bacilli. If we turn the tie over and we read it, it says E. coli, a common intestinal bacteria, particularly of mammals. So what's the brown material, ladies and gentlemen? It starts with F. It was on one of Jim's slides. The next letter is an E, then there's an E, then there's an E, then there's an S. What's the word? We need that on recording so do you want me to repeat that? Theses! Thank you for helping me continue my 20-year history of using that word in every public presentation that I've done for 20 years. So when bad things happen, we have a saying about things like this and we say stuff happens. Five letters, not the four. Get your mind out of there, ladies and gentlemen. Stuff happens. That's a very negative phrase. But let's read the tie again at the bottom. It says children are particularly susceptible. Children, children. Ask on Graham, Jen. Ask on Graham, Jen. John, ask on Graham, Jen. They did not learn the vital lesson. The vital lesson was know who speaks after you. That lesson was taught us in an ancient Klingon proverb spoken by the great Khan as he pressed the Genesis machine glaring into the view screen at James T. Kirk. The original James T. Kirk, William Shatner, not Chris Feiner like both of them, but in this case it was William Shatner. And it's like what the great Khan said, revenge is a dis-best-served cold. So ask on Graham, Jen, John. Next time, don't bring a rubber knife to a gun fight with a guy with a machine gun. Rookies! But that's a negative thought. And we're not going to end on a negative thought. And if you're not here, you haven't understood the banter that we've built up for four days because we've been building up for four days and the threats have been going back. And we've had a great time. And Friday night, we had a little incident. Some of us were on a dock bus and it got a little damp. Some people got a little wet. A few people got a little scared. We had a great time. And then Ashconn actually acted like a professional. And we picked up Ken, we picked up some other people. And anyway. And anyway, we had a saying that summarizes that, and we went to, you know, a great party run by James and Amy. And you know, we let the water roll off of her backs. And we said, eh, that's life. And there you have another answer to what is life. Jesus, son.