 And that's what everybody says when they get out of the tank. The one word, if I had one word to describe what people say when they get out of the tank, it's something like, amazing. And then it goes on for three or four times until the person kind of returns. In pursuit of nothing, in 1954, this tall 39-year-old who walked a little bit like a penguin, donned a breathing apparatus and slipped into the water of an eight-by-eight-by-eight-foot tank. And as he did so, he turned off the lights. And his body slid down, and then he slowly floated to the surface and hung out there and waited, wondering what was going to happen. Because the prevalent scientific point of view at the time was that he would go to sleep. He didn't. Hung out there for a while, finally climbed out, and he liked it so much that he started using it frequently. And it occurred to him that he could, that maybe he didn't need the breathing apparatus. So he created a four-foot-wide, four-foot-high, eight-foot-long tank and just had 20 inches of solution in it, 20 inches of water, actually. And he bent at the knees. And he would do what he later referred to as dolphin breathing. He would inhale and hold his breath. And then when he needed to breathe again, he had exhale and inhale quickly. And so that his body's in sync below the surface. Well, he started doing this the first session, first sessions in the eight-foot-by-eight-foot-by-eight-foot tank were done at night. Because he found out that any serious scientific research that he wanted to do, he always did it at night. You did your other work where they paid you for it during the day. But if you were really serious about doing good scientific research, you did it on your own time. And so he started floating or using this thing as just about every lunch hour. And he'd come back to the office. And his secretary wondered what her name was because he came back always with a smile and a bounce in his step. And she couldn't figure out who it was that he was seeing. 18 years later, this very shy, kind of weird, nerdy kind of guy was working at a company. There was another company called IBM. Some of you have heard of that. It used to be the size of Microsoft or Apple today. They did business work, batch programming for businesses. Once a week, you'd have to have payroll. So they'd run the payroll once a week. The company that this little nerdy guy worked for was Scientific Data Systems. Here's both IBM and Scientific Data Systems mainframe computers. This was the panel of the mainframe of the Scientific Data Systems computer. And what was unique about their computers is they worked real time. They didn't do batch once a week or anything like that. They were actually doing calculations for incoming data and sending data out. So if you wanted to control something, you would get feedback from it. And it would do calculations. And then it would send the feedback out to make the modifications. So NASA made a lot of these. This was kind of the beginning of the space work. And one of the jobs that they did was to make a time-sharing system. So there'd be the mainframe computer. And then there would be terminals, like this guy's on a terminal. And these 128 terminals would be hooked up to the mainframe computer. They'd be all over. When I met Lee, I brought my terminal to her house and worked from there. I'd hook it up to the phone system. And I'd work on my mainframe that was at SDS. And so we designed that. In 1969, on October 29, two of our computers, there's a computer in back there. Two of our computers, one was at UCLA and the other was at Stanford Research Institute. Back at the mainframe? Yeah. That's the mainframe in back. They started a project that was funded by the US Department of Defense. They decided that it was important to have computers talking to each other. They thought it might be really valuable. So they decided to try it. And on October 29, 1969, the guys at UCLA sent the word logon there to the SRI computer. They called them up to make sure it was working. So the guy says, I just sent an L. Did you get it? Yes. Oh, yes. Gee, the darn thing just crashed. That was the beginning of the internet. So in 1972, a friend of mine told me about I was very interested in finding out how to improve the quality of my life. And he suggested a book by John Lilly called Center of the Cyclone, in which at the end of it, there was information on some training that was going on in Eureka, Chile, at the time. And so I read the book and I was really impressed because this scientist was talking about things that were really bizarre, having to do with consciousness and reality and so on, and changing your life, which I sure wanted to do. And after reading the book, I was so impressed by him that when I saw an ad for a workshop in a couple weeks, a week-long workshop, I signed up and I had to go. And at the first day, there was a bowl cut out of a mountain. And on top of that was a shack. And we were able to stuff up all the holes in the shack so that no light went down below. And there was 20 inches of water down below, fresh water. And so I was one of the first to float. And when I came out, all the earth was a shimmering, shining, scintillating thing of energy. And time had completely shifted. And I was in a totally different state. I was not familiar with the state. We had lunch and John asked me to share my experiences, which I did fairly comfortably. Well, at SDS a couple of years before that, if I went to the cafeteria with two people, I wouldn't open my mouth. I was too shy. I'd only talk if it was just one other person. So I thought if something could make me so that I could open my mouth in front of a group of people, wow, it must be pretty, pretty incredible. And so I had to build my own. Nobody was making them at the time. And I was unbelievably naive. If you've ever tried to build anything for anybody else, for the public, I thought that since I was making one for myself with a little more energy, I could make them for other people. Boy was I naive. But anyway, I asked John what he thought of it. And he thought it was a fabulous idea. And by the end of the week, he'd given me the specifications for it. So Andy also gave me the name of the company, Samati Tank Company. And a little later, he would say things like stop avoiding the void, get nothing from Samati. I started with a plywood tank and made a prototype. I very quickly realized that wood was not a good thing to make this out of. So then I went to a fiberglass version. There's the first wooden version. And then there's the fiberglass version. I personally didn't like fiberglass. It was very, very heavy. It was hard to make light proof. And it was very expensive. And brittle. And so when you try to make it, if you do the labor on them, it's unbelievably toxic stuff. So I started making a kit. And during this time, I was still working at SDS, Scientific Data Systems. And then I happened to have Lee came to a party at my house. And I decided I needed to go out with her. And I called her up, asked her if she'd go out with me. I said, you scare me, but I'd like to go out with you. I've never heard a line like that before. Yes. So I went to her house. And she took one look at me. And she said, how old are you? And I told her. And she said, go home, you're a little baby. She was nine years older than me. That was then. Actually, still is. So we fell madly in love and decided we wanted to be together 24 hours a day. And so we decided we wanted to do the business full time. So the, oh, this is, there she is, a little younger than what I saw her. So but still with the same incredible being shining out there. So the first job was to try to figure out how we could have a door that would work better than the door you just saw a moment ago. And it took a while, but we finally figured out to cut off a corner. And then we had to figure out how to make the structure. Well, there wasn't a market. The only market were just a few people who happened to read John's books. And he referred the people if they contacted him to us. And most of those people were kind of poor, hippie type kind of people. So we were looking for something that would not be too expensive. And so we came up with making the tank out of cardboard. So the bottom foot of that is the shipping carton. And that's triwall. It's thicker than a half inch piece of plywood. And Frank Geary has made furniture out of it and so on. And then we put foam on the inside. And originally, we were epoxying the door structure. But that became pretty excessive, so we very quickly moved to vacuum forming plastic for the door-door structure. In any case, we had a very small pump, a magnetic drive pump. And what we did was we were able to get the whole thing to fold down into that shipping carton. And this is yours truly. And this truly. This is us carrying the first production model tanks. Our first brochure on the back of it has that picture. And you probably can't read it. But it says shipping and warranty. Shipping will be by dependable carrier and so on. We didn't realize what we'd done when we put those words with the picture. But anyway, cardboard was a customer had to point that out to us. We eventually realized that cardboard wasn't good for commercial things, so we made it out of plastic as well. But the cardboard one was the one where we were using at home where we first started our having people come to use the tank. Well, this microphone. I would just wind you in the light. Oh, OK, good. So we had many people going through that cardboard tank. And they were still splashing salt even back then. And so it was much harder to clean a cardboard tank than one that you could just wipe down with some cool water. And so that's when Glenn started to figure out how to turn that cardboard tank into a plastic one. And that's it. That first cardboard tank we were selling for 650. Oh, there's a businessman. This was Los Angeles. A businessman from San Diego was one of our customers, one of our first ones. And he just didn't want to keep driving from San Diego up to Los Angeles. And so he bought one. And he said, don't you ever tell anyone that I paid $650 for a cardboard box. The price for that tank would now be about $2,000. $650 is about the same as $2,000 today. So we started at home to do all parts of the business. We learned how to introduce people to it, how to talk to them. At first, we were turning people off. We'd describe what we did. And people would say, why would you want to do that? Yeah, it's dark and wet. And you go in all by yourself and so on. It's called an isolation tank. And people were just definitely not interested. And so we spent every time that we were in the car together, we'd try and come up with the words that we could use that would not turn people off when we described what we were doing. And then we worked on how to introduce people, how to give them an orientation. You know, let's say when they came to float the first time. That took a long time to develop how to do it well with only the making it handling safety and comfort and people's fears. Because as many of you know, many people have fears. And the other thing was that that one went through too fast. I didn't catch it. And we so, I won't tell you how old she is, but I'm 71. That's what John Lilly always said. He said, my forgettory is getting bigger than my memory. So during that period, we would go to John Lilly workshops, where we would be investigating during the workshop consciousness and reality and so on. He gave a bunch of MD workshops, which were very interesting. And so we got an approach of how to work with the tank and how to deal with people. And that's kind of gone through the whole life of our company. When we first started the company, do you want to mention about what we signed at the beginning? All right. We had, after talking a lot, we had decided that we were going to do this business. We had to go through all of our business. We're not business people. You know, I'm an educator and he's a scientist. And business people are the people who cheat you. You know, like what Graham was talking about earlier, listening to everything about business. We knew very little, except that if you're in business, you do that to make money and cheat people. And that seemed very unattractive. And so we had to learn everything about business. We knew nothing. And the instruction we got from John Lilly was, thou shalt not program. That you do not know what somebody is going into the tank for and what is possible for them to get out. So for you to think that you could imagine what would happen for them during that particular float was not a reasonable assumption. And so we had that instruction not to program people. And we had to learn, well, what does that mean? What's the nature of programming? And then we had set our sights on building a center. Because we went from one tank at home to two tanks at home. Our learning curve was steep. But every day we learned a little bit more. We'd listen to the things that we said to people. One would say to the person and the other one would listen. And then we'd role play afterwards and say, gee, well, you could have said this or you could have changed your tune that way to something else. And we worked consistently. All day we did epoxying and learning how to construct tanks. In the evening we were running people through and learning all the other aspects of having a business. And now we were looking for a place to open a tank center in Los Angeles. So we finally found one in Beverly Hills. And as we had started to learn how to be with the floater after their float, we discovered during our role playing that the best thing was to not have an agenda, to not want something from them, but rather to be empty like the tank. And so in designing the place we felt that was the same thing we wanted to put into the center is we wanted the center to be empty. We didn't want it to be like any other place they'd ever gone. We didn't want it to remind them of a hippie haven or an upscale place or a medical place or any other kind of place. We wanted it to be just empty. And we found out that we did a really good job because people would come in and suddenly their energy would shift. It was as if they'd come into a monastery. But it looked ordinary. It looked very simple. But it looked like something that you had never seen before but familiar. So it was a fine line. And we went into every shop in Beverly Hills and looked and see how they did what they did and what we felt from walking into a place like that. And then came up with what the different part that we came up with had a very special color scheme that we got some professional help with. And the place was just magnificent. We were in the rear. And right in front of us was a black beauty salon. And the men who had brought their women when we're waiting for them to get their hair done would come and sit in the Samadhi Center. They were like, oh, we're just here to chill out. Don't worry. No, we don't want to go in there. But they would come. And you could see that they would get that atmosphere and breathe it in and go out much softer than when they came in. We built all of our own furniture. That's our furniture that you're looking at. So it was actually very simple and very inexpensive for it to do. We built the whole center, 2,000 square foot center for $60,000, which now would be less than $200,000. And we had a contractor, but we did our own furniture. We had four tanks in our home, I'm sorry, two tanks in our home, first one. And then after a while, we had two tanks in our home. And that was for four years before we opened our center. So we'd learned a whole lot on how to do things. And when we opened our center, there was one of our customers, Brando Crespi. Actually, Count Brando Crespi. His father was the owner of Italian Vogue. He said, I'd like to do your PR for you in exchange for a tank. We said yes. We learned a lot about public relations because he was very well situated in the whole community. And he had stars coming to be photographed at the place and showing up. We used a system of parties and events. We would have people, when people came into the center, and they were musicians, which there were a lot of at that time, that still are. And we would have sign-up sheets. If you would like to have this as a performance space, just let us know. And so we would have performers or people who had slideshows or any other kind of poetry reading or storytelling or slideshows. They would sign up. And then we would have sign-up lists of the floaters who would like to come to an event so that, for example, John Lilly told us that we could have a sign-up sheet for him. When we had 45 people on that list, we called John Lilly and said, we have 45. OK, I'll be there next Friday. And so we were constantly bringing in new people who wanted to see the center. Their friend, if they brought a friend, the tank rooms were not being used at that time. But they would bring each other back to the tank rooms. They could look. They could touch. Because this was a time where the fear was so large about getting into a tank that it was Glenn's design that if you missed the door, you were inside and you were scared. And you wanted to get out. And you stood up and pushed. The top would come off. And so it was purposely done that way. It only happened twice. However, that was the safety that was put into the tank at the time. And so having these people constantly coming every week, having people come and parties, like last night when those of us who were here went out and party together. It changes the mood of things. The fears get much less. The idea of being with each other gets much stronger. And the idea of, well, like the waitress in the restaurant last night, you remember what she said to us? She said, you people have waited a long time. We brought the wrong things to you. And I'm going to go and float, because you people are so good-natured about it. Must be something to it. So there is something about being around a bunch of floaters. I mean, these people are not the same. So three months into our center, we were on the front page of the second section of the major newspaper in town, LA Times. And so we were immediately filled to capacity. And that went on for quite a while. And it slowly, gradually started going downhill. And we realized that you cannot have a business just on first-time floaters. You can't afford to spend so much money or energy promoting the thing to only have first-time floaters. You've got to have your floaters returning. And so we worked on that. And what we finally came up with was to have a package situation so that a package of three floats, if somebody came to float the first time, we would charge them more than a regular float, because they had to have an orientation. But the real reason was so that we could have a three-float package that wasn't too cheap that everybody would want to buy rather than paying for that first float. Yeah, it was an offer they couldn't refuse. We were charging $15 a float. And it was three floats cost $31 or something like that, so that you pay either $15 or $31. For the $31, you've got two more floats. And it brought people back to be able to have three floats so they would have more of a sense of what it would be like to use the tank with more frequency. Other people may disagree with this, but we tend to think that it is best to start your business slow and get all the bugs worked out of your systems so that you're totally functional or is functional enough so that the first time floaters are not going out the back door never to be seen again. And so we would tend not to suggest that you do PR until you have things down. Not everybody would agree with that, but that's our point of view. So the interesting thing that happened once that center was open, see, we were the manufacturers, and our interest was in selling tanks. And this was kind of like in that kind of language, it was a showroom. And people who wanted to try it before they bought it would come to the center and float, and then they'd want to buy their own tank. And that did happen. A lot of people bought tanks, but something else happened that we had no idea about. People would come and they'd sit there and they'd look around and they'd come back and they'd come back and they'd say, we want to buy one of these centers. And we didn't know what to do about that. We had just conquered the business and what do you do about that? And we knew how to sell a tank, but we never heard of selling a center. Nor did we think that we were even up to such a thing. We thought for that you have to be one of these business people. And so we started looking for a partner who would know things like that. We found him. He was one of our customers. He was in big business. He managed a division of a company called Intel. He lived very high off the hog. He wanted a 20 tank center in San Francisco. We built it. He borrowed a million dollars. He spent. No, raised a million. He raised a million dollars. That's right, he raised it. He raised it, franchises. Right, you heard about franchises this morning. He wanted to sell franchises. And he did, he had about, they're not completely sold, but he had about four or five of them on the hook. And, you know, he couldn't stop spending money. He had to cut, he was paying himself $9,000 a month. This was 1980. We said. Multiply that by three for today's. All right, for how much he was making. And we said, you know, Bob, this is a little bootstrapping business here. It's just too much money. He said, okay, I'm gonna cut back as best I can. And he worked really hard to get himself down to $8,500 a month. So the place lasted for a year. And then it was up on the auction block. And, you know, that was one big, beautiful place. And ridiculous, you know. It was just, it was not, not of our time, you know. Nor was the world ready for that at that time. So we ended up, that partnership ended up three quarters of a million dollars in debt. And we had put our Beverly Hills Center as part of an investment into that partnership. Luckily, the Smartie Tank Company was still separate. But the tanks that it was selling, they weren't paying the Smartie Tank Company either. So we ended up losing 120,000, which in today's terms would be about 200,000. And so they disappeared. We lost our center. And now we're back to ground zero with not only no money, but our own debt. Well, we managed to slowly recover from that. And then we moved to... Well, that was because, the other thing that happened around that time is AIDS started to become very important. And all of the bathhouses in the San Francisco area were closed. There was a great deal of fear of going into public waters. So by the time, and this will be in the FDA report tomorrow also, Rock Hudson, the movie star who died of AIDS in 1959, that reached a high point of the fear in the public. So you had the fear of AIDS going on. The number of centers in the US had gone down from a couple of hundred to about 50 in the whole country. And the two San Francisco closed, Beverly Hills closed, and we were approaching a point of kind of quietness. Also, we had guaranteed that once we had our tank designed and the company in LA who was manufacturing it was going to keep, they would keep delivering. We would give them the orders and they would deliver the tanks. They had a big fire. Everything was wiped out. All of our molds, all of our inventory that was all wiped out. And so we were, and we had promised that Glenn could leave the city because he's from the country. So he could leave the city when we had everything in order. And so we began to look for where we were going to move. And our favorite place in California at that time was around Mendocino. And when we went up to investigate, there was no shipping up there. And if you're selling tanks, you have to have shipping. So we were unable to move up there. And John Lilly told us of a friend of his, the high tech shaman in Grass Valley. And so we went and we talked to that group of people. They welcomed us. They had a lot of assets that we were looking for, promotional aspects. And we moved up to Grass Valley in pursuit of more of a spiritual life. What we had seen in working with the tanks was that a lot of people who came in to the tank world because they wanted to get rich, maybe some made money and so on. But the spiritual life was very much enhanced by working with the tanks. You're working out of the material world, really. You're in the floating world, which is quite different. And so we were going to devote quite a bit of our time to learning more in the spiritual world. So that's one of the places that we went. Then also your health went down. During that time, just before we moved to the country and then after we moved to the country, I suffered three major health blows. The last one was organophosphate poisoning, which is what many pesticides are made out of. And it's a nerve toxin to disrupt the nervous system of the bugs. Well, it disrupted my nervous system. My right side stopped working. 10 years ago, I was just dragging my right leg after me. I could barely sign my name. I couldn't think, couldn't remember anything. So through proper diet and through the tank and so on, I'm very slowly recovering. And now I have some memory. Really, it's still not all back. But at least as a 70-year-old, I'm really thankful that I'm going this way where most 70 ones are going that way or aren't going at all. And in the spiritual era, our business, when we first started our business, we said what we wanted to do was to transform ourselves and business and others. And if we weren't doing that, we wanted to stop. And we were constantly trying to figure out what is it, what is it that floating gives? Like I explained what happened to me that first float. Well, after every float, I feel somehow different. Sometimes we related it to like when you fall in love, sometimes we related it to like being on the top of a mountain where you're on awe of everything or when you're so deeply into a project that time changes. But we couldn't quite figure it out. Well, after doing the spiritual work when we moved to the country, we felt we finally had a way of thinking about it. And that is that we generally think of ourselves as having a mind and a personality and that's who we are. But there's another aspect to us that goes between lifetimes that's called a being. And sometimes if you in certain special situations, you, when you aren't doing a lot of stuff, that's it, you just be and you're more present and you're more aware and so on. So what we concluded was that by being in the tank, it's a lot like meditation. After you do enough mental chatter, it kind of completes itself. You wind down and you kind of leave the mental chatter and leave the mind and you move more into the being. And looking at it this way, we think it helps explain all the different things that happens for people in the tank, including the medical stuff. If you read Hanuman, the founder of homeopathy or Rajan Sankaran, you will understand that all health, all disease is from mental, emotional things that aren't quite right. So if you move out of your mind and into your being a little bit, it can definitely alter that whole thing. And so for us, what floating gives us is the ability to be here more and be present more. Which leads to appreciation of oneself, of one another, of humor, of music. I know that the person who's here now is very different from the person who first went into the tank. I can just be so much more quiet and want to be. And I think that's one of the things that we sense when we all get together is that we're kind of not the same as everyone, but not that we can't be the same or we feel that we're other or different. It's a subtle change that happens to us. And the more you see it, the more it's given. That's how it seems. And we at this point, we're much more involved in the business than we ever have been in a certain way. You know, when the opportunity to be here came up and we've been working with Oshkan weekly on getting this conference together, it's been a great energy effort to produce all this. And all of us who are producing it haven't stopped doing all the rest of the things that we do every day. And yet, this is how it comes out. So it's a very, it's a pretty remarkable tool that we're working with here. We'd like to invite you to consider another tool besides a tank that we think can help make you more present. We think that if you wish to, you can learn to listen in a different way than you are accustomed to. Most of us listen from the brain and the personality. When a floater comes out, we have our agenda. It may be to be social, it may be to be helpful, it may be to give advice, it may be lots of things. We'd like to suggest that there's a different way to listen. And that is to listen from the being and simply be and be present with that person across from you. If you don't have floaters coming out to do this with, you can do it at any time with anybody, but it's certainly easier when it's structured. I'm not suggesting you can do this right away. We have for 30 years, even before we understood how to talk about it, we have been training it to our staff. It's not easy to train. We can't teach you to do this. We can give you some exercises that we think will work to, for you to discover how to do it on your own. And we would like to encourage you to be interested in that and to have a new tool and whether you want to do it for spiritual reasons, it's also just as good to do it for business reasons. We have a friend who has a 2,500, had a 2,500 book library on selling and so on. He, people who invest in movies, he was cold calling those people. And three of the most important sales books he ever read, he recommended and two of them had to do with primarily how to listen. We just got a sign that there are five minutes left and by now it's probably four or three. And so I wanted to just see if there were any questions so that we stay within the time limit. And open it up and to see whether anybody has a question. Yeah, go for it. Oh, John, when he gave me the specs, said that he had had a tank in the Virgin Islands and I could put 3% salt in so I could float better because that's what was in the ocean. And I don't float well at all so I put in 10% and then I set up a tank for him at Esalen and he experienced and said, that's fantastic. Let's go to saturation. However, that was not, he asked going from sodium chloride to magnesium sulfate. So then we were starting with sodium chloride and we found it a little abrasive and he came up with the idea of using Epsom salts. The question is since where the founders, do we have, where do we see floating going from here forward? It's about four months ago, something changed in the world and about four months ago this started being possible where the number of people who wanted to float, who wanted to buy their own tanks, who wanted to open centers, I mean does that match your experience that it's been within about the last four to six months that you decided that you want to get into what's happening here? And I don't know what it is, it's a book called The Tipping Point that talks about tipping points. And I think Malcolm Gladwell, I don't think he says that he knows what, you know how you define it and it's often not connected. It's something that happened there then results in the tipping point now. So something has happened and things have jumped very recently and it looks like unless we really do some things that you know stop it, that it's gonna keep going. Does that answer? Yeah, thank you guys so much. Glen and Lee everyone, I'm definitely amazing to have them here.