If Money were No Object – DSP 353

Graham and Ashkahn have some fun and talk about all the crazy things they’d add to Float On if money were no object. They cover everything from the impractical to the insane. And Ashkahn reveals his love of robots… and sandwiches.

An Important Announcement from the Daily Solutions Podcast

If you’d like to sign up to ask a question on our two hour call in show, November 29th at 3pm PST, go to floattanksolutions.com/dsplive.

So… some zany ideas that I’d like to do if I owned a float center and money were no object:

1. I’d love to, in the vein of tank pranks, replace the floaters clothes with a superhero outfit and cue up theme music when their float ends. Once they came out, we’d insist that the Commissioner was on the line and they were the only one that could help.
2. A plastic dome inside the float tank that had a shower head above it so that you could make it sound like it’s raining while you’re floating. Who wouldn’t love that?

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A Portrait of Ashkahn drawn with my left hand. Look at that poor guy. He’s clearly just waking up.

---

An essay on the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in iambic tetrameter:

The year ninteen-eighty-five was
when Gorbachev instituted
an “openness” policy that
led to public outcry throughout
the whole entire Soviet state.
He also introduced free markets
overrun with bureacracy too.

Consumer goods were hard to find.
Shortages meant hoarding of supplies.
Black markets were out of control.
Wages stagnated, inflation
spiralled as oil prices fell,
external capital dried up.
The economy went way down.

The Cold War meant defense spending
to keep up with the U.S.A.
All vital resources went to
the military industry.
They invaded Afgahnistan,
fighting mujahideen armed with
some American equipment.

When Chernobyl had its meltdown
public sentiment hit a point
of no return. The State tried to
hide the disaster, but it failed.
Trust in the system disappeared,
and without it, the Communist
Party could no longer hold on.
When Reagan called for the Wall to
come down, the public was on his
side. It was too late to fix it.

And that’s a summary of the
fall of the Great U.S.S.R.
Written as an essay in what’s called
Iambic Tetrameter, not
Quatrameter, silly Ashkahn.

---

No redirects, unfortunately. They only let me edit posts.

Listen to Just the Audio

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

Graham: Alright.

Ashkahn: Alright.

Graham: Hey there.

Ashkahn: Hi.

Graham: It’s good to see you again.

Ashkahn: Yeah thanks.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: It’s nice to see you too.

Graham: Not you audience, you hang out there for a second. I’m talking to Ashkahn.

Ashkahn: Yeah, just chill we’re having a conversation.

Graham: Yeah. It’s been nice recording all these podcasts with you.

Ashkahn: It’s been nice.

Graham: Yeah. It’s too bad it has to come to an end.

Ashkahn: I know, if only it didn’t have to end on November 29th from 3:00pm to 5:00pm Pacific Time.

Graham: Yeah. I mean the nice thing I guess is that it’s going to end on a high note with a crazy, crazy call-in episode.

Ashkahn: Yeah it should be really fun to have people calling in live.

Graham: Don’t. This is between me and Ashkahn.

Ashkahn: Yeah, if you just mute, get outta here for second.

Graham: Yeah, ignore that, you don’t even, we don’t even need you there for the episode, it’d better if it’s just the two of us I think.

Ashkahn: Yeah, doing voices of people calling in.

Graham: That’s what we’re gonna do.

Ashkahn: Good, my name’s Tom Fine, I have a question.

Graham: Yes Tom, what is it? Cool, so no, but definitely join us if you wanna hear more about why we’re shutting the whole operation down. Check out our special announcement episode, which happened about a week ago.

Ashkahn: It’s called Special Announcement.

Graham: Yup, you can go find it and you’ll hear us blather on about-

Ashkahn: Just Google-

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: -Special Announcement, it should pop up.

Graham: Yeah right there at the top. In the meantime, we gots a question for today for us to answer.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Just the basic premise of the podcast.

Ashkahn: I’m excited. Oh.

Graham: It’s actually, this is a fun one today. If money were no object, what would it be? No sorry. “If money were no object-”

Ashkahn: It’s a concept.

Graham: “If you had millions and millions to spend on a single center, what kind of cool, normally impractical stuff would you do?” Yeah.

Ashkahn: Yeah. So many things.

Graham: Robot attendance.

Ashkahn: Yeah. I got salt cleaning robot. Probably we would have to have.

Graham: Mr. Epsom, yeah.

Ashkahn: Oh man.

Graham: Yeah, yeah.

Ashkahn: I mean there’s some that are more realistic that we’ve actually looked into before we realized they would cost prohibitively large.

Graham: Let’s start with the realistic ones, that would actually, I wish were affordable so that our float center could actually just have those.

Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah. Giant amazing jellyfish aquarium.

Graham: Would be super cool.

Ashkahn: Super cool. Yeah, just imagine staring at some huge jellyfish after your float. With like crazy neon lights hitting them.

Graham: Like entire, yeah like 10 foot by 18 foot wall.

Ashkahn: Aquarium, like you’d go to city aquarium, like that jellyfish exhibit in your lobby.

Graham: Behind your desk, yeah, yeah. That’s be so cool.

Ashkahn: Be nice.

Graham: Rooftop enclosed lounge with full garden area.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Like a bubble, like a kinda bubble top.

Graham: Yeah, like a bubble top, you just go out there, you’re with plants but even in winter time, if it’s snowing outside, you just get to chill in a robe with warm tea and look at the outside area.

Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah. That sounds pretty nice.

Graham: I’m for-

Ashkahn: Automobile float.

Graham: What?

Ashkahn: Like a floatamobile.

Graham: Oh.

Ashkahn: We could take, you could actually-

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: The end of your float would be you being driven back to your house in the float tank.

Graham: Oh wait what? Oh I see. I went from not understanding to also not understanding you but thinking I did.

Ashkahn: Your float would finish and you could pop out, you’d be right at home.

Graham: Yeah, that’s, wait what? Now I’m confused again.

Ashkahn: And dinner would be cooked for you.

Graham: Wait the float tank would be in a truck?

Ashkahn: It’d be in our, it would have wheels itself.

Graham: Oh so, while you’re floating, you actually get transported.

Ashkahn: While your floating, you get transported, but it would have gyroscopes and stuff like that so you can’t even tell.

Graham: Also transported. Right look up gyroscopic pool table.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and you’ll see what we’re talking about.

Graham: If you haven’t seen that before by the way, yeah. You could have a float tank on a cruise ship if you could put it on a gyroscopic table.

Ashkahn: Really, really flying float tanks. I wanna be, instead of sitting in a chain on an airplane, I wanna be spending my flight time floating.

Graham: Oh yeah, it takes so much more than just millions, yeah it’s even beyond the scope of the question that we’re answering, its supposed to be ridiculous.

Ashkahn: They said money is no object.

Graham: It’s true, it’s not, it’s just an idea at this point.

Ashkahn: Yeah, just a concept.

Graham: No I like float tank on an airplane.

Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah.

Graham: That’s really good. I would say-

Ashkahn: Flying float.

Graham: -one that I also think would be realistic if I had enough money would be just a straight up float tank outside.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: You’re in the middle of forest, you’re like 10 miles or more from any kind of civilization.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: And your float tank has the ability to have a transparent ceiling.

Ashkahn: Mm-hmm.

Graham: You can block it out, one of those touch panels things were it turns dark.

Ashkahn: That makes it opaque, the smart glass.

Graham: Yeah, so it’s either closed in and dark or you touch it and you just open it up and there’s a big night sky.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Out in the wilderness.

Ashkahn: Into it.

Graham: Yeah, that I think would be amazing. That’s one of our business partners Christoper Messer’s dreams as well. We’ve had several conversations about how amazing that would be. He actually has sketches he’s drawn up in a book for that one.

Ashkahn: One that I want real bad. That I feel is gonna happen someday. This isn’t even, we’re not even in crazy land at this point.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: The self-cleaning float room.

Graham: Oh yeah.

Ashkahn: I just want it to be set up where you just a button and it goes and everything, the whole room is de-salted and sanitized and clean. A new towel pops up out of a towel ejection system.

Graham: The ol’ towel pops down, towel injection system.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Man, that’s gonna be great.

Graham: Yeah, you just swipe a card, you go in there, the room takes a picture of the room before and after you go in. So you know if someone’s been irresponsible. You could streamline the whole thing really, really well.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Or even, I mean, it is, we don’t even have to take it to the point of a totally person-less float center.

Graham: Oh I want to, I’m gonna, if that was your idea as not totally automated. I’m gonna say, yeah, you have a person back at HQ, who’s hours away in a different city.

Ashkahn: Okay.

Graham: They’re just running these little isolated float centers that run themselves.

Ashkahn: And then we have robots that are really good at talking to people, that are just there to chill with you afterward.

Graham: See, you don’t even need robots for my system.

Ashkahn: Chill out, but chill out robots.

Graham: I mean that’d be cool, money’s no object, sure yeah, send the robots, yeah send them in.

Ashkahn: Money’s no object, so you can have chill out robots. The chill-bots. The robros

Graham: I’ll say another one that I think would be cool. I would love to have a float center where I had enough money and enough space that we could be both build giant soundproof walls that are distant from each other. But also just walk in between those walls. Full four foot gap, so that if you ever need to do plumbing repairs or just wanna go see if there’s water damage on the inside of your walls, you just take a stroll there in between them.

Ashkahn: Oh that would be cool, yeah.

Graham: Double stud walls and then same with the ceiling, where you have a nice suspended drywall drop ceiling kind of coming down but you have full access up above, just full access anywhere. Anywhere there’s a backside of a wall, you can go in and look at it.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Because you built your wall cavities or ceiling cavity to be that big.

Ashkahn: I mean, just like good enough soundproofing that you actually wouldn’t have to worry about noise at all.

Graham: I mean that’s the-

Ashkahn: That would also be amazing.

Graham: -to be honest, that’s the thing that most people run up against with money, right? It’s like, getting to 85% soundproofing.

Ashkahn: But no one’s gonna go to the point where you could just be like, yelling in your lobby, you have a party going on in there and people be able to float without any problem.

Graham: That would also be my-

Ashkahn: That’d be amazing right?

Graham: Ideal though, yeah. No, that’d be so cool, let’s not have to worry about it.

Ashkahn: You could just actually do whatever you want in the lobby. Yeah.

Graham: And then some kind of safety mechanism so if someone’s screaming in the room, we could still hear them.

Ashkahn: Well there’d be a robot in the float tank.

Graham: I’ve always thought that just having really nice delicacies available when people go out of their float, would be really nice, just like really pure cacao chocolate. That people have access to or just something’s that where you don’t have to raise your float up to a 100-110 dollars. Free fresh squeezed juice.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Oh yeah.

Graham: When you get out of tank, just really nice sustaining or very pleasurable flavors in your mouth.

Ashkahn: Sounds great.

Graham: Yeah, that’d be really cool.

Ashkahn: Here’s another one. This is more like a lot of money would help you deal with the impracticality of this. Which is that it’d be really nice to have floats never have a set length.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: People can just float and they just get out when they’re done floating. Instead of having to have a schedule because we need our business to run with some of amount of efficiency so that we don’t go out of business.

Graham: No, that’s actually a very cool and we tried to, hard when we were first opening up Float On to figure out the logistics of that and turns out you just need a ridiculous amount of float tanks. There’s no shortcut to making that work. But yeah, that would be awesome. I mean that’s, for a long time how I floated at night, back when we weren’t open 24 hours and we could actually get in to float tanks at 2 a.m.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: But hopping in a tank and just not worrying about any music coming on or about the float ending and being able to get out whenever you want is … A really cool experience, it’s actually my personal favorite way to float.

Ashkahn: Oh yeah, no, it’s the best.

Graham: That’s a really good one. Yeah, yeah.

Ashkahn: It’s like sleeping without waking up to an alarm clock. It’s how it should be.

Graham: Yeah, agreed. Being able to just send people home with their own free float tank. Like oh here’s a Zen Tent. You enjoyed your float, yeah, have it.

Ashkahn: Don’t worry about it. It’d be really bad for our business but yeah.

Graham: Money’s no object, it doesn’t even matter if our business survives at this point.

Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s certain to have a float center. Yeah okay.

Olympic size float tank. I just want a humongous float tank that I could push off of one wall and just, ‘Cause I love that feeling and I love-

Graham: And if money’s no object, what the heck, have it been 10 feet deep.

Ashkahn: Yeah, right. I mean, that would really be cool too.

Graham: Even though doesn’t matter.

Ashkahn: It doesn’t matter, I would like to know that there’s that much float tank water below me.

Graham: I mean, you’re right there. Yeah.

Ashkahn: But I really do, one of my favorite things to do in the float tank is push off from one edge. ‘Cause you feel like you’re going so fast. I mean, you’re only going like, you must be going-

Graham: A centimeter a minute, or something.

Ashkahn: Yeah right? ‘Cause there’s no other way that I would take me that long to hit the other side. But if the feeling of the silky, float water going past you makes you feel like you’re flying through the clouds. So to be able to just push off hard and keep that momentum up, yeah, that sounds cool.

Graham: Having different therapists/professionals around just for processing pre and post float. I think it’d be really cool if someone got out of the float and they just wanted to chat with someone about what they’d experienced and they have an art therapist and an existential therapist and a behavioral like cognitive behavioral therapist to choose from, they can just hash through their experience that they had and then maybe hop back in the float tank.

Ashkahn: And a sandwich bar, so you could make whatever sandwich you wanted for your therapy session.

Graham: Not everything has to be additive. Sandwich bar could be your idea not like, therapy with sandwich bar.

Ashkahn: No I just, that’s what I, but I feel like they go better together.

Graham: Well should we talk about some of the impractical ones or?

Ashkahn: Wait, I had another one.

Graham: Of ones you actually want?

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: In addition to sandwich bar therapy.

Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah.

Graham: Just seemed like we were tending towards the more outlandish ones.

Ashkahn: No, this one I think is really, really realistic. Elaborate pranks on people. If we had enough money to construct a replica like float room, connected to the door of the float room someone went into. So they open the door and they walk in, there’s just like, an exactly identical float room that they walk into instead of the lobby and like their clothes are sitting there on the counter and there’s someone in the float tank and it’s a robot that looks like them … you know like really-

Graham: Yeah or like-

Ashkahn: -stuff to really get people.

Graham: Or like they come in to float and you’ve just really obvious calendar on the wall, marked with the date and some plants on the counter and they go in, they come out and you’ve changed the date forward 10 years and everyone’s wearing shiny v-necks now and switch out the plants for big plants.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: So you’re like, “Oh my God, they finally came out, how was your 10 year float?” By the way we own tankpranks.com, so if any of you actually accomplish good tank pranks.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Send them in, we’ll publish ’em online.

Ashkahn: Yeah, let us know, we’ll put them on there. Just waiting for that site to get going.

Graham: I mean, there’s just so much, it’s the kind of a cool thing about floating, is that it is Nothing. It’s, you’re doing Nothing, so adding to that is really, really easy, right. You can almost imagine anything that you love. Actually another one, just as an example of cool things you could add on, is and I actually do want to do this sometime at our float center, which we could do in a few of our tanks but I wanna have live musicians in the lobby just performing for whoever is floating that wants music to be piped in.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: If the music ever comes on at the end of your float, that’s someone in the lobby just playing that music for you.

Ashkahn: That does sound awesome.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: Like a sandwich bar there for you to listen to, to eat while you’re listening to music. I get it.

Graham: Okay, I got, you got some impractical ones?

Ashkahn: No, those are just the full list of everything I would want.

Graham: Yeah. So I want a non-saltwater float tank.

Ashkahn: Oh yeah. The fuckin’ yeah, like anti-gravity-

Graham: Anti-gravity machines.

Ashkahn: Machines, we need anti-gravity machines.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: I mean, the water’s not, there’s definitely something to being in water.

Graham: I like it.

Ashkahn: But I would ditch it, if it came down to not having to deal with salt.

Graham: If you could have an anti-gravity machine.

Ashkahn: I would ditch the water to not have to deal with the salt.

Graham: Or just enough anti-gravity that you could have fresh water … Without the salt water and just get enough anti-gravity-

Ashkahn: Well just even like showering and everything. I mean it definitely would be cool to just be able to-

Graham: Go in fully clothed.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Nothing, shoes on, just hop in the tank and just floating there.

Ashkahn: Just jump and you just like in this … yeah, it’d be awesome.

Graham: Investing in the research to make anti-gravity possible. If money’s really no object.

Ashkahn: That would be cool.

Graham: I thought of this before though and then I started thinking about the problems that we have with current float tanks and I’m like, “Oh my God, what if an anti-gravity machine went on the fritz?” What kind of-

Ashkahn: There’s a black hole in room three.

Graham: Doesn’t sound good. I mean there, it’s infinite, there’s so many cool things you could do if money were not an object.

Ashkahn: Yeah, I would pay someone to come up with more ideas for what to do with all this money we have.

Graham: Yeah, probably Frank. From float tank solutions, if you’re familiar with Frank, he’s just an idea machine.

Ashkahn: You could certainly name all these projects.

Graham: I mean, honestly though what, one of the cool things about running a float tank center and running your own business is, money is an object. It’s not just an idea, but you can still kind of do whatever you want. Obviously, within some certain bounds. It’s, I mean, but the-

Ashkahn: I feel like nothing we’ve said here of the scope of this episode, is something anyone could do.

Graham: I mean, think like you could have a sandwich bar as long as people just had to pay a little bit for the sandwiches, you know what I mean.

Ashkahn: Well the sandwich probably by itself.

Graham: You could have an anti-gravity machine as long- I do think that if you put your mind to just thinking of your ideal space, you’ll probably come up in the course of an afternoon with some cool things you’re not currently implementing at your center, that you might be able to do.

Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s true. We do have kombucha we have for people. We used to give out little chocolates to people. Yeah.

Graham: Yeah, on tap for our members, yeah. There’s lots of cool things you can do. You’re actually probably more in control of amazing ideas you can implement for your floaters coming than you think you are.

Self-cleaning robot rooms.

Ashkahn: I mean that’s just coming. That’s gonna be here eventually.

Graham: All right, any last-

Ashkahn: This is a good question.

Graham: -see last zany ideas to add to this before we wind it down?

Ashkahn: You’re gonna find another zany idea in our show notes, written by Juliet.

Graham: Yup and I’m just gonna go out on a limb here and say, two zany ideas.

Ashkahn: Yeah and in addition to that, in our show notes, is gonna be a small essay explaining the three main reasons that the USSR collapsed, in iambic quatrameter.

Graham: And a hand drawn portrait of Ashkahn, drawn with Juliet’s left hand. So you have those to enjoy, if you wanna go check out the show notes.

Ashkahn: Yeah, look forward to that. Great.

Graham: Yeah, also if you have your own crazy ideas and wanna send them in or your own realistic ideas you’d do if money were no object, we’d love to hear them. We’ll even read them out loud on the air. Go to floattanksolutions.com.

Ashkahn: Slash mo money mo problems.

Graham: Wait what? Slash podcast

Ashkahn: I will pay someone to create re-directs for me whenever I wanted them, that’d be another thing.

Graham: Don’t think she knows how to do re-directs but if I’m wrong she’ll put the correction in the show notes though. All right, thanks for tuning in everyone.

Ashkahn: Okay, talk to you later.

Graham: Yeah, talk to you tomorrow.

Ashkahn: Oh yeah.

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