Maui Calm is coming soon!, Dr. Justin Feinstein | 2025 Float Conference

[music] [applause] So earlier this year um I lost my father and I'd like to dedicate this talk to my dad. You know, this picture was taken a few months after my first float conference 12 years ago, and my dad was driving me out to Tulsa, Oklahoma, on my way to open up the float clinic and research center at the Laurate Institute. And in the panhandle of Texas, as you're getting ready to to cross into Oklahoma, there's a place you could stop at called Cadillac Ranch. And you have a bunch of Cadillacs literally coming out of the middle of nowhere in the ground. But the reason this was significant for us is growing up my dad was a big Springsteen fan. And you guys might remember the song Cadillac Ranch and every time that would come on uh uh the radio or uh my dad would play it. Wherever we were in the house, he would find me and my brother and he would pick us up and literally run us around the whole house while he was holding us. So, we had to reenact it a little bit at Cadillac Ranch. My dad was also a writer and some of you may have read this book. I think Ashkhan and Graham read this book and this was his first book. And shortly before he died, I found out that he had written three more books, a trilogy, and he hadn't told anybody about it. He just did it in secret. But I really love this book because it spends a lot of time going through the theme of dreams and what happens if your dreams don't come true. And my dad kind of had this opinion on this matter, a very strong opinion that it didn't matter if your dreams came true or not. That wasn't the important part of the the equation. The important part was do you have a dream? That was the the most critical part is just having a dream. And so when you guys see me up here and you hear some of my ideas, I want you to recognize all of this is actually transmitted through my dad encouraging me to dream. My first dream happened about three years ago. After all the research we had published at Lloyd Institute, I said what what about starting a nonprofit where the whole focus of the nonprofit is to unite the float industry and start collecting data at float centers all over the world and use the power of the collective of all of us to actually accelerate the approval of floating as an accepted medical treatment. It was just a dream. And in 2022, we we kind of proposed this grandiose idea of going head-to-head against big pharma, doing a head-to-head study of floating versus bzzoazipines and opioids and trying to raise $10 million in order to do it. Now, this was at the height of the pandemic and our economy has not been doing too good, in case you guys haven't noticed. And I think all businesses that require discretionary money, whether it's float centers or 501c3 nonprofit organizations, they're all struggling right now. But we set multiple tiers in terms of our goals. And the first goal was can we actually raise 150k to set up a cloud-based infrastructure to collect data at all these centers and actually try to launch the study into the ether. And I checked actually um two days ago on our website. You guys could take a look if you'd like. And we basically hitting our first goal. Let's see. There it is. Pretty good. [applause] You know, in this day and age, you got to celebrate these accomplishments. It's not, you know, the grandiose goal of going head-to-head against big pharma quite yet, but we're about to launch Project Acturus. And by a show of hands, who was here at our workshop on Friday? Nice. We had a great showing. We were already going through the platform. We're going through the questions we're going to ask. Brad Duck, you could uh uh raise your hand, Brad. Brad's the manager of Project Arcturus. [applause] He's been my partner in crime this whole time and trying to create this and actually get it disseminated to all the float centers. And I'm pleased to say we're almost there. We're going to launch the study later this year, probably around October. So, there's still time to sign up. And for those who have never heard of Project Arcturus, the basic idea is this is going to help shape the arc of future float research in the coming decades. And in many ways, it's going to provide the F FRC with a north star of where should we be focusing our research efforts. The goal for those who don't know is we're trying to actually have the largest float study that's ever been done. We're trying to recruit over a thousand people who are regular floaters floating on at least a monthly basis. And when you look at the prior 50 years of float research, we haven't had very big studies. In fact, I think the largest study we've had has always been less than a 100 people. So this is an order of magnitude larger than anything we've had before. I think it's going to be really seinal study and the hope is we're going to have over a 100 float centers around the world participating. And right now as it stands we already are at 60 float centers who have signed up. So we're very close. We have representation across the USA. Yesterday I met someone from Alaska. We may have a an actual representation from the northernmost flow center in the world. Um, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand. So, it's really coming together and if all goes well, we should be able to start the study in earnest in October. So, we're almost to the finish line on this. And if your float center hasn't signed up yet, now's a perfect time. or if you know of float centers that haven't signed up, tell them now is the perfect time because just a few days ago, we launched our sponsorship program. A lot of these centers who are part of that core of 60 centers have actually paid more than the entry fee for the study, which is $1,200 essentially. We've been asking float centers to contribute $100 a month for a year. And for all those centers who've contributed more than that, we're now going to be able to take that extra money and sponsor float centers who may be struggling right now, which there's a lot of them, but they still want to participate in research. They still want to help with the project. And so I think we're going to have about 30 sponsorship slots and um you could go to our Instagram account at float research. We just put this post out and there's actually a link you could click that will take you to a form you could fill out for your center if you want to be in that sponsorship pool. And I'm excited about this because I think it's going to get us really close to that goal of 100 flow centers. And ultimately everyone I think would uh uh benefit from this type of research because our goal in the F FRC is to actually prove this and this first study is going to get us a part of the way there. The other nice thing about project Arcturus is once we have this set up once the cloud-based system is set up we have this whole network of float centers around the world participating. it's going to be so much easier to launch study two and study three and so on and so forth. This is going to be the gift that keeps giving, but this first study is really kind of the critical foundational study to get this off the ground. So that was my first stream. Let's try to create a cloud-based international study and we're almost there. That was the 2022 conference when I launched that and that was in the other Portland in Portland, Maine. A year later, as we were getting ready to go to the 2023 conference in Louisville, I was all set to talk about Project Arcturus. And then about a week before that conference hit, a real tragedy happened on the island I live in Maui. This might be out of batteries. Oh, there it goes. So 88 23 is a day I'll never forget. Um, let me see here. So this is where I live, right down here. And I remember my father waking me up at midnight that day because this fire was right near his house over here and he was evacuated. But we got very very lucky that day because the winds were blowing in a direction that were totally opposite of what it normally is blowing. Normally the winds would blow this way towards our little village here in Kihei, but they were actually blowing this way. So it saved our village. We didn't actually get hit at all. My parents house was fine. But it was a very different story over here in Lahina. There the winds were going 80 miles an hour down these mountains and it just took out the entire town of Lahina in about 2 to three hours. They didn't stand a chance. There was no sirens. Even though we have sirens on the island that go off the first Monday of every month, no one turned them on that day. No one knew what was happening. It was total pandemonium. And I could tell you living in the most rural spot on earth like this, we were very illprepared to handle a devastating fire like this. A lot of people were trapped in cars. A lot of people had to flee into the ocean to try to save themselves. It ended up being the deadliest fire in the history of America over the past century. Over 2,000 structures were destroyed. 10,000 people lost their homes. And in total, it was about 10% of the population of our island that either lost their home or business. So imagine, take any city in the world, you lose 10% of your population to something like this. It's it's a real giant ripple effect across the whole island. And to this day, people are really struggling. In fact, a study came out just about a month or so ago that looked at the mental health of about 2,000 of these fire survivors. This was a University of Hawaii study, and the numbers were actually worse than I had anticipated. 25% of the fire survivors are experiencing moderate to severe anxiety. This is tenfold higher than the levels were pre-fire because they actually collected some of the same surveys pre-fire. 50% of the fire survivors are experiencing depressive symptoms. And then this is the really worrisome part for me is this whole generation of children and teenagers on Maui is really struggling. About half show signs of PTSD and over 30% are reporting significant anxiety. And this is two years postfire. So when I was thinking about going out to Louisville in 2023, the fires had just hit. I remember speaking to Kim on the phone and she goes, "Justin, you don't need to come." And I think I was maybe waffling and told her, "Okay, I'm not going to come." But then I think a day or two before the conference, I think I texted Ken. I said, "I'm coming." And the only reason is because I had an epiphany. I had an epiphany in like that heart of distress when we were trying to feed all the firefighters and trying to figure out how many people had actually died. I said, "What if we could get floating to Maui right away and start floating this population that's been traumatized?" And I created this whole idea in about one week's time and I presented it at the 2023 conference. And this was another dream, the Maui Comm. The dream was to rapidly deploy float therapy to the island in portable shipping containers, which had never really been done before in this type of setting. And the other part of the dream was to be able to subsidize it. So we could actually provide it completely free of charge, which also has never been done before. A whole community getting to float and not having to pay a penny. So this was really a pie in the sky dream, maybe even bigger than the idea of let's get a bunch of float centers to collect data around the world. I had no idea if this was going to work. I think a lot of people came up to me after the 2023 conference and thought it was a good idea, but I a lot of people said, "Good luck. Good luck trying to do that." But part of what my father instilled in me is it's not so much the outcome, it's the idea itself. Put it out to the world and see what happens. And so I did. I went home from that conference and I started really trying to figure out how do we do this? And it took quite a while as you could tell because I'm here two years post. And I'm going to show you kind of today the journey I've had to go through the last two years to bring this project to fruition. The first part which was grandiose was our fundraising goal. We calculated that in order to complete this project and get it to the island and provide it free of charge for at least a year, we're going to need to raise a half million dollars. And for me being a numbers guy and seeing that we've now been going at it for three years with Project Arcturus and we're almost at 150K, I was a little concerned about this fundraising goal. But I also knew that I was going to need a fund raise outside of the float industry for this study. And so I started pursuing local grants. And you guys might remember after the fires an organization called Hawaii Community Foundation was getting a lot of donations. And what HCF or Hawaii Community Foundation does is they provide all those donations to 501c3 nonprofits that are on Maui itself. So I was eligible and I put a grant in and no one at HCF had ever heard of floating. They thought this was the strangest grant they had ever seen. They thought it was a fake grant at first. They said, "This this seems too unbelievable. What do you mean float tanks and what do you mean it's in a shipping container?" And it was way beyond them. And it proceeded to be an educational process where I literally had to present to their board. I had to show them all the papers we had published and people who had anxiety and people who had PTSD. I had to get letters of reference from every person I could find on Maui County who had any sort of uh sway in town. And it took a year, a full year to review it. And I was kind of thinking, okay, maybe this might come through. They might give us the money. And then a year later, they came to me and they said, you know what, Justin, we're going to give you half of your grant. They gave me 238,000. And this was really cool because this was specifically allotted to pay for free float therapy for everyone on Maui. The catch 22 though of this is I could not use a penny of it to pay for the buildout of the actual facility. So, I was back at square one a year later saying, "How the hell am I going to raise the rest of this so I could actually build it and get it to Maui?" I thought about throwing in the towel. And then I said, "I'm going to have to do something I don't like doing, which is social media." I put out a a message on LinkedIn and was basically speaking about the sad state of affairs of mental health on Maui and how no one was taking it seriously enough. And someone commented on that post by the name of Chad Goodfellow who is the CEO of the largest construction company on Maui called the Goodfellow Brothers. and he pinged me on LinkedIn and I wrote him right back and we set up a meeting and I pitched him the whole idea and he goes, "You know what? I'm gonna help you get halfway there." And he started a $75,000 matching campaign to help me get to the finish line. And then I said, "All right, we're getting so close now. We just need to get to that 75K mark and we could start building this in earnest." And so I started talking to all my friends and one of my friends on the island named Josh Dorcin was the founder of a website you may have heard of called Bigger Pockets. It's a sort of do-it-yourself company for real estate. And he loved this idea and he chipped in about 25K. And then he connected me with one of his friends who runs something called the Disability Opportunity Fund and they threw in 20K. And then the uh Goodfellow brothers connected me with the largest shipping company that comes to Maui, a company called Pesa. And Pesa said, "We love this idea. We want to sponsor you and we're going to help you get the shipping container from England, which is where it's being built now, all the way to Maui, which is basically around the whole world." And that was a huge contribution because it's not cheap. And then finally, the last lynch pin to finishing the matching campaign is I had to give about four different presentations to the Rotary Club. And you know what? I ended up joining the Rotary Club after this. [laughter] I got to say, I didn't know what Rotary was, but they really came through big time. And we ended up getting to the finish line of the matching campaign. And in fact, we went a little bit over and we could start building the float facility. And this was about I don't know maybe nine months ago. So that was really exciting. [applause] But as you could see, we're still short of the half million we knew we were going to need. So I had to keep going. We didn't stop there. But at least we knew we were going to get this thing built. And so given this goal or this mission, we really needed more support. And one of the things that happened right away after my talk at the 2023 conference in Louisville is Tariq. Is Tariq here? So go over to LA Salt Co. after this and everyone thanked Tariq because what Tariq did is he said, "Listen, Justin, I know this is a wild idea, but if you make this happen, I'm giving you all the Epsom salt that you need." [applause] And sure, sure enough, he kept to his word because I pinged him about a year and a half later and I said, "Hey, Tariq, remember that conversation at the conference?" He goes, "Justin, you just tell me when you need it." and he sent over 7,500 lb of Epsom salt. Lot of Epsom salt. [applause] I remember speaking with Graham after this presentation and Graham said, "You know what? This would be perfect for Helbot. You're going to need like an automated way to schedule all these people. We could totally set you up." So, we already have the scheduling software as well. So, thank you, Graham and Helbot. [applause] And then on top of it, you know, I started thinking very carefully about the fact that we're opening this up to the public in a way that's never been done before. And we're going to be floating people of all types. We're probably going to be floating homeless people, too. And in order to do this in a way that's going to be successful and maintain the quality that I'm going to want, we really need a good disinfection system. So, actually, we spoke to James Ramsey and the folks at Superior, and they've been helping us actually get all the disinfection part of the equation together, and um on top of it, we had to order some American parts to send to England, like water heaters and plumbing parts, and they were very uh gracious taking those in and shipping it over to England with us. So, thank you, Superior. [applause] >> [applause] >> Other strange things happened. Um Audrey Carson, who owned a float center in Colorado, had a float around float tank that she wanted to donate to the cause. And it turned out a woman by the name of Taran Marchie had just lost her float center to a fire in the state of Washington and ended up buying that uh floataround float tank and giving us an extra 15k just through that. So that was another nice thing. And then Anthony Pacci had an extra uh superior disinfection system that he was willing to donate and we got an extra bit just from that. So there was just strange dots that were connecting. Um we launched another program. We said anybody who wants to become a foundational member of this Maui Comm project for $1,000 will get their name on a plaque that will stay at the facility and be there for perpetuity. And we got about eight people so far to sign up for this. I think Vivian, who's going to be speaking later today, all the way from Ireland, was one of our founders for this. So, we're getting a little bit money that way. And we could still sign up. I think we still have 90 slots left. But even with all of this, we were still about 50k short of our goal of a half million. And something really remarkable happened about two days ago. One of the volunteers for our nonprofit by the name of Callum Wilcock, who lives in England and has been helping us for about a year and a half now, basically said, "Listen, Justin, my father just died and he gave me an inheritance and I want to donate this to you and he just transferred two days ago 50k." So everyone please thank Callum. [applause] He was the lynch pin to getting us across that finish line. So at this point I could now say with absolute certainty this is coming to Maui. [applause and cheering] >> [applause] >> So, the other big part of this is how the hell do you build a float facility inside of a shipping container? And as you'll see, it's not just a single float pool. We're trying to put three separate float pools all inside one 40 foot container. And the engineering to this is not trivial. I could tell you because we've been going at it every week for the past year. And it's a lot of moving parts to fit into a very small area. And I could not have done this if it wasn't for Colin Stanwell Smith and really his son Toby. It's like the dynamic father-son duo. These guys are incredible. Colin got his start engineering in the 60s working on the Concord supersonic jet for British Airways. And he trained Toby in the old-fashioned mentor style, apprentice style his whole life. And Toby is just as incredible of an engineer. And a lot of you may not realize this, but Colin and his family, there's Jenny, actually moved in with me for about six months in Tulsa, Oklahoma to help me build my lab in Lloyd Institute. So the week after the fires, these were who I was on the phone with talking about this idea of a portable float facility and they jumped into action. They started thinking about it. they started trying to budget for it and I gotta say um I'm I'm just amazed. I really am what Toby's come up with and you're going to get to see it because he just sent me some videos and you guys are going to be the first people in the world getting to preview what this actually looks like. So this is the idea. This is actually the shipping container in England right now. That's what it looks like. And when it arrives to Maui, we're we're going to transform it so it's not going to look exactly like a shipping container anymore. The idea is we're going to have three open float pools. This is not what it's going to look like. You'll see what it's going to look like, but this was just sort of giving people a sense of what is an open float pool look like. One of the uh pools is going to be slightly bigger because we're going to have a room that's accessible for people who have wheelchairs. on the far end of the facility. That's where all the disinfection equipment is, the water heater, all the HVAC stuff. So, we have one area that everything has to kind of filter into. And then outside of each room, we're going to create kind of a a modular changing room area because it's very cramped inside. We don't want people having to change inside the actual container. And then we're going to make sure it's shaded. So, um, it kind of protects you from the hot Lahina sun. And then if you take a look at the actual plans, this is what, uh, the blueprints look like for it. And it's turnkey, a turnkey float center. And what does that actually mean? What it means is as soon as it arrives on Maui, all we should have to do is connect it into water and electricity and within 24 hours we should be able to have it up and running. That's that was kind of the the long-term plan for this whole vision is make a turnkey facility. So, let's take a little look at where things are at. This is uh the container arriving at Floataways factory in England. It's a side entry container. This was really important because when you're doing anything with the shipping container, you cannot even put a single screw into the outer shell of the container. They won't ship it anymore. So everything has to actually built be built totally inside the container. Has to be totally contained. All the doors, everything would have to be fit right into that. I mean, look how small that is. It's It's really wild when you see a 40 foot high cube container. There's not a lot of space. And we decided to go with fiberglass as our choice because we wanted these rooms to be essentially water rooms. We needed to have the ability to do very easy cleaning. And so the idea is we could literally just spray the whole room down in between floaters and it would be perfectly fine because it's all fiberglass. So, this is actually um Mark, one of the people who um has been helping Toby with the whole construction. And they're getting the fiberglass walls here ready for uh bonding and sealant. This is kind of like a uh a time lapse. You can see Toby is in red. Then here's one of the rooms that they're um we're making a couple weeks ago. And this is them getting the the ceiling and the heating panels um attached and put on. And each of the fiberglass walls on the sides have heaters on them. So, we could really calibrate the temperature of the room and make sure there's no condensation or moisture that's actually getting built up on the walls. And then the other really neat part of this is the choice of fiberglass. They they created this really cool almost like waterfall streaming effect with the fiberglass. And then they set up the LEDs so you could actually select whatever color room you would prefer. And some people might have some preferences, but it's super easy to change the the room color or the color of the lights in the pool itself. And then full circle, we actually last week got to put some water in the pool and Callum uh went over and checked it out. And so this is actually what the final room looks like, which is pretty cool. Callum's 6'2, by the way, so he he thought it was actually pretty spacious. There's dome ceilings. I don't know if you could kind of see the dome part of it. And then you have your open pool here. You got ADA uh grab bars both uh horizontally and vertically. So, it's super easy to get in and out of the pool. [applause] So, I know Colin and Jenny and Toby really wanted to to come out to the float conference, but they couldn't make it this year. But if anyone sees them, make sure to give them a big hug. They've put their their lifeblood into this project. And we've when I say we've been meeting every week, I mean we have multi-hour meetings every week just to figure out all the different issues that come up with trying to build something like this. So the next step of this whole process of of making Maui calm come to fruition is where are we going to put the float facility when it arrives? And once again, the Goodfellow brothers came through. one of their directors is on the board for the YMCA and it turned out the YMCA got a very big grant from the same foundation that gave me the grant to build a brand new YMCA emergency resource center in Lahina proper. And so I've been meeting with the Y for the past six months and it looks like now we're officially partnering together to put this in the heart of Lahina. So just to show you all of this is essentially destroyed around it. But there is this one small area in Lahina right here that for some reason the fire missed and that's where the YM YMCA is going to be. This is their main building right here. It's a 6,000 square foot building. It's not going to be a typical Y. It's really going to be set up for emergency services. They're not going to have like a pool or a full gym. It's really more about partnering with other nonprofits to provide services for the Lahina folks. But then if you go behind the building, there's this outdoor lot, it's about 35,000 square feet, and that is where Maui Calm is going to be. So take a look. This is actually what it looks like. You have your West Maui mountains up over here, and Maui Calm is going to be somewhere in this vicinity over here. I took a little video just so you could kind of see uh the scope of the layout, but you have the big L here for Lahina Luna High School, which is up here. You have the solar panel farm right over here. And you're right underneath these beautiful West Maui mountains. This area be here. Here, this is where the fire stopped. This this whole complex got burnt down and they're rebuilding it. So, the fire literally came up to our property and then as you turn um away from the West Maui mountains, you actually turn towards the beach and there's there's several spots where you could actually see the the ocean. There's a little ocean that's going to be the main building for the Y that just got finished being renovated last week. They're going to hopefully open it either this week or next week is the plan. Officially opening the the brick and mortar part of it. And there's some more ocean. And actually by that smoke stack, this is where most of the deaths happened. Over 40 people died on just one street by that smoke stack. So my first thought when I saw this is I saw a lot of potential, but I said at the end of the day, it's still a gravel lot. We got to do something about the gravel lot. you know, this is not conducive in my opinion to what I was hoping it would feel like. So, I started pushing the Y and it turned out they had spent almost all their money on the renovations for the brick and mortar. So, they didn't have much left for this outdoor lot. So, I said, "All right, let me go talk to my friends and Rotary." [laughter] And I started bugging Rotary and telling them this is a great opportunity and this could become a real epicenter for healing in the community. And Rotary agreed with me. And so now that outdoor lot is going to be called the Rotary Partnership Park. And Rotary gave their biggest grant to date to the YMCA. That's the executive director, Steve Scrags, and his assistant, Jayloo. But they got 250K to help turn this outdoor lot into a healing garden. It's going to be filled with indigenous trees and plants and flowers. And we've partnered with all these green thumb nonprofits who are trying to reggreen Lahina and all the trees that burned down in the fire. And they're going to make this look like Maui. It's going to feel like Maui, not just a gravel lot anymore. And so this is all starting. We're we're getting ready to ramp up and get this moving um and transform the space into something really powerful. But the idea is to to use nature and water to try to calm the nervous system in all of these fire survivors. That's the idea of this space. [snorts] And if you remember back in my 2023 uh float conference talk, I thought that this was a very powerful idea because to me I think there's something so fundamental about water and fire and that that sort of antagonistic relationship, right, that water has with fire. And I've always thought to myself, I think floating could be particularly good for helping people overcome fire trauma. But in all of my research at Laurate Institute, I worked with people who had PTSD for other reasons, other types of traumas, not fire trauma specifically. And this was one of the, in my opinions, the weaknesses of my application is I didn't have good data to support floating as a treatment for fire trauma. But at that float conference, I presented these two pictures. And after the talk, Chris Jones came up. Is Chris Jones in attendance? >> All right. You tell Chris, you give him a big hug for us because Chris came up to me after that talk and he said, "Justin, you're not going to believe this, but every day I have firefighters coming into my float center." And I looked at him, I said, "That's weird. What do you mean firefighters?" He goes, "Well, let me connect you with somebody. She'll tell you." And he proceeded to connect me with not just somebody, but the medical director of the International Association of Firefighters Center of Excellence, the IIAFF, the largest firefighter union in the world. It covers all of North America, including USA and Canada. And she runs what's called the center of excellence in Washington DC. So, anytime a firefighter goes on disability because of a fire trauma and they have PTSD, they have the option to actually fly out to her center of excellence and get inpatient work for one to two months. It's really intensive work. And she tries to get them back to the functional level where they could go back and and work on the firefighting force again. And what I found out when I started speaking to Dr. Morris is she had been floating hundreds of these firefighters with PTSD and she was getting unbelievable results. They they all said this was helping them and so she wrote a beautiful letter of recommendation and I think it was her letter that may have been sort of the lynch pin to getting that grant that we ended up having. So thank Chris for doing that. Um it was a great connection but it gets even better. Two weeks ago Dr. Morris called me on the phone and said, "Justin, are you sitting down?" And I said, "Yes." She goes, "I'm moving to Maui. I'm going to help you set this up." She thinks it's a great idea. She thinks it's the sort of idea that could scale around all types of first responders. She's really into first responder mental health. That's kind of her forte. And she could imagine this at every fire station. She could imagine this on active duty sites. You know, when the LA fires hit, she called me up and she goes, "Could we get a dozen of these and just put it right at the active duty fire so when they come off a 48 hour shift, they immediately go into float and then they could sleep and then they have to go back out into the field." And I said, "There's no reason we couldn't do it, but we don't have a dozen of these tanks yet." So, what she told me is she's going to move out in October. She's taking a six-month sbatical from her medical director position and she's going to help me get this launched and then the hope is that we could find ways we could scale this and I think it's it's a really interesting niche especially when it comes to first responders. But once again, another float conference miracle. These happen every year and it's I'm always struck by you never know where a conversation at this conference is going to to end up leading. So to kind of summarize what we're trying to do now that we have a location for Maui, now that the facilities almost built, we're hoping that it's going to be here later this year. It takes two months, by the way, to get all the way from England to Maui over by ship. There's a couple ports it has to stop on the way. So with a little bit of luck, we'll have this here in October or November. But the the primary three aims that we're trying to achieve with this project are as follows. The first one, which I think is the lowest hanging fruit, is we just want to reduce the high level of stress and anxiety that the people of Maui are currently experiencing. And it's not just adults. I'm teaming up with all the local high schools. We're going to try to get all the adolescence to flow because I'm really worried about the adolescents. I met with people from the Paradise Fires. You guys might remember those in California about seven years ago. And we asked them, "What are the big regrets you have that you wish you could have gone back in time seven years ago and and do differently?" And everyone told us the same thing, which is they said, "Focus on the kids and the teenagers." Because right about now, those Paradise kids and teenagers are adults and they're struggling. They are really struggling. a lot of substance addiction, a lot of major anxiety. They're not leaving the house. And so I think this is a great opportunity to actually start floating adolescence. It hasn't been well documented before. Emily Shet really did the first peer-reviewed study in adolescence with anorexia nervosa providing a proof of principle that if you have very severe anxiety, you could still get a very strong anti-anxiety effect even as an adolescent. So, I'm excited about the adolescent piece of this equation. The other part of our aim is more experimental. We're going to be tracking people over time. This is this is going to be a research study. And what I would like to actually see is if the people who are using floating on a regular basis, there may be people who do this every day. We're opening up the schedule for that if people need that every day. Others might do it on a weekly basis. Others might do it on a monthly, but we're going to look over time and see if the people who are floating most regularly show the largest reduction in PTSD symptoms, but then also all the things related to PTSD like anxiety and depression, suicidality, insomnia. We're going to look at this, we're going to track it, and we're going to actually publish this in a peer-review journal to provide a proof of principle that you could use floating in a real world trauma setting. Now we're two years out. In an ideal world, I would have come to the float conference in 2023. I would have pitched it and then the next week we would have had the container on the island. That's what I was thinking at least. But imagine though if we could imagine if we could have dozens of these already pre-built and so the next time there's like an LA fire, these could have been there within the first week or two. And to me, this is the million-dollar question. If you could get people floating quick enough after a traumatic event, if you could get their nervous system regulated in that immediate aftermath, can you actually prevent the formation of PTSD to begin with? Right? We're looking at chronic PTSD here, right? This is chronic. We're trying to prevent this from spiraling into a lifelong chronic state. And PTSD in people who have severe trauma could last a lifetime. It doesn't go away always, but if you could get people floating right away within the first week or two, maybe no PTSD even develops. That's what I'm really excited about. And so the third aim of this project, which once again is another dream, is can we actually create a scalable solution for addressing real world traumas and disasters from the moment they occur? And this became very relevant to me because there's so much crap happening in the world right now. And it's really upsetting to me because you see all of this unnecessary suffering, right? And you want to do something. And what has been kind of the shining light and actually inspiring me during these dark times is another nonprofit organization that some of you may have heard of called World Central Kitchen. Who who here has heard of World Central Kitchen? Awesome. So, Chef Jose Andre, he's he's going to win a Nobel Prize, I'm sure of it. He started this a little over a decade ago, and it started in Haiti after one of their horrible earthquakes. And he was the first person on the ground feeding people who were survivors fresh food. That was his idea. But then all of a sudden, he says, "If we could do this in Haiti, why can't we do this other places?" And they have now become the literal epicenter of any disaster. They're the first ones on the ground and they're the first ones cooking meals for survivors. In fact, just this week he's in Gaza and his goal is to cook a million meals a day to try to feed all the people in Gaza. It's just incredible. And so I started thinking to myself, there's actually a niche here that needs to be filled because you already have somebody coming in to to feed people, right? But what about the other part of the equation? You need people to help with the mental health right away. So the way I'm actually conceptualizing this next phase is it's a world kitchen for mental health. And so anytime there's a disaster, the idea is we would go into that zone in the immediate aftermath. And it turns out I found out last week we have a connection with Chef Jose. we might be able to partner with the World Central Kitchen and do this in tandem and actually try to provide the mental health side of the equation here. So, it's a pie in the sky idea once again, but so was Maui Calm when it started. And if Maui Comm is effective, there's no reason that the same concept couldn't be transported elsewhere. It's a 40ft shipping container. These go every spot on Earth. So, I'm super excited about this. I think uh Dr. Morris wants to help me develop this. I'm trying to create a team of people who actually know how to do this type of disaster relief and recovery. It's it's going to be hard. I have no doubt it's going to be hard, but I think at this moment in time in our civilization, we need this more than ever. These natural disasters that are happening like in Maui or in Los Angeles are going to keep happening at an exponential rate. All these conflicts look like they're getting worse, not better, right now. So, this is a void that as a society we really need to start taking care of all these people who've lost everything. And I think this could be one viable way to do it. So, with that, I'm going to close and I'm going to thank my dad for teaching me how to dream. >> [applause] [cheering]