Talking About the Float Conference! – DSP 234

Today is the last day to buy discounted tickets for the Float Conference!

Today, Graham and Ashkahn talk all about everything they’re excited to see at the Conference this year, everything from the Bus Tour, to the Speakers that are coming (some returning, some coming for the first time), the Bus Tour, The Marketing Forum, other Friday activities, the awesome after parties, and did Graham mention the Bus Tour yet?

It’s Float On’s last year hosting the Conference, and it’s gonna be excellent. See you there!

Buy your tickets for the 2018 Float Conference!

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Right.

Ashkahn: Hey, welcome everybody.

Graham: Hello loyal fans.

Ashkahn: Hey, my name is Ashkahn.

Graham: I am Graham.

Ashkahn: And we have a special episode for you today. Not our normal shtick here.

Graham: Yeah, we don’t have a question, but we do have an important announcement to kick things off, which is today hit’s a point we’re at the last day of early bird specials. What are you laughing at?

Ashkahn: It’s just a good announcement.

Graham: Some of us very excited.

Ashkahn: Let me give it a try.

Graham: I’m very excited.

Ashkahn: Let me give it a try here.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: Today is the last day.

Graham: Boo!

Ashkahn: Believe me, this is very important, and we’re taking it seriously. Today’s the last day that you can purchase discounted early bird tickets for the Float Conference. There’s a huge discount, and honestly for us, this is right when we have to start ordering a bunch of materials and putting food orders and all that sort of stuff, so that’s why things get harder for us as this point goes on.

Graham: Yeah, later than this it’s gonna be really hard to take all that money and flee the country as well, so if you could get that in soon that would be great.

Ashkahn: We have two more days before we disappear.

Yeah, hop onto the Float Conference website, you’ll see the tickets on sale there, and grab them before the day ends and you’ll get a much cheaper rate than you would tomorrow.

Graham: Yeah, and definitely if you’re on the fence about coming out, I mean I’m sure that you’ve heard plenty of people telling you that you should make it out to the Float Conference, but in case you haven’t heard this is going to be the last year that we organize it as Float On here in Portland, so hopefully we’ll be transitioning that over to a non profit and taking steps to making sure it carries onto the future, but if you want one last little round of Float On hullabaloo this is the year to get it.

Ashkahn: That’s right, so yeah, we’ve been doing this for seven years now, this’ll mark our seventh Float Conference, and I guess we just wanted to take a moment in this podcast to talk about some of the stuff we’re excited about for this year.

Graham: Yeah. It’s a lot. I’m excited for a lot of stuff. This might be a long episode. What are you excited about?

Ashkahn: Good question.

Graham: Thanks. Great question listener, and-

Ashkahn: Well there’s a few things. There’s some cool speakers, I think, coming out this year that I’m definitely super excited about. One is something I just finally got final confirmation for, which is John Turner, one of the original float researchers is coming out to speak at this years Float Conference.

Graham: It’ll be his first year too.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: We’ve been trying to get him out for so long.

Ashkahn: It’s just his schedule is never lined up.

Graham: He’s a very busy person, yeah.

Ashkahn: Yeah, but we finally got him, so John Turner’s coming out, which will be super exciting so he’ll get to talk about coming to the old research lab that they had set up, him and Tom Fine back in the day.

Graham: Yeah, I’m actually really excited for that one.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so that’ll be really cool, we have Roy Vore, who is a microbiologist, and is kind of like the dude who, like if something goes crazy in the pool and spa World, like if there was to be some sort of disease outbreak in pools and spas here in the US, very likely that Roy Vore is gonna get a call.

Graham: Yeah, he’s probably gonna be the third person called, or something like that.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so he specializes in, the official name of it is, “recreational water illness”, so basically ways people can get sick through shared public water, and he’s been doing that for many years. We’ve gone to hang out with him in a number of conferences and shared many a beer with him, and over the course of all that, got him to take a look at float tanks, and he stopped by a float center and actually took a peek at how they work, and he’ll be giving a talk about the actually microbiology, at least his take on the microbiology in float tanks and how that can differ, and how the Epsom salt in there can make things kind of a different world that pools and spas.

Graham: Yeah, super knowledgeable, really entertaining guy. That’s actually, both of those are two speakers I’m very much looking forward to.

Ashkahn: Every time we see him he has a tie with some different pathogenic micro organism on it, and I’m like, “What is that?” He’s like, “Oh, this is my. E coli tie.”

Graham: And usually socks that have some kind of drawing of beer. That combination really fits Roy Vore as a person. Dr. Hu, I’m looking forward to having Dr. Hu out.

Ashkahn: Yep, so he is the head of the Chinese Float Therapy Association, so they have been recently formed. They really only started at the end of last year, but have been doing things in the Chinese float industry in the market there, which we did an episode when Jake and I went to China about that on this podcast some months ago, but there’s a whole big different kind of float world going on over there, so he’ll be coming out to share that with us and tell us what’s going on with float tanks on the other side of the world.

Graham: Yeah, that’s really cool. I love hearing about research and developments from places that we don’t usually get access to because most of the literature is published in Chinese not in English.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Go for it.

Graham: Beer Bus Tour. I’m really excited for the Beer Bus Tour.

Ashkahn: Beer Bus Tour. I had a couple more speakers.

Graham: That’s fine, you can go too, I thought we were just sort of winging it. Things we’re excited about. I didn’t know we had a structure.

Ashkahn: Let’s talk about the Beer Bus Tour.

Graham: Yeah, we can go back to speakers.

Ashkahn: Alright, a few more, there’s-

Graham: But the Beer Bus Tour’s gonna be really cool though.

Ashkahn: We’ll get there, we’ll get to the Beer Bus Tour. There’s-

Graham: Dr. Bus is coming out and taking you on a tour of float centers, that’ll be a good talk.

Ashkahn: Get serious for now, alright, this is a very serious topic.

Graham: Alright, yeah.

Ashkahn: There’s some more good speakers coming up.

Graham: I’m very excited for them.

Ashkahn: There’s the entire crew from the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, so Justin and Sahib-

Graham: Again.

Ashkahn: And Ricardo, and yeah. And actually Tom Fine is working with them now, so the four of them will be here to present what they’ve been up to, which is awesome. I think they basically use the Float Conference as their annual time to debut their new data, which is really cool.

So they come out and they share their most recent findings, and they think they’re crunching and analyzing data literally up to the minute right before they have to go on stage and present and, yeah, it’s so new that we usually can’t release the videos of their actual talks for months afterwards.

Graham: Years sometimes, yeah.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: That’s not true, it’s usually months.

Ashkahn: It’s usually months, but I mean this last one it was maybe like seven, eight months between when the Conference actually happened to the point that their data was gone through the process of being published in a paper to the point where it was okay to actually put that information up online, so it’s cool because you get really early access to the newest float research that’s happening out there.

Graham: Yeah, it turns out publications really wanna break news, so the idea of having all the research out there for the public before someone publishes it makes it not as appealing. Makes it hard to get that stuff out there in the general web.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so that’s exciting. A couple float tank people, Float St Louis, Kevin and Jake over there and Gloria Morris from Float 60, they’ll be giving presentations. James Nestor, an old conference favorite, he hasn’t been out in some years now, but if you guys remember some crazy old talks about free diving and the animal magnetism and stuff like that, he’s been working on a new book about breath, and how breath affects the human body, and that’s actually one thing I’ve always been really interested in, or found really fascinating about float tanks is it really just sinks your breath into a different place into your body while you’re floating, so he’ll be coming and giving a really cool talk about breath and the human body.

Graham: Yeah, really good speaker too.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Should be a nice one.

Ashkahn: And all sorts of stuff. I’m sure I’m forgetting other people, there’s definitely more talks out there, but it’s all exciting. These are gonna be some really exciting talks.

Graham: Yeah, for sure. Exciting talks.

Ashkahn: Did you have anything you’re excited about Graham?

Graham: No, I think we pretty much covered the speakers, but there is this cool Beer Bus Tour thing going on, and some other fun Friday activities too. To be honest, and this is a simple one every year, but I’m gonna toss it out there early, which is, every Thursday and Saturday we do silly photo registration, which is non mandatory if you really don’t want to take silly photos, it’s not we twist your arm.

Ashkahn: It’s a little mandatory.

Graham: Okay, but you should come and do it, is the bottom line here, and some people get scared and they don’t take silly photos with us, and they regret it, occasionally for the rest of their lives.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: I’ve talked to people who on their deathbed mentioned-

Ashkahn: Yeah, to their grave.

Graham: The silly photos and not taking them was one of their great regrets.

Ashkahn: Their only regret sometimes they say.

Graham: It’s just an awesome experience and I personally get to have me in silly hats and clothes with a ton of the industry, which is delightful, so-

Ashkahn: As someone whose job it is as part of the Float Conference to go buy a bunch of silly costumes and props every year before the event, very seriously. I’m like, “you have 200 dollars to go buy capes and hats and whatever random toys you come across.”

Graham: And there’s another persons job to usher people in to get their silly photographs taken, and then someone else’s job to edit those.

Ashkahn: That’s right. It’s a big job.

Graham: So, you’ll be keeping people employed if you come take silly photos is what I’m saying. It’s a noble act.

Ashkahn: Alright, did you have more about the Friday activities?

Graham: Heck yeah! How long do we have? How long is our episode?

Ashkahn: Hold on.

Graham: Did I mention the Beer Bus Tour goes-

Ashkahn: Let’s talk about what the Friday activities are. If you’ve never been out to the Float Conference before, the main conference is the Saturday, Sunday-

Graham: Smart. This is smart.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and then the day before-

Graham: I’m Graham.

Ashkahn: Which is a Friday, happens to be August 17th-

Graham: That’s my dad’s birthday.

Ashkahn: We have a whole day of smaller workshops. It’s your dad’s birthday?

Graham: Yeah, the conference is on my dad’s birthday this year.

Ashkahn: Oh, that’s pretty exciting.

Graham: Yeah, happy birthday, Dad, I’ll be very busy.

Ashkahn: Well, yeah, so there’s all these little activities that are happening. Basically people who are coming to the Conference who want to put on a workshop, or a class, or a fun event, or whatever it is, can put them on this day, so it’s gonna be just a bunch of simultaneous smaller workshops, classes, events, things like that happening. One of which is-

Graham: Can people still apply for that?

Ashkahn: Yeah, you can still apply for that.

Graham: I could send in an application for a Friday activity still?

Ashkahn: Sure, yeah, just go ahead and email conference@floathq.com and we’ll consider your application.

Graham: Awesome. Now I think that’s pretty much it for Friday activities. There’s gonna be some cool workshops going on, there’s just nice keeping space intro ceremonies for the conference, there’s actually going on tours and drinking craft beer on a double decker Lodekka bus around the city. What else is going on?

Ashkahn: Yeah we put on a couple of them, so we put on the Beer Bus Tour that Graham keeps talking about-

Graham: Because I’ve gotten to host it two years, and there like some of the best two years of my life.

Ashkahn: We also put on a marketing forum. We did that for the first time last year, and it was a bunch of fun. It’s one of the bigger events that happens on that day, and is just marketing is, I think, such a huge part of running a float center, and one of the things that habitually on our industry survey that we put out is the most common thing that people seem to find difficulty with.

We’ll be doing another one this year, slightly different style. Trying to adapt to hone in on some very specific things we think might help float centers and bring other kind of experts from within the industry and within float marketing in too to chat about marketing a float center, so that’s always a really fun one.

Graham: Yeah, that’s great, it’s almost like a mini conference in itself.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: There’s a stage, whole panels, I mean there’s hundreds of people who show up for it just for the marketing forum portion. It very much did feel like a little bit of a one day marketing conference that happened right before the Float Conference.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: It was really cool. That was a neat experience.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: It was also why I had to miss the Beer Bus Tour, but it don’t hold it against the marketing forum. Wasn’t its fault.

Ashkahn: So yeah, there’s that. Justin Feinstein this year is putting on a workshop on this Friday about trying to set up float centers across the US and hopefully across the world to be places where actual research and data can be gathered, so spreading out the ability for us to gather big amounts of data and actually gather it in a way that can be published and stuff like that, so that’s been kind of recently formed and he’s trying to kind of workshop the idea and figure out how to make it happen at this conference, so that should be a really fun one.

Graham: That stuff’s really cool too. I wouldn’t mind post conference doing a little podcast episode with Justin about that very thing and delving a little more into it and what he got out of his workshop at the conference, because it’s such a cool idea, and I know so many float centers that would be so into contributing their own data, and actually participating in research and even donating free floats or whatever would go into that, but the process of making it so that can be serious recognized research is not a small one, so it will be really interesting to see how that plays out.

Yeah, very exciting for the future.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so you can find all this at floatconference.com/friday-activities is the actual URL. It gives you a breakdown of all the different little events so you can read descriptions on them and stuff like that, but there’s a bunch of fun ones going one. A couple ones that are kind of progressions of things that have happened in the past. I know Cory and Treeka from different float centers, one in North Carolina, and one in Calgary have done a didgeridoo and shamanic journey event for the past couple years, and they’ll be doing that again, which will be really cool.

Carlos Cassias did an event last year about running a small center, because I do think that’s one of the things we hear about a lot of these big centers in big cities, and then there’s so many centers out there that are just a couple tanks in smaller places, and how is that different-

Graham: The majority by far, there’s way more one and two tank centers than there are three tanks and above, which is really interesting.

Ashkahn: So Carlos did a really cool workshop on that last year, and is doing a follow up on it this year, so that should be fun. Bunch of cool stuff. Bunch of cool Friday activities. Most of them are free, just included with your conference ticket, so definitely come out early and plan on enjoying those.

Graham: You know what my least favorite thing about the Friday activities is?

Ashkahn: What’s that?

Graham: That I can’t go to all of them. The fact they overlap it’s the biggest complaint we get about Friday activities is people writing and being like, it was so awesome and I got to do this thing, but it meant I missed four other awesome things that were all occurring simultaneously.

Ashkahn: Yeah. I have a suspicion people might complain more if our conference was nine days long to make it so that wasn’t a requirement, but definitely.

Graham: Yeah. Least favorite part.

Yeah, I mean, are we past Friday activities?

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Speakers down, Friday activities down. Toga party.

Ashkahn: Toga party, yup.

Graham: Oh, what’s Saturday night? What are doing for Saturday night?

Ashkahn: Saturday night will be at OMSI at the science museum.

Graham: Okay. That’s what I thought, but I didn’t want to say it-

Ashkahn: We’re just going to see the-

Graham: And be wrong and have to pause the recording to make me talk smarter.

Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s happened a couple times so far.

Graham: Jordan, can you cut that out, by the way? That hasn’t happened so far-

Ashkahn: Yeah, there’s a touring exhibit on robots there this time, so that should be really cool.

Graham: It should be fun, we got to see it too.

Ashkahn: Yeah. I went in thinking that robots are gonna kill us all and eventually take over the world.

Graham: And now I’m like, well they climb buildings really well, so maybe we can just look forward to that.

Ashkahn: That’s a very optimistic sort of view of robots from the they’re all gonna kill us robots.

Graham: And every year I’m just mainly looking forward to seeing everyone.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: To be honest.

Ashkahn: For sure.

Graham: I mean it’s the best part of the entire conference is the community that actually comes together and if you’ve gotten the chance to even hang out with a dozen float center owners at one time you just know what an amazing group of people it is, so condensing that into 7, 800 people all in one place is magical, and I can’t wait.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and it’s cool to just see what’s up in the float industry. You just get to learn about the newest things everyone’s doing. I feel like even for us, and we’re pretty in the know and hear about things throughout the year, still with the Float Conference I’m like, “wait that’s happening? Wait, you’re doing what? Wait, that person did what?”

It’s just constantly over the course of the entire even I’m just learning about all the new interesting, amazing things everybody’s doing out there.

I always come out of it just feeling like wow, cool, I know where the next step of the industry and where we gone to at this point.

Graham: Yeah, so come on out, join us. It’ll be an amazing time. We should be doing some live podcasting actually from the conference.

Ashkahn: Hopefully. Yeah.

Graham: If-

Ashkahn: No promises yet, but that’s the plan.

Graham: Yeah, we’re gonna have to do it while running just around from place to place and dealing with things, but yeah, that’s the goal. If you have questions that you only want to ask to our face you should be able to do that at the conference as well.

Ashkahn: And don’t forget to get your tickets.

Graham: Yeah. Today’s the last day of cheap tickets.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so snag those and we’ll see you at the conference.

Graham: Yeah. See you at the conference.

Ashkahn: Okay.

Graham: Bye everyone.

Ashkahn: Bye.

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