Dr. Justin Feinstein & Mandy Rowe | Floatation Therapy: The Research, History, & Broad-spectrum Benefits Of Time In The Tank

00:02 Alright people, I'm gonna make this quick but for the next six weeks or so starting February 1st. I'm putting all my show outlines up for auction I've mentioned before that i have a very strict routine for preparing for and recording THC episodes, and part of that process 95% of the time going back many years has been waking up early on the days i record and compiling my notes into a roughly 4-6 page outline that i print out and conduct interviews from as a template. I write in the margins, cross stuff out as we go along. Jot things down that I don't want to forget and usually have a good deal of material in these outlines that never even makes it to air. When a show is done, put a little staple up in the corner and throw them into filing cabinets. Well its no secret im trying to move and what better time to try collect some extra cash and offload a box of stuff I've been storing...that I dont need!

01:00 So I'm signing, listing and auctioning off all the outlines i have to any listeners who might be interested in that kind of thing. Each one is totally unique with its own markings coffee stains beer spills printing imperfections typos and maybe even doodles in some cases that were never really supposed to be seen by anyone else but...I guess that's no big deal I know, personally, I've bought signed scripts before and some of my most prized possessions are band set lists I nabbed at the end of concerts. So maybe this is something like that for podcasts? If you're into it they will be listed on eBay dot com. Yeah, I know... ebay dot com slash USR slash higher side chats

01:43 The link is at the top of the show notes as well, but it's ebay.com slash usr slash higher side chats And of course I'll post links across all social media dystopias that I have an unfortunate presence in Again, the first batch will go up February 1st and be listed for 10 days! And I'm going to continue putting new batches up as time permits when and where i can And I hope to have the whole thing completed in about 6-8 weeks or so. I guess i'm just out when im out, but if there's a specific one you might want keep dipping into see what has been added. There is a good chance that I haven't gotten it listed yet and real chance that I don't even have for one reason or another. But I do have most so just keep an eye out! Thanks in advance to anyone who picks up a little piece of THC history and contributes to the Carlwood Family Moving Fund

02:36 Alright, and that said in more ways than one let's get this show on the road. Enjoy! Here we go again, Hireside Chatters from sunny San Diego. I'm Greg Carlwood and it's no secret that in the smartphone age we've become far more attached to these little black boxes than we ever would have guessed. Endless scrolling, dopamine dripping, little red notifications constant EMF exposure and delivery apps that encourage us to never leave the couch They're impressive little things but at what a cost?

03:42 Stress, anxiety, depression and drug abuse are all at near-record highs and we can't blame the smartphone alone. The 24x7 fear based news cycle, low wage work, bad diets, poor education and general lack of fulfillment or proper guidance all have a role to play as well but broadly speaking taking a break from the world's constant input is something all of us could use more of And if we could make even a modest dent in the number of people supplementing their unhappiness with Big Pharma's latest offerings, I'd say that's a beautiful thing. Which is exactly what today's guests Dr Justin Feinstein and Mandy Rowe are trying to do through their work with flotation therapy aka sensory deprivation or rest reduced environmental stimulus therapy

04:28 They have both shared some impressive data on flotation with me and it seemed only right to pass it along to you. For the unfamiliar, Dr Justin Feinstein is a clinical neuropsychologist and expert in the neuroscience of fear with over 50 peer-reviewed publications in some of the top scientific journals who has been trailblazing a new path forward for treatment of anxiety, stress, PTSD & other suboptimal states of being through floatation therapy He is now the president and director of the Float Research Collective, a non-profit organization that is playing a pivotal role in establishing flotation as an accepted medical treatment.

05:05 And Mandy Rowe is the president of Franchise Development for TrueRest, the leading float therapy brand in the world who discovered float therapy right here in San Diego where Navy SEALs were using float pods as a holistic approach to PTSD and muscle recovery. Now through the franchise model she works to make float therapy an accessible and approachable therapy for all while helping people achieve their entrepreneurial dreams Worthy goals all around. Let's get into it, the holistic approach advocates sensory deprivation supporters and flotation tank true believers Justin and Mandy welcome to The Higher Side Thank you Greg I think i told you i'm a huge fan of this podcast my boyfriend introduced me to it like two years ago And I don't think I've missed an episode since so I'm excited to share everything we got with you Yeah great to be here Greg

05:53 Well, it's great to have you. Mandy that is a hell of an honor and this is going to be an interesting one I assume most people are somewhat aware of flotation therapy but through your presentations Dr Feinstein I learned a lot more and there's some really intriguing research and hard data I'm also a big supporter of this angle that it could make us serious dent with what you refer to as the behemoths of Big Pharma. Benzos and opioids which are clearly a massive problem so that's where the real value is to me and making people more aware of this option and its benefits

06:30 But in the interest of leaving no man behind for the people who don't know a whole lot about this, when you get into a flotation tank you are floating on 10 inches of water 1,000 plus pounds of epsom salt and you are cut off from the rest of the external world. No sound, no light, no gravity and if you stay still enough you can't even really sense the water because it's usually set to body temperature 2 And that's really the long and short of it for those who might still be unaware. Let's start with Dr. Feinstein, but let him know if I missed any important details and talk to us about why you were so intrigued by this specific modality considering the range of options that are out there and the decades of work that you've done?

07:15 Well, first of all thanks for that great introduction Greg. I would say that our society is at a very critical sort of crossroads right now technology is transforming faster than the human species and we all have to face that We are the guinea pigs. We are the first exposed to this sort of 24-7 connectivity. I could tell you with the young generation especially they are in harm's way. There is clear data coming out showing that the smartphones are highly addictive and they're changing the nervous system for the worse, higher rates of anxiety, higher rates of depression, higher rates of eating disorders, higher rates of suicidality. These are very ominous indicators of something gone awry and so when I stumbled upon float therapy over a decade ago

08:13 It was really at the beginning of this sort of shift in society. Here we are a decade later, it's only gotten worse and to me what I've noticed as a neuropsychologist is people are self-medicating the most common forms of suffering away whether it be stress anxiety or pain and it's caused a concurrent addiction epidemic so This is really the confluence of what led me to float therapy, which in many ways could be an antidote to all of this. And I really believe that it's been 10 years now we've been collecting data, we've published many studies and good peer-reviewed journals

09:01 And the data is very clear that this could be a very potent antidote to this constant connectivity of modern society and not needing to self-medicate away stress, pain and anxiety. There's a natural alternative that could really help your nervous system reset. Yeah, great points. It is intense the era we are in and sometimes the solutions offered are no better or worse than the problems themselves which is just a terrible spiral and Mandy I would kind of ask the same of you. I understand you come from a seal family and that your segue in was seeing the seals use this but why are you so passionate about flotation therapy when compared to everything else?

09:50 Yeah, absolutely. So it's actually kind of funny between Justin who had been working at the VA in San Diego and I was born in Coronado where the Navy SEALs train and you being there in San Diego...I think there might be something in the water out there that has this all interested in this topic But, you know for me so there's actually no Navy SEAL in my family but being raised in Coronado you're constantly surrounded by you know Navy SEALs training as you know they run down the beach and your friends parents you know go on deployments and your friends leave. You pretty much all throughout my childhood And so I had one family friend her dad was on multiple deployments and came back from one with his calf blown off and with some pretty obvious severe PTSD that

10:35 you know, did break up their family and that had a lot of other really bad consequences. And when my dad ran into him a few years later he after many many requests to have his leg amputated did not have his leg amputate it and was doing a lot better. When we asked him what he was doing to heal himself His answer was float therapy on top of a couple other things. It turns out that at the amphibious base in Coronado they've got a couple float pods And they are putting these guys in there for anywhere from 30 minutes to four hours. And at the time, there was only like eight locations and all of North America where anyone in the public could go float. And if the Navy SEALs are doing it, to us that's just extremely obvious that is a validated therapy and why isn't not available to the public?

11:26 And one of the things I know your audience will enjoy, and we can dig into this maybe later but other than the just anecdotal evidence from our Navy SEAL friend—I won't share his name. There were a couple articles and videos online of these different people in the Navy higher up talking about how they were using float therapy to treat PTSD, and for advanced language learning. And a couple other things... And of course as soon as I start talking about that video more it was taken down within like the first year and now those videos are nowhere to be found and the Navy doesn't want you to know that they're probably still doing it. So when we learned that powerful for our veterans.

12:06 and we have a franchise background in my family. It just made sense to start offering this to the public, and I think the public has been very receptive to it obviously with our expansion across the US and now into Canada but i rely on people like Justin to give me the neuroscience and the actual research to tell everyone that yes you feel incredible but why does that happen? And we're going to continue to do everything we can to help give people a non-addictive approach to pain relief, relaxation and better sleep. Right on yeah the example of your friend's father is definitely a powerful one and I definitely wanted to get into the advanced language learning thing but

12:48 While we're still setting this up, what is the real scope of the possible benefits from this therapy for those who have serious problems in the stress anxiety PTSD realm and also for those who don't? I mean as you said just living a life these days requires maybe a little bit oomph in the relaxation department but talk to us about that range of benefits. There's obviously a lot of claims but what do we know Justin You know, when I got into float research about a decade ago there was really not much in terms of peer-reviewed publications in patients with mental health issues who were floating. There was anecdotal data as Mandy alluded to there were some peer reviewed papers and healthy subjects

13:40 but the clinical populations were missing. And that's really what I've tried to fill that void by studying patients with PTSD, anxiety across the spectrum and depression. And my colleague Dr. Saeed Khalsa is also studying anorexia nervosa so we've kind of looked at a large group of different mental health issues and we try to you know first address the question of safety you know, when you have mental health issues is it safe to go into this environment? Are you going to have potentially adverse effects?" And this was really most of our initial studies was really focused on safety. Now we're kind of in the middle of doing these sort of longer-term clinical studies of what are the benefits from floating repeatedly

14:34 But to me, when you look at the effects of just a single float session I think by themselves they're pretty impressive. I do think the practice has benefit with multiple sessions but that research is still being conducted we're conducting one of the first NIH funded clinical trials to look at that but the data is already out and published on the effects of what happens when you float and you have these conditions And what we're seeing is within an hour of entering the pool, your stress levels dramatically reduce and your muscle tension interestingly dramatically reduces. And to me I think a lot of mental health issues could be subconsciously or unconsciously driven by muscle tension

15:24 And this is one of the few interventions that really almost immediately relaxes all of that muscle tension, especially in the back around the spinal cord and the neck. On top of this reduction in stress and anxiety you get this very interesting sort of boost or lift in mood. Patients who are depressed are suddenly feeling a lot less of that depression they feel a sense of peace and calm and serenity in ways that they often reported post-float were completely novel to them. You know, a lot of these patients I was studying we kind of first went after some of the most severely impaired patients in that spectrum and they had been suffering not just for years but for decades and the way a lot of them described it was it gave them this sort of really amazing reset

16:24 And when we followed it up for a day or two, it persevered. It wasn't as strong on day one or two as it was immediately post-float but there was still this residue of calm, of peace and the stress and anxiety then would start sort of percolating back up maybe by day three or four. There's individual variability but to me the fact that you go into this environment for a single hour And you take somebody who's been chronically anxious and depressed for years, and suddenly and magically they're feeling a little bit better like their old self again. You didn't have to do anything the environment did all the work for them so we've now studied this and replicated that effect five different times it's a highly reliable reduction in what we call state anxiety

17:21 on average about a 14-point reduction on the Spillberger state anxiety inventory from pre to post float. And we found this in all of the different types of patients we studied, it seems to be this really great environment for inducing a state of homeostasis in the nervous system and there's very few technologies I'm aware of that could do that as rapidly and as effectively as floating And the other part I should mention is we did measure safety in all of these trials, and we were not seeing adverse events. We were worried about this. I did a lot of things to try to make this as safe as possible. We had an intercom system where we could communicate with the patients. We are monitoring their vital signs. We were ready to address any safety issues but they didn't come up.

18:17 So to me, this is something incredible from a medical standpoint. It's very rare to see something that could give such a reliable benefit and have so little downside. And with that, that's why I started the non-profit The Float Research Collective. The whole goal is to try to make the world more aware of these benefits and hopefully get the powers that be to start paying for this therapy so anybody could access it. It's so simple, it's so easy yet right now it's not as accessible as I would like it to be." Yes you make that point in one of your presentations that when it comes to the most vulnerable people who could benefit the most they often don't have the funds to do this out-of-pocket routinely

19:08 And so if we could get insurance companies to recognize it and pay for it, that would be a huge help for those most vulnerable people. And I think anyone who's done this or knows a bit about it would look at and be like well of course there is no negative effects you're just floating in this tank but of course with the vulnerable people you could induce panic or claustrophobia these kinds of things which again its kind of in your head But that's what we're dealing with, is problems that exist in our head. I wanted to read this from one of your slides. You say, the challenges of the disengaged mind in 11 studies we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6-15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more and

20:04 Actually many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being alone with their own thoughts most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing even if that nothing is negative and. Obviously, that's just kind of a comical realization from a study. But how much of our mental problems arise from the fact that our culture doesn't really have a lot of respect or aptitude for meditation? In some ways flotation seems like meditation on steroids are providing the opportunity to meditate but that's got to be a factor in why our culture has a lot of these problems right

20:46 I couldn't agree more. You know, that's not from my study by the way that's Timothy Wilson this was a study that got published in a very prestigious journal science right as i was building my laboratory My float laboratory So you can imagine I'm seeing this study come out of the top journals saying people can spend 15 minutes alone with themselves without shocking themselves You know, people hated to be by themselves in this. It was really just sort of like a plain old room like an old psychology office in the basement so not much stimulation but kind of very boring and obviously without their smartphones

21:27 So, I was worried. I was concerned whether the patients could handle it. A lot of the patients when I would say you could float in there for up to an hour or you could float in the pool for up to an hour and a half that was typically the two ranges of time that we looked at they would look at me and say you're nuts! I'm going to go in there. I'll be by myself for five minutes and then I am out of there. They didn't think they can last five minutes in there And what's amazing to me is we just finished this NIH study, and I could tell you guys this. We haven't published it yet but when we left them to their own devices and said, You float for as long as you want. We're not going to tell you how long you could float for. Just float for as long as you want. This same group of patients who originally didn't want to be in there for five minutes by themselves ended up spending 75 minutes on average per float

22:23 So, you know to me what this is telling me is we have a completely backwards psychology about what happens when were by ourselves with our own thoughts in a state where were not immersed in this world around us. And it turns out that when we go internally There's this immense feeling of peace. But you have to do it in the right environment and what floating does is it tries to create that perfect environment I mean, one thing you didn't talk about as much is we try to match the skin temperature

23:02 of the outside body to both the water and the air temperature. It's not body temperature, it's skin temperature. It's about 95 degrees. And what that does is you don't have to thermoregulate. You don't feel too hot or too cold. It feels perfect. It's one of the few times in life where your skin doesn't have to thermoregulate and then suddenly You can't feel the boundaries between air, body and water. And your body will sort of just become one with this environment. It becomes more or less what Richard Feynman called an out-of-body experience. That's what happened when he floated. He talked about it as an out-of-body experience. What ends up happening is you go within body

23:52 You know, you use the word sensory deprivation and I hate that word because all of our research shows that when you're floating you feel the visceral body. You feel the breath very intensely. You could feel your heart beating sometimes you could feel the blood pulsating through your body it puts you into this very basic state of sentience and when you're focusing on things like the breath Suddenly, what people are trying to achieve in these sort of mindfulness-based meditations where they're focusing on the breath becomes amplified. And meditation as you said becomes so much easier in this environment and so you know to me I know I'm meandering here but to get back to your original point

24:41 People struggle with the idea of being with themselves because typically, the environments that they're with themselves are in the outer world where they're sitting next to their smartphone. Where they're stimulated by life In this environment you are with yourself under the most perfect state of homeostasis Your nervous system is really at peace and so suddenly when you go internally it's going to feel very different And this is what people don't understand. I think there's a lot of hesitancy to try float therapy, but once you're in the environment you realize it's actually quite simple

25:25 In our intro video, Justin if you remember for like the first six years we used the little phrase. If you can't spend an hour alone with you what does that say about you? And people were so offended that in the last year we finally just took that out because they just couldn't wrap their brains around the fact that they might be bored with their own thoughts I like that i think people could use a little gentle ribbing here and there yeah i like the way you say that And so flotation tanks, they have an interesting history too. Right? I believe they were first developed by Eli Lilly who is probably even more famous for his research and trying to communicate with dolphins which ended up getting pretty weird with LSD and interspecies relations but i'm not sure which of you would know more...I'm sure you both know a little bit about the history but is there more to say about Eli Lilly and the genesis of this floatation tank idea

26:19 You mean John Lilly. Oh, John Lilly! My mistake. Yeah yeah Eli Lilly you know is a very giant name as well in pharmaceutical company now yes yes I think that's why i got my wires crossed...I got a one-year-old at home. Hey forgiven but yeah John Lilly is a figurehead in this It was really John Lilly and Jay Shirley, both medical doctors who kind of invented the initial conception of floating back in the 1950s. They were at the National Institute on Mental Health and sort of thinking about consciousness, what happens to the brain when you could just shut off the outside world? Get rid of all forms of external stimulation. Get rid of all forms of input into the nervous system. Does it at that point cease to exist? Do you fall into a state of deep sleep or coma? What happens

27:10 And so they created these very elegant contraptions, very different than the float pools we have today where you're basically immersed in an eight foot tall VAT of water completely immersed. It's heated to skin temperature. You're vertical not horizontal. You're wearing this crazy alien like contraption helmet that has breathing tubes coming in to deliver oxygen, breathing tubes going out to release the carbon dioxide. And you're just sitting in that vault of water it's very sci-fi and as you can imagine not very many people volunteered for this except NASA astronauts. It turns out all the

27:54 astronauts in training on the race to the moon in the 60s were doing this at Jay Shirley's tank, at the VA hospital in Oklahoma City. And it turned out your nervous system didn't shut off you went into a very sort of deep state of self-awareness, of introspective thinking sometimes mind wandering imagination but he didn't cease to exist there you were the entire time It turns out the female astronauts in training were outlasting the men twofold. Some of those female astronauts could stay in this environment for upwards of 12 hours straight, the men were about six hours but anyways you know John Lilly was really fascinated by this state of consciousness and around the time Jay Shirley started his laboratory at Oklahoma City VA John Lilly took off

28:55 to the Virgin Islands and started his experiments with dolphins, and started combining float tanks with psychedelic substances like LSD and eventually ketamine. And wrote about it in his books. He never published peer-reviewed scientific papers which always upset me about him on floating but He wrote some books and it became part of popular culture. And then in the 1980s, they made a movie called Altered States which was really a fictional tale about John Lilly and his adventures in float tanks. And it became somewhat of a cult classic. And floating took off I would say at that point in the 80's there was sort of initial peaking

29:51 And then it trailed off again after that. And Lily passed away, I think earlier this millennium, in the early 2000s. He was actually living in Maui at the time but he was a very creative imaginative genius but also a bit of a madman himself and so we could get into that. I have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with John Lily Because I think he could have done so much more for the medical field in floating, but he never really touted that part of it. It was more of a consciousness exploration for him and he was a medical doctor and he was a scientist as well who published other things in peer-review journals

30:37 But for better or worse, it was Lilly and Shirley who initially conceived the idea. And then Lilly and Glenn Perry in the early 70s who invented what is the modern day conception of floating where you are floating horizontally on this pool of water saturated with epsom salt Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean the way you describe, these are my favorite types of people, the ones who push up against the boundaries and somehow secure funding to do such research because it is so rare to have that kind of outside-the box stuff happening. That's why we still talk about it today decades later because it's hard to find a guy like Lily doing work like this. That's right and I feel

31:25 The one mistake Lilly made is he was a well-respected scientist for many, many years in the early days. I think science started losing respect for him when he stopped publishing papers and stopped doing research and it was all just sort of self observation. I appreciate that because it's courageous what you did. He went to states of consciousness that pretty much no one else on earth will ever obtain But at the same time, coming from a medical or clinical perspective he was a medical doctor. He was a psychiatrist by training. He had published neuroscience papers on recording some of the first signals from the brains of monkeys. He was getting published in prestigious journals and then he discovers floating and then started using really high doses of psychedelics and then kind of stopped doing all that research and stop publishing and never really

32:24 thought of floating necessarily from a therapeutic perspective. At the time, the tanks were very enclosed and we could talk about that. The tanks have become much more spacious and open over the days so as you said Greg earlier some people might feel claustrophobic in those earlier iterations of floating So maybe Lily thought this is only for special people who could handle this environment But nowadays, floating should be open to everybody especially now that there's open pools. So there is no enclosure. But anyways I digress...I think you know the point i'm trying to make about John Lilly is the clinical field of medicine never took floating seriously it's just starting to right now because we're publishing this stuff in peer-reviewed medical journals

33:12 But until then it was always this far out wild niche that was always associated with psychedelics. It was never viewed as a therapeutic treatment and that's what upsets me is I feel like Lily could have done more to get it more respected in that regard Mm-hmm, that's true That association is pretty strong but on the other hand even the psychedelic sir having their time to shine with lots of research going on concerning These same types of conditions really, of stress and PTSD. And I would say that mushrooms or MDMA are probably still far better ways to go about it than opioids and benzos but having had a few of my own experiences they can still be a roll of the dice especially if you're going in with already somewhat fragile state-of-mind

34:00 So floating really does seem like the best of all of these options, but maybe because of the resurgence in taking psychedelics seriously. There's a new attitude towards taking the float tank seriously too and that previous association isn't a big deal anymore because it's all kind of coming out Yeah, isn't that funny? Full circle right. And it all kind of happened at the same time those initial float tanks in the 70s the psychedelic movement in the late 60s going into the 70s and It all sort of washed away and now it's coming back again. And you know psychedelics I think have therapeutic use there is no doubt that evidence-based especially for psilocybin and depression MDMA and PTSD Is really quite impressive

34:47 You need to be doing it in the right set and setting. And in all of the peer-reviewed research that's coming out the past few years, It's with a trained and licensed therapist for many hours I mean for a psilocybin session you'll be with them for eight hours so...it's not your typical psychotherapy session They're guiding you through the experience they're helping process the emotions they're helping make sure going into a quote-unquote bad trip, but inevitably bad trips happen and psychedelics are quite intense especially for people with mental health issues. The adverse event rate of these in the most recent study that came out were higher than 50 percent sometimes upwards of 75% or more are having adverse events

35:36 So I think it's, you know...I like the idea of psychedelic therapy. I think floating is maybe perhaps a better bridge or transition before you go there in some ways floating creates i would say the perfect set and setting and that's probably why Lilly was combining psychedelics with floating. I think that was a big part of it. Ketamine was his drug of choice And ketamine with depression, I think is popping up all over the country now. You're seeing clinics opening at every corner and he thought floating combined with ketamine was the ultimate state sort of dissociative state really. Yeah but it turns out ketamine is one of the most addictive substances on earth right huge physiological withdrawal

36:27 And Lily spent the latter part of his life in that withdrawal. And so I think what we're not aware of is whenever you're introducing a drug, whether it's a psychedelic or a drug like ketamine which is really dissociative there is the possibility for adverse events and there is the possibility for addiction and these are two things I'm trying to fight against with float therapy. I feel like it doesn't have that same profile You don't have adverse events, you don't see addiction with it it seems to be very safe. And so I think of safety a lot because the opioid epidemic we're in right now and the benzodiazepine epidemic we're in right now were driven by medical doctors who weren't thinking about safety, they were just writing these prescriptions not caring about what are the ripple effects in society when people are now addicted to these substances? Justin and I have taken maybe a little bit of solace

37:26 One of the guys on my board of advisors, our buddy Dr. Dan Engel he's working with the Thank You Life Fund that is doing a lot of this psychedelic treatment with veterans and the amount of traction and fundraising and you know even some government awareness that this Thank You Life fund is getting is I mean incredible! And again everything that Justin saying if he can get that kind of attention with psychedelics then Justin's float research collective should really follow the same trajectory if not better we're hoping yeah absolutely and going back to the comment you made justin about relaxing our bodies regulation that is constantly happening that in the tank our bodies can kind of

38:11 Put that process on the back burner and made me think of an analogy possibly to fasting which is another trend out there that our bodies in American society are constantly processing intake morning noon at night. we don't fast but you know it's getting trendy and when you let your body stop that constant intake process other things happen that seem beneficial and you could maybe say there is a parallel there to just our bodies regulation of temperature and all these things that

38:47 we're experiencing because of the constant input, it allows in a sense our bodies to stop and take a breath while we're in that tank. Is that kind of... You see what I'm saying there? Yeah yeah! It's really a form of self-regulation right? I call it like the patellar reflex you know, you hit the knee with a hammer, the whole leg comes up and float therapy, you go into that pool and your nervous system just relaxes And we're talking about both your central and your peripheral nervous system. We just published a paper last month showing that your blood pressure reduces by 10 to 13 points, your heart rate variability in the high frequency domain significantly increases, your respiration rate goes down

39:33 You know, to me these are physiological changes that are happening when you're in a float environment. And just like with fasting right where you're reducing the input, you're allowing the gastrointestinal system to enter into a state of homeostasis where it's not being stimulated by all these different food items coming in right? Floating is kind of doing that for the nervous system floatings kind of... In some ways I never thought of it like this but a fasting for the nervous system because you're being so stimulated all the time. Yes, yes that's exactly what I was trying to get at and it seems like there's a little bit of an analogy there because our bodies can't help but process input the food you can control but the outside stimuli you can't control it from cradle-to-grave you're always looking at something feeling something and it's nice for the body to get a rest in that regard and that's also probably why

40:29 Some people, not that it's the main thing but some people have an out of body experience or some kind of disassociation and maybe it simulates something similar to the body being like oh what am I dead? What's going on here. Uh...I'm not used to even pausing for a moment! And now that I'm pausing maybe we're gonna float onto the great beyond or something like that. But I do understand those experiences are kind of rare. Don't freak out thinking that you're going to get in a tank and then be looking at yourself from a third party perspective or anything." Yeah, like I said we didn't see that. We didn't see hallucinations

41:05 I mean, once in a while people have visuals in there like oftentimes auras or colors they might see. Or they might hear some sort of sound in the background. Some people describe it almost like a quiet symphony of sorts. Sometimes you'll hear your body noises that's common. Yeah, I did. That's just normal. It's just always kind of in the background we just don't know until it becomes very quiet. I've heard people could hear their eyelids closing Wow, that's something. I mean when you mentioned the heartbeat thing that was it for me is i've done flotation tanks in the past and me and my wife really enjoyed it now with the one-year old Mandy was kind enough to let us have a float recently and we both came out of there realizing man we have not

41:53 been able to relax in a while and we're not as good at getting into that relaxed state, but it's clearly helpful. But in this most recent experience is definitely my own heartbeat that I couldn't stop being distracted by wild. But Mandy you were going to say something? Yeah, the more you float the better it gets so that first experience usually is pretty I don't say overwhelming, but kind of like Justin was saying though the first time you go in you really do feel that reset and the more that you float. The more your body becomes accustomed to that sensory deprivation experience and going back to where you said people can sometimes have those out-of-body experiences You know it's really fascinating that i can have some

42:36 of our veterans or clients unlimited members that come in literally every single day and never have experiences like that. And I can have other people who come in for the very first time, they're exhausted for whatever reason and like I've had a woman who was in the flow pod for not even 20 minutes And she got out and she was so irritated that we had let her sleep for so long. And we'd remind her, you know it's a 60 minute float, you were in there for 20 minutes and she really really believed that in that 20 minutes she had gotten out of the flow pod, she had gone home fed her dog come back gotten back into the flow pod then we have forgotten about her

43:15 All of that can happen within 20 minutes in your brain because she finally just had a chance to decompress. I don't know that, i could even say that she was in the deep sleep phase at that point but she might have been and personally I know a lot of other float spot owners too have had experiences where you know I felt like I was living a parallel life. I saw 20 years of my life if I'd taken a different choice when I was younger and you come out of that experience I don't say relieved, but it's just so... It's just kind of nice to have those experiences and go, I don't know why i was meant to see that. I don't know why that happened but it is kind of cool that the more you float you can kind of start to tap into whether it's a vision whether it's lights or

43:56 or memories that you can start to tap into some of that within your subconscious. Yeah, similar to meditation everyone agrees universally that it's great for relaxation and clarity of mind but then as you get more developed in it people report some pretty wild experiences and I'm sure there's just a good parallel there but While we're still in this first hour here, I wanted to come back to what you said Mandy about advanced language learning because people are going to wonder why we didn't bring that back up if we don't now. But it's interesting because there is a great book called Psychic Discoveries from Behind the Iron Curtain about all the mind research going on in the USSR while our guys were doing the MKUltra stuff and they talk about using certain

44:43 brain states in conjunction with, in their case classical music to learn languages almost overnight. And this is not exactly the same thing but that book made me aware of the possibility of putting ourselves in certain States where we retain much more information much faster and apparently there's an element of this with how The Seals were using the tank right? Yeah so it's kind of funny you talk about people have used in historical purposes, not only for advanced language learning and relaxation. But the reason Justin and I kind of have a negative reaction to the word sensory deprivation is because before if you looked it up online, it would actually show as a form of war torture. And that's obviously not what we're doing here. But one of the videos that I was referencing earlier when our buddy The Navy SEAL was talking to us about floating he had said that within the flow pod

45:37 they had like a Rosetta Stone language learning program and it was able to take their six month language learning program down to six weeks. And the reasoning behind it was that these guys cannot sleep. They have PTSD, they're usually ADD, they're focusing on a lot of other things, they've got all their buddies within the room... The last thing that they are trying to do is maybe not trying too but they have a hard time with their memory retention and you know going back into the classroom And so putting these people into this state where not only their memory was a lot better because they can sleep at night and because they're more relaxed, and they don't have the distractions. But there's some kind of memory enhancement that can happen better when you drop into that theta wave state. One of the things Justin will probably talk about too is going from theta down to the delta wave

46:29 But that video specifically, you can find the transcript of it online but you cannot find that video anywhere. And so I've always just relied on that testimonial from our Navy SEALs and I'm talking to many of them who will agree that happens. So one of things TrueRest Float Spas are trying to do is say great we're going to take French and Spanish and these different languages and see if we can start integrating into our business model to help people learn languages faster which which will be great for people that are in high school and college, and even just want to go on vacation. Or they're trying to listen to some language learning program in their car while they're driving, and they can't figure out why it's not working because you are far over stimulated in your car listening to a podcast than if you were in a sensory deprivation tank

47:14 And one of the things I'm actually personally trying to grapple with right now is whether or not I do that through virtual reality. I know there are a lot of positives to virtual reality and I know there's a lot of negatives to virtual reality, and so it's something that we're definitely going to do in the next six months. I'm just not sure of the modality of it yet That's very interesting. Yeah, I mean VR is a tool like anything else and it has many applications and it's worth exploring if there are more positive ones because we hear so much about the negative ones that'd be nice to see it used in a good way. And Dr Feinstein, I wanted to ask you a little bit about

47:53 something mandy and mentioned to me where when you were studying brainwaves during floating you found people entering the delta brainwave state but while they're awake which apparently is pretty unheard of, add we've mentioned time a few times that is to me one of the most mind blowing things people should experience it's just how when you are in that environment u can't get a grip on time you know the paid for an hour and of course people have these in their house it's great cuz you can just do whatever you however long you want but you know you pay for an hour so your trying to relax like man i need to get this relaxed state because the clock is ticking and then you kind of

48:39 get there and you're just like, well how close am I to the end? And it's a kind of puzzle. And it's just weird how in an hour 60 minutes is this time... You lose all grasp of it but that might relate here to this delta wave brain state thing while people are awake It's just another odd thing that seems to happen but we don't have much research or even much observation of this occurring This Delta Brainwave State while people are awake Is that right? It's true My colleague Joel Froelich just finished analyzing these data and this was only possible because of my other colleague, Ricardo Gil-DaCosta who has a startup company called Neuroverse that made these very small wireless waterproof EEG systems. It'd be impossible to measure brain signals in this environment otherwise

49:34 And what was amazing when Joel analyzed these data is, yes these people were conscious awake and in the midst of a very prominent state of delta wave activation which is very rare. You normally only see that in deep sleep that's kind of the most common time you see delta waves Deep dreamless non-REM sleep So to me, that's really fascinating that you could achieve such a state while awake. There is evidence that this could happen in other domains including psychedelics it turns out DMT is producing a lot of delta waves but also a lot of other waves and floating its mostly Delta slow brainwave state one two three cycles a second so to me thats really fascinating finding

50:33 it does suggest that floating is inducing a very unique state of consciousness. Greg, it's annoying in a good way to businesses like TrueRest because I've been marketing the theta brainwave state and researching the theta brainwave state for seven years now because that's what all the research was pointing to—that everyone spends their time in theta wave so when this research just came out at the last float conference I was mind blown and then i had to go do all the research to find well what is actually happening in the delta wave. And Justin's point there's not really any research tell you what is happening with your consciousness in that state because there's just not any other way to achieve it really or anesthesia, you could get through anesthesia little riskier little bit riskier but you're not conscious yeah and hopefully you come back to consciousness with anesthesia but that's right

51:33 It's funny you mentioned the DMT thing because I once interviewed Rick Strassman and he is famous for his DMT research. He made the comment, we were giving this to people in a cold sterile environment of a doctor's office and maybe that wasn't the best environment for intravenous DMT. And I would have to agree. Settings are obviously very key but To come back a little bit more to the opioids and the benzos that you talk about in one of your presentation, the data around just how much of it is being used. Apparently we have 1 million deaths in America since 1999 over 100,000 just in the last year. You also mentioned that when the Sacklers brought Valium to market at its peak in the seventies Americans consumed

52:20 two billion tablets of it. And where it gets really interesting was this statistic that one in eight Americans have used benzos in the last year and 20% have admitted to misusing them, and when you ask these people why they misuse these drugs there's a pie chart of their answers elaborate on some of that information the answers they gave and how it lines up with flotation benefits You know, if I could recall that slide. I think over half of the time the reason people are misusing benzos oftentimes drugs like Xanax Valium's another one at a van or Lorazepam is because they are trying to relax and relieve tension This is probably the most common reason And I think this is what people in society need They need to take a load off They've been stressed all day

53:17 They have a ton on their plate. And so they're looking for quick fix to relax and relieve their tension, and benzos work highly effectively at doing that within an hour or two of taking a benzo you're feeling less tension, you're feeling more relaxed. To me that's really fascinating because that's what we were finding in our data with the anxious patients who are floating and the stress patients who were really floating to relieve their tension and to relax. And there's other reasons too, I think about a quarter said they were doing it to help with sleep and insomnia. There is now some data mostly anecdotal but some published data that suggests floating will improve the quality of your sleep and make it easier to transition into sleep

54:10 So, I think there are a lot of overlaps between the benefits of floating and why people are misusing drugs like benzos. One thing we haven't talked about maybe will talk about it in the second hour is the other clinical condition that people are floating for is pain especially back pain and back pain as ubiquitous. I think almost all of us feel at some point in life But you know, you're just fighting the forces of gravity and oftentimes you could have back pain for no obvious reasons other than that. And floating is one of the few places that you're in this zero-gravity like state and... You are able to decompress the spinal cord all those muscles around the spinal cord relax The tension is released and now the spinal cord could actually decompress from the forces of gravity

55:02 And that's a really unique state. And a lot of patients with chronic back pain are reporting immediate benefits from floating, that will often persevere once again for a day or two sometimes. So I think it's something that needs to be looked into more the research isn't as large and vast in that domain is what I've been studying with the anxiety disorders and PTSD But I think it's another area of study and a lot of those patients were also using opioids to combat their pain. And would talk about the effects of floating as being as good as taking an opioid,

55:43 except they don't feel zombified after. They're not sedated, they come out of a float clear-headed and clear minded and excited to take on the world so it's very different than that sort of sedate or zombified state that comes from benzos and opioids Yes, and we should get into back pain. But I asked you about the drugs to lead up to this very ambitious goal you have of running a study comparing a single float session to a single dose of these drugs and just putting them head-to-head against each other? I don't know if this set of studies has started yet or not but talk to us about that goal on what you would expect it to show so

56:30 These drugs are highly addictive, we know that now. Oxycodone and Xanax, highly addictive. Millions of people are physiologically addicted. There's overdoses happening all the time as you alluded to and the reason people are using these drugs it's very clear is for short-term very immediate rapid relief of pain and anxiety This is why they're being abused, this is why they're so addictive. And they also have intense withdrawal symptoms once the body becomes addicted to it. But anyways... To me there's never been a single study that has tried to take on what I call the behemoths of big pharma

57:14 You know, why is it that a doctor has a patient in front of them who's complaining about issues related to pain or anxiety or stress? And the first thing they do is write that prescription on the pill pad. Why is that? Well, it turns out there's never been a peer-reviewed head-to-head clinical trial showing that there's a behavioral intervention that could have that same pain relief or anxiety relief as these pills And to me this is mind-boggling. I'm talking about meditation, I'm talking about psychotherapy, I'm talking about yoga and acupuncture go across the entire spectrum of behavioral interventions non-pharmacological interventions and no one's ever tried to go head-to-head against these guys

58:03 And to me, I feel like this is a travesty because that's going to be the only way to get doctors to start prescribing another alternative instead of these highly addictive pills. So that's what I'm proposing and my non-profit is proposing to do. We need to fundraise for this you know? Going up against people who could spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get drugs approved and then spread through the entire medical system This is not going to be an easy task, but I think it's one that we have to do if we're going to change the field of medicine which is really going in the wrong trajectory. Yeah! I really see floating as part of a holistic toolbox that could put a serious dent in the drug-only solution that we have today. Yeah absolutely and

58:58 you know, we have to celebrate small achievements. Society is large and I think there's so many people that could stand to benefit from floating especially given all the stress right now in society and Mandy i just found out reached her 1 millionth float right? Yeah! So a million people have now floated at TrueRest. To me, I'd like that number to be a billion eventually right? Oh we'll get there. We'll get there but the problem is most people have never heard of floating and have often never tried it and to me this is something people need to understand could become part of the routine like you said the holistic package of how to live life in modern times and I think floating could be a very central piece today

59:47 Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. Greg do we have time at some point for Justin to talk at some point of how he left the Laureate Institute for Brain Research and why he went off on his own? Yeah let's do it right now! Justin i think that's a good story All right...I don't want to get into too many details but I'm happy to kind of give the 10 000 foot view Sure You know to me this idea of disseminating float therapy What I've shown very clearly in my data is a very safe intervention, especially when done in the confines of the open pool. I say that because we haven't had a chance to study the closed pools yet but I just want to put that disclaimer for patients who might be listening to this podcast all of our research was done in the open pool and I think it's important that this environment create a safe space for you You need to feel safe

1:00:44 That's a key part, I think of the therapeutic process. And I think you've alluded to that Greg that some tank designs could make you feel unsafe and that that's not good. You know? To me, that's the key part of the therapeutic process but this idea that I wanted to disseminate this to the world is so central to my purpose and meaning of doing science and research. When I got into this, when I decided to pursue my PhD and study this at a serious level at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research it was with that altruistic motive that anxiety is ubiquitous! And the current treatments are not working they're not satisfactory

1:01:31 And I want to find some solution that could help bend the curve a little bit. And I don't wanna say floating is going to be a cure-all, I think floating like you said Greg could be a catalyst for so many other things but it can certainly provide a very potent temporary relief from the suffering that is so ubiquitous in our society pain stress and anxiety those... That triad covers so much of our suffering And if we could just provide these respites, I think there's going to be wiggle room and opening to expand the benefit to other areas of life. But you know, to me that's what i'm trying to do with the Float Research Collective is we're trying to get the evidence base... To get the field of medicine to take this seriously

1:02:21 and to try to actually engage in a way that this could be covered. So no matter who you are, you could walk to your neighborhood float shop and go float, and it will be paid for or subsidized by the government or health insurance. That's my vision here. And wouldn't that be great? Because everyone in society I think could stand to benefit from this respite from reality. It's just freely available to everybody So that's kind of, you know my goal and at the Laurier Institute for Brain Research I saw the iterative approach that was being taken. You know we just finished our NIH study where we were looking at the safety of floating across 75 patients with severe anxiety and depression across multiple float sessions everyone floated six times

1:03:19 And we just wanted to assess over the course of that six sessions, were there any adverse events that could come up with multiple float sessions? And once again the answer was no. We weren't seeing adverse events but that was the whole point of the study. The study wasn't to take on big pharma you see and the idea is I'm trying to make this research happen faster. I don't think i could have done this big pharma study at the Laurier Institute And you talked earlier about big pharma, I didn't get into this. But the powers that be are vast and extensive. Yeah. And psychiatry by the way is basically funded by Big Pharma that the whole field of psychiatry is pretty much entirely funded by big pharma because That's what psychiatrists most often do is they will prescribe pills

1:04:13 oftentimes what separates them from psychologists. Not to say that psychiatrists can't do amazing therapy, but the vast majority are just prescribing and that's because big pharma wants that so to me I was going to face these powers that you spoke about and this study going head-to-head against benzos was not going to happen And so that's what I'm trying to do. That's why left, that's why I created the Float Research Collective is I want to get this approved as a medical treatment as quickly as possible So that everybody out there who suffering from these ubiquitous conditions stands to benefit. That's the whole idea

1:04:58 And Justin, I think the reason I wanted you to share that to a degree is because you talk about these different studies that have the NIH backing which is obviously huge but The Float Research Collective does not. So the fundraising power needed to make this head-to-head study happen it's extremely important because it does not have that kind of NIH backing that the library has on some of these studies that already happened Mm-hmm. Yeah, the system is not gonna want this study done because we already kind of have a fair indication of what it might show. And they don't want anything to compete with their profits for these pills, so yeah I mean i think that's a story that's going to resonate a lot with this audience who likes to see people go rogue and try to fight the big machine really just in the interest of giving people something that is going to help improve their lives and improve their situations that they don't have access to otherwise So yeah, I appreciate that

1:05:57 And as we're starting to do the wrap up stuff, Mandy I also wanted to. talk to you a little bit about what you do with franchising. Now, I looked at the numbers and it seems a bit lofty for the average person to get involved in but no franchise really seems cheap. I almost went down the path of opening a Jimmy John's or buying a vending machine route back in the day when I was sad and desperate but so many of us are working in areas we don't feel fulfilled by or maybe were working in companies where we know we're doing active harm in the world to a degree, but we gotta get a bag somehow. I would think if a person wanted to become an entrepreneur be their own boss and feel good about their product and their contribution to the world this would not be a bad way to go give us the pitch in terms of what's involved with being a TrueRest franchisee? The benefits and ultimately its profitability. Yeah, I'm glad you want to know more about that

1:06:58 When anyone ever asks me, I've been in this industry far longer than I already thought I would be. And there's three reasons why you know one is what we're doing is just incredible. Between the conversations that I have with Justin and anyone else that's doing research or even wants to talk about floating it means my favorite topic. I just can't imagine doing work where I talk about anything else But on the business side of it, I know every single morning that I'm waking up helping people leave the corporate ladder that is a complete grind where they're totally burnt out and they don't see really any upside or way to move forward and help them become entrepreneurs. It's also what keeps me up at night is for the people who maybe do struggle a little bit more aren't seeing you know the strongest gift card sales what can I do in every single given moment to help those people achieve their goals?

1:07:50 And then the last third thing, which we don't really need to talk about but just a personal statement is because my dad is the CEO and I won't step away until I get to see him retire. Which I would hope this for all of my franchisees But every single person that has opened a TrueRest so all 44 locations they floated at some point and they believed in it In that first float so much That they've invested over half a million dollars or more into opening up their location Now, there's SBA loans and all other ways that you can fund it for probably less than $200,000. But all in all if you're looking at half a million, you've got to really believe in float therapy. You've gotta love it. You gotta want to get out of what you are doing and its the topic we talk about on the grocery store I mean when anyone asks me what do? We ask if your down to float those are kind of things my franchisees want to spend their life doing

1:08:43 So, you know the process itself takes about maybe nine months from being interested to actually getting your doors open and then whether it's a single location like we have in San Diego that my mom runs and it's a little two-pod spa and she floats all of her veterans. And you know all for other clients or you know, my Pittsburgh franchisees that are going to build five locations and they have full time jobs but they really wanted to bring something other than what they were doing into the world and to kind of help their Pittsburgh friends and family that they saw were really suffering. There's a lot of ways to franchise with us so you gotta just love float therapy, and you want to be an entrepreneur, and I'll help you do the rest

1:09:24 Love it, love it. And Justin, that's always good to hit this sort of stuff at the end so it's fresh in the minds of people out there but give us a little more about The Float Research Collective itself and some of your main goals, the fundraiser and how people who have enjoyed this could help the mission if this stuff resonates with them? Absolutely. You know, this has been new for me I'm not a social media person if anyone saw my TED talk I don't like social media at all i think it's the end of us but there's a purpose for getting messages out and I think that's a very important part and so we did start social media this past year all of our accounts are at Float Research that's the handle and we also have a website clinicalfloat.org

1:10:14 It talks all about what we've been discussing. It shows a repository of all the peer-reviewed papers that we've been talking about and a lot of the ones I published are open access, so you could get the PDF there and actually read it for yourself. We also have major fundraiser that we just launched four months ago, so it's still fresh. We're trying to get it really getting some steam now but that's to raise $10 million dollars to do these head-to-head studies against benzos and opioids. And, you know we could use all the help we could get honestly We even have the ability to sign up fundraising teams if you want to help us get to that goal rather than just giving a one-off donation But either way that website can be found on basically any of our social media sites on clinicalfloat org or if you want to go directly to it

1:11:08 It's clinicalfloat.fundraise, F-U-N R-A-I-S-E dot org That's our fundraiser Great! And it is so unfortunate that it takes that much money to do this stuff but... ...it's the game we play and how things are structured and the people who have that kind of money in one lump sum you know, don't want to spend it on this. And that is how we're in the situation so it's a noble thing to try and do at grassroots and get the funding required to show that this is alternative with really no consequence." I also just wanted to mention before we go something you said in that presentation

1:11:54 regarding how you guys can kind of work together, the synergy between you both which is kinda this cloud-based system because you can get more data from all the float centers that are out there. If you can get just 10% of them to sign up, you said you could get thousands of data points... That's a really creative and interesting way to get strong scientific data based on the network that's already there right? That's right, you know that was another thing that excited me about starting the float research collective is here we have this burgeoning network of float centers who are all very excited by the potential of this novel technology and they want to learn why it's working how its working who its work in four and so we could set up very easily

1:12:43 a cloud-based system where all you would need is an iPhone or tablet or some app. There's different ways we're exploring this actually, and very quickly float centers could have all of their patrons who go into the float fill out some questionnaires. And it would be that simple to collect massive amounts of data. We can talk about safety on a much larger scale I could talk about what are the base rates of adverse events that happen less than, you know 0.05% of the time when you have tens of thousands of data points? And so i think from a safety standpoint from a dissemination standpoint we need this system in place and that's one of the other things we're fundraising for

1:13:28 Yeah, that was a really creative idea I thought kind of a gorilla way to get the network going because it's already halfway in place you just need to collect that data with some cloud based system and get people to participate. Man, this has been really enjoyable. You know I had a little uncertainty about filling two hours with the float tank conversation but i thought it was really great and I think people are going to enjoy it and especially anything that kind of is a thorn in the side of the pill pushers...I think our people are going to support and appreciate Are there any other links or follow-up info to give people before we really call it in?

1:14:10 One of the things I'd love to share, and I should have mentioned it earlier at some point but as an ode to the True Rest origin story every True Rest across the country offers free floats to veterans on the 11th of every single month. So no matter where you are across the country if you're a veteran and some locations even expand that to first responders You can always get a free float at True Rest. I love that Mandy! And you know I worked in the VA in San Diego for many years It was heartbreaking I'll never forget the look on a couple of my patients faces who had post-traumatic stress disorder and they'd come to me at the rock bottom, you know. By the time they got to me their wife or significant other had basically said i'm going to divorce you if you don't get help. They've lost their friends, they were in the throws of addiction, they're on the cusp of suicide and they get to me...I diagnosed them with PTSD

1:15:06 And then I have to look them in the eye and say, there's a four month wait list for psychotherapy. You know? To me that's an atrocity they need help that day. That's why they got to me! And i would have loved to been able to say to them hey just go float right now until you could get psychotherapy I want you to continue to float every single week That's what it should be and to me there should be a float tank at every VA hospital in this country no excuses Yeah, for sure. I'm glad you got to mention a little bit about your experience working with people who have seen the horrors of war because there's certainly a lot of talk these days about heightened geopolitical tensions and the prospect of World War Three and maybe a lot of us have been desensitized

1:15:56 through movies and even video games, sure. As to just how horrible those experiences are and how difficult it is to truly recover if you're lucky enough to survive the experience itself. And you've done a noble thing working with these most vulnerable often forgotten people who took a major risk—the biggest risk you could take—to try to do what they thought was right. I appreciate that and i appreciate all the veterans, I think it is a tremendous thing that they have to encounter in terms of stress to the nervous system. Very few could say they've ever encountered what they have and so it's up to us as a society to take care of them! I really believe that and to me there's no excuse that they're not floating every single week especially as they come back from war

1:16:48 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well said I agree well you are both doing important work to help people recover and optimize in noninvasive risk free ways and I salute you for it keep up the great work and take care Thanks Greg thanks so much Greg All right there we have it surely an unexpected topic as i mentioned a lot of the podcasts i listen to or have in the past talk about floating affair amount so i wasn't sure about doing this one. But mandy being a listener i think made fun because she knew what sort of angles we might appreciate,

1:17:29 And after hearing Justin talk about the state of our culture and his very specific aim of putting floating up against Big Pharma's harshest prescriptions, it tipped me over into the green. Maybe not as many people know about floating as I might think and if they do maybe they've yet to actually try it! And speaking of that, I can't get too far into this without mentioning a very generous offer from Mandy and that's 50% off a float session at participating locations. So obviously a franchise owner has a little say in what they do but if you go to truerest.com slash VIP you will find a list of multiple locations across 13 or so states that will let you come and have a session for half price

1:18:19 So that's the quick and easy way, but if you find a true rest location in your area that isn't on that list Mandy went a step further and provided me with a link where you can basically buy yourself A 50% off a first float gift card. That would work at any location so it's a little complicated But you got to do a search and see if there's even a truerest around you at all If there is See if that location is on the VIP list. And if so, it's as easy as scheduling it through that list of locations at truerest.com slash VIP or you can just scroll down to your show notes and go add it from there. And that's where you will find that link for the 50% off a first float that works anywhere. That is a true rest location. It's always a little frustrating when we don't get these sorts of offers set up until after the interview

1:19:15 Because you want to feature them more prominently so everyone is aware. But sometimes this is just how it shakes out because this kind of thing is not usually top of mind for me, So I didn't think to ask Mandy until the interview was over and when she came back with this 50% off thing, I just thought wow that was a lot more generous than I expected We could all benefit from carving out a little time for introspection, relaxation and de-stressing from an environment that is pretty rough on our mental state and physiology. So treat yourself! It's not really going to get any easier or cheaper most likely than with this offer And I just go back to thinking about our battle with the bad guys being a battle to control the energy field as Lynn McTaggart might call it

1:20:07 But you know, the general polarity of the consciousness field and all of our thoughts and actions contribute to it. And it's always being manipulated to skew negative well if I can tell or remind tens of thousands of people about floating and then a few thousand actually take the next step and check it out And from there, they come out feeling more at peace. Less overwhelmed with it all less prone to negative expressions of emotion and more zen-like let's say It might be a small thing but it might have big impacts maybe you could end up being like a butterfly effect kind of thing But any positive impact on the field is good and that's how I'm thinking about this one and how effective it could be

1:20:55 Plus, maybe some folks feel passionately enough to contribute to the fundraiser. It's awfully expensive to do a head-to-head study that will be accepted across the medical community but we know how this game is played studies that upset big pharma profits just don't get funded and the bar for credible evidence is set so high very few can clear it So yeah I'm rooting for Dr. Feinstein and wholeheartedly support his mission I just started kinda thinking along those lines and it seemed like there's actually a lot more potential for this to make an impact than I first thought. Hell, maybe even some of the THC upper crust decides to open their own float rest locations? The possibility for a big domino effect is there people giving themselves a break spreading the word anyone they know on opioids or benzodiazepines

1:21:52 or people who are just curious doing a little business with the network that's being helpful to the world and supporting a leader in that sphere, being Justin who is trying to go up against Big Pharma directly and on their terms. It's bold I like it! I'm happy to use an episode of this show to try and help with those things sadly sometimes solutions are less exciting than the problems but we need both if we want to get anywhere So the first hour is great and the second hour doesn't disappoint. We talked about the benefits of visualizing your goals clearly and how floating can help, lengthening the hypnagogic state, the healing properties of water and Ebsen salt in general, the history of strategies used by big pharma when they want to fight dirty some resistance trouble and roadblocks to wider adoption from the big machine

1:22:51 the benefits of ego detachment, reports of triggering what's interpreted as womb memories thoughts and considerations with tank design infrared panels co2 modulation in the imax tank possibility and dr feinstein's work with james nester when james was writing the book breathe which I have raved about before All interesting stuff. Join Plus for a second hour of every show, $8 bucks a month. Cancel anytime start with the 7-day free trial TheHigherSideChats.com That said in higher side news how about that pre roll message huh?

1:23:31 The great THC Outline Auction of 2023 is almost upon us. I don't know what these are worth to anyone or how high or low some of these auctions might go but i know i'm not gonna raise the price a plus and i've done all i can do to try to convert more people to it and i don't want to go down the ads route though so many people have been kind not to give me A lot of shit about even the prospect of doing it for the free show only, of course. But the thought of auctioning off these outlines came to me and it feels a little cringey to sign something and assume its valuable to anyone but my wife reminded at time I got her a signed script from an episode of The Office as gift once And how I have setlist from They Might Be Giants back in the day still framed

1:24:26 And so she made me feel less cringy about it. Besides, I started looking into moving costs and got some serious sticker shock! I know gas is expensive but the moving industry seems a little bit like a racket... Surprise surprise! And i did rip this band-aid off in the joint session but we have settled on Tampa Florida That's right people, it checks a majority of our boxes. Florida is probably the largest concentration of family on both sides more than Missouri even at this point It's an income tax-free state we avoid the harsh winters they at least have a medical dispensary system and we have the whole east coast to explore really the last part of the country that I'm largely ignorant of

1:25:19 I think i've covered the continental US a lot more than the vast majority of people, but everywhere on the east coast south of Boston and north of Florida. I've just never really had a reason to visit so yes! I know Florida is humid. I know Bill Gates just released a shitload of GMO mosquitoes down there if it was a perfect place...I'd be there already But after a lot of consideration The pros definitely seem to outweigh the cons as my wife and I see it So the fact that we finally settled on a place became the catalyst for the wheels turning as to how I could get a little bit of extra cash in hand. And thus, The Great THC Outline Auction of 2023 was born! If a THC outline is any interest to you pop on over to eBay and see what we got starting February 1st

1:26:16 And I suppose that's all she wrote. Big thanks again to our guests, share this interview with anyone who might benefit from the information, anyone in mental or physical pain or exhaustion. The system certainly treats us bad enough we could all treat ourselves a little bit better. Thanks for listening and I'll see you soon maybe in Mount Shasta if I'm lucky But I've done my part. Your move, Big Pharma faithful stressed and unrested masses and turners of the great tide You're fuckin' Sometimes when i get down I eat a bunch of corporate junk Fuck that makes you fat An industry is facing wrong Got an addiction to the digital technology And then I try to quit but it's too hard See discipline is no money

1:28:39 Discipline on behalf of the big conspiracy and every one of them