Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Dan Cohen - Neurologist, Inventor & Serial Entrepreneur | The Hidden Link Between Sleep and Success

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Dan Cohen - Neurologist, Inventor & Serial Entrepreneur | The Hidden Link Between Sleep and Success · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  I went through medical school, specialized in neurology, went through residency, became
• 0:04
  born certified, had great job offers, and then immediately started a business.
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  What if I told you one simple idea to transform how we sleep, how we heal, and how we live?
• 0:13
  Today's guest isn't just a neurologist. He's a pioneer of visionary who spent decades
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  pushing the boundaries of science and entrepreneurship. From creating the revolutionary
• 0:21
  breathe-right nasal strip to selling his company for over $566 million.
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  I was really interested in the difference between brain and mind, but this was the early days of
• 0:31
  computers, so I was kind of excited about all that stuff. We raised 350,000 to get going.
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  The market was very accepting at that point of really small cap companies.
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  Sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. I mean, when you're an
• 0:45
  entrepreneur, you are a risk taker. Dr. Daniel Cohen has consistently turned bold ideas
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  in a global impact, but this isn't just about success. It's about redefining what's possible.
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  If you don't have to raise money, then you could focus on the business exclusively.
• 0:58
  Most people don't understand is thinking versus feeling. How an exit, in case you're not going
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  to be able to wean in the marketplace. Using magnetic waveforms, he's transforming sleep and
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  shaping the future of health and wellness. This is the story of a man whose relentless curiosity
• 1:12
  is changing the way we think about life itself. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott
• 1:20
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  Dan, I am very excited for you to come on. Dan, Dr. Dan, all the above, you are a neurologist,
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  you are at MD. I think a really fun way just to understand sort of your journey and all the different
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  things that you've built out over your careers to really just ask a question, you are a doctor,
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  but you are also a business person. You also build incredible businesses. So why does a doctor
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  go into building businesses? Where did that, what was the inflection point that pushed you down
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  that path? You know, that's a good question. A lot of people don't ask that. And essentially,
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  I went through medical school, I specialized in neurology, went through residency, became
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  board certified, and had great job offers, and then immediately started a business. And people
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  looked at me and say, well, what the hell did you go through all this medical training for,
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  and then go into business? And you know, both my parents were in business. They both had small
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  businesses. So around the dinner table, it was commonly business discussions. Number one,
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  number two, neurology back in the 80s, you know, isn't the kind of field or wasn't the kind of field
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  that you could help a lot of people. You can make a lot of diagnoses, but the treatments really
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  weren't available. And I wanted to do more good. And I thought I could do it based on my experience
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  with the brain and understanding that by developing equipment. So it was pretty simple. But how do you,
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  like, I mean, I actually have a friend right now who's who's in med school, and I keep trying to
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  push her to be more entrepreneurial and she keeps going in all these traditional routes because
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  it just feels safe, right? I think that most people, not everyone, most people that go into medicine
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  and law outside of the fact that their parents are pushing them into it, it's because it's like a
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  really safe career path. And if you spend that much time and energy in, in these kinds of
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  careers, first of all, it's expensive. It takes a lot of your life to get to the end. And then you
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  want to go make some money and pay off that debt. So I think jumping into high risk starting a
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  business is not the first thing on everyone's mind. They're like, I got to get the best possible
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  salary and start practicing. So you didn't do that. What was the, what was the outside of your
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  parents outside of putting all that time and energy into your actual certifications? Why,
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  why did you choose to go down this path? And also what, what was that first version of entrepreneurship
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  that you felt comfortable enough doing? There was not too high risk that allowed you to actually
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  start a career where you felt, listen, this is the direction and journey I want to go in.
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  Well, you know, first of all, you know, I went to college and medical school in the 70s.
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  And I got to tell you, it was really cheap. My whole college education at Penn State was 3000
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  dollars. Oh my god. Yeah. And my parents could afford that. They couldn't afford medical school,
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  but even my medical school education was $7,800. So I took out a loan. So I didn't have big debt.
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  Number one, it wasn't like, it's not like today where you come out where you've got two,
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  three, four hundred thousand dollars worth of debt. You know, I was essentially debt free.
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  And later in my neurology residency years, I had side jobs. I had medical director of a nursing
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  home that did social security disability exams. So I could make money on the side working weekends
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  and evenings. So I was in a good shape financially, especially when you're in your 30s. You know,
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  let's face it, you know, the world's ahead of you. You're too dumb to know that you that you
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  can fail miserably. Yeah, you're optimistic. You know, so it wasn't hard. But, but I was really
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  interested in difference between brain and mind and things like that. And, and, and, you know,
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  this was the early days of computers. And we could computerize the physiologic readings. And so
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  I was kind of excited about all that stuff. And so I, I just jumped in. Just, I mean, so jumped
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  into, jumped into what? What was that first, that first version? Well, the first version was
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  there were a lot of high risk surgeries, principally, open heart surgery and carotid end
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  daughterectomies where they open up the carotid artery that feeds half your brain and they take out
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  the plaque. And these surgeries were done without brainwave monitoring, you know, very, very few
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  facilities had the ability to do brainwave monitoring. I mean, male clinic, for instance, did,
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  we knew that the neurologist there that did that. And so we watched him do it. And he had the old
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  EEG machines, you know, and we looked at that and we said, you know, we can automate this process.
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  We could bring the EEG signals in, you know, digitize them, do FFTs, you know, frequency analysis
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  and create graphics that showed you when you were in trouble. We could even automate the process.
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  So you didn't need to have a doctor there doing the work. So our first, you know, foray into
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  that business was, let's automate the whole field of brainwave monitoring. And then we could sell
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  this to hospitals, you know, that had operating rooms and it would be safer for everybody. But I
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  got to tell you that first business, although we made a great product, we got it through the FDA,
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  it was validated to be 100% accurate. And it was a total failure as a business.
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  First of all, that is seemingly the most, the most risky version of entrepreneurship,
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  creating medical devices, because if you just think of all the different pieces that have to go
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  into that, this is not like you are drop shipping t-shirts. And there's, there's a lot of science.
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  And the FDA is, I'm sure, very hard to deal with. I mean, it was probably less expensive to deal
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  with them than it is now, but it was not easy. So what were the learnings from that first business?
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  Because it sounds like you actually did all the things properly and it sounds like it was a great
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  idea and right time and right place and the markets moving in the right direction and you're
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  taking advantage of all this new technology and then you get the regular, you get over the regulatory
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  hurdles as well. So what, what was the learning, like what went wrong with that business?
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  Well, first of all, back then, what we had to do, we were very sophisticated from a technical
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  standpoint. So we were able to make the product very quickly and then with a very, very small team.
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  And the regulatory process for us was relatively easy. And so we got it through FDA very quickly.
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  Then we took it out into the market and then it was the biggest, it was the biggest like slam in
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  the face that I've ever had in business. I went out with a sales force and did the demos.
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  You know, and after the demo, the surgeon would pull me aside and say,
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  do you think you could remove that disk drive? And I said, wait a minute, that's the medical record.
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  I said, you need to have the medical record there. He goes, yeah, he says, but
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  I'm not going to be able to afford my liability insurance. He says, right now, if there's a stroke
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  that happens in the operating room, nobody knows about it until the recovery room.
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  And so I can say, I didn't cause it. It happened in the recovery room. So I'm not at full.
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  And what you're doing is you're going to be able to assign blame to that stroke.
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  That's insane. And that's why it didn't sell because now doctors felt they were liable.
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  Right. Well, and so the big learning was, you know, you really got to get rid of it and talk
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  to your target audience and say, is this really a good idea? I could have learned that in two days
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  by talking to a few surgeons that it wasn't going to fly. Did you raise money for that?
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  Yeah. When we started, yeah, we didn't have any real money. So we did a friends and family
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  around and we raised 350,000 to get going. And then our lawyer was an SEC attorney. He knew all the,
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  you know, VCs, remember, venture capital was just starting back in the early 80s. So he lined us
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  up with some of those guys. And so we raised money because they thought it was a great idea.
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  But, you know, it turned out not a good idea. But you must have a paying okay. So
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  it actually still sounds like a great idea. It doesn't sound like a great idea if doctors are
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  concerned about their liability insurance, but it sounds like medical innovation and more insight
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  and more data is like a net positive thing, especially for the patient who everybody's supposed
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  to be serving. I mean, just as a really small commentary, we can move on because I don't want to
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  spend too much time on the first business, but just as a patient of the medical system, that is a very
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  concerning idea that too much data now gives me the ability to place blame if somebody screws it
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  up. Like that's what I actually, I actually want has since then has the medical system in general,
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  I just we can talk about the US, has it adapted to new technologies in a more positive or
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  or amicable way so that if somebody does end up screwing up, the blame can be placed because this
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  is like a very interesting issue that you're dealing with right now as to why it wasn't accepted
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  by doctors. I can't speak to medicine overall, but you know, I'm sure some processes are sort of
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  buried that way. Is it look at it this way? Scott, is it any different when a pharmaceutical company
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  is threatened by new innovation and they buy the product and they shelved it? I know ethical
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  companies, so-called ethical companies that you wouldn't, you would think of as ethical companies
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  that buy products that paid $10 million in the very early stage of an idea and they say this
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  competes with a business that I have right now that's a billion dollar business. I'm just going
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  to let it sit on the shelf until the patent expires. I think it happens all the time. That's scary,
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  it's a little bit scary. What was the next business after this was so it failed, you didn't make
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  money off of this. Did you sell the IP? Anything like that? No, what we did is, well, you know,
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  I remember going back to my board, you know, after the months out in the field and I told them,
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  I said, look, this business is not going to work. And the response was, remember, these were VCs,
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  but the VCs back then were seasoned operators. They were people in their 50s, 60s, you know, VCs
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  had just sort of begun as an area. And so these guys generally knew what they were talking about.
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  And it was really fascinating. They looked at me and they said, what do you know? You're a doctor.
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  You know, we just need to get a real sales guy in there. And so I knew that if I convinced
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  them that the business was going to fail, the business was over. So I said, you know, okay,
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  you're right. You know, I'm just a doctor. Let's get a sales guy in here. And I said,
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  what I'll do is I'll take the hardware that we've developed and I'll write new software.
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  And I'll take it into sleep labs because sleep labs have a problem that we can deal with.
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  And there's no liability issues. And we'll be able to make them more money because we'll be
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  able to, you know, increase their throughput. And so one of the VCs who was the most respected
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  one in the room said, it'll take it 10 years to do that. I said, it better not because I don't
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  think you're going to fund us for 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And what was what was year? I got
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  to tell you this because this is really funny. What was so interesting is, you know, I knew it was
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  going to take a couple years, but I knew I needed to make progress faster. So I envisioned the product.
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  I made some screens, you know, took screenshots went out some of the sleep labs. And I said,
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  I can give you this and it'll reduce your scoring time from four hours to a couple minutes.
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  And I said, and I'll even give you a special program that you want for your lab.
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  And, you know, and we'll make that for you. But you got to pay $60,000 up front for me to develop it.
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  In that first year without having a product, I outsold the new sales guy with his sales force of eight.
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  And without a business, I didn't even have a product. That's amazing. That's so smart. And I'm assuming
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  the sales guy, it doesn't matter, you know, it's like your, your, your, it doesn't matter how much
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  sales energy you throw at this thing, he rendered the same problems. So VCC that like this pivot is
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  going to be successful. This is a direction you're going in there. And so then they were willing to
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  fund it. But then we did another pivot in the business when I saw that, you know, the sleep business
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  was, was okay, but we were profitable. We were already a public company after just five years,
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  you know, cause we needed the money, you know, and you let the public. Yeah. So we went that early.
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  Yeah, that early. And, you know, but we had, you know, we had revenues and we were on the verge of
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  profitability. So we know it was reasonable. You know, we were a young company and the sleep field
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  was starting to grow primarily because of our innovation. You know, you know, when we started
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  in that field, there were only 300 labs globally. When we left that field 10 years later, there were
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  3,000, you know, many of which were using our equipment because we reduced the scoring time
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  from four hours to one minute. So it was made it far more efficient and people were starting to
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  learn about sleep out in the air. So there are two factories there that were big boosts to sales
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  or to, you know, growth in the field. But tell me something. So how old are you at this point
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  when you're when you're taking a company public? Cause that is still a wild ride. So this is not
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  something that many, I guess at this point, you're not like a first time entrepreneur. You've
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  gone through ups and downs. You've pivoted. I mean, but this is a, this is not a small time
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  business at this point, even even though it's relatively early on. Yeah. I was 35. That's young.
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  That's still young. Yeah. And does it not, I mean, the people that I know that have taken
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  companies public, they're at much later stages. Like I don't know what your revenues were like when
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  you took that company public. But does it, does it not act as a slight distraction from building
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  the company when you're managing that side of it as well? Yeah, it does. But you know, I had
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  somebody on the board who was our SEC attorney and he became my mentor. And, you know, and the truth
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  of it was, it wasn't that hard, especially as a small company. Cause, you know, most people aren't
• 17:06
  paying attention to you. So it's, you know, yeah. Did we hold quarterly calls? Did we meet with
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  analysts? Yeah. Yeah. All those things. But I also hired a very seasoned, you know, CFO who
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  had already been in public companies. So, and the bulk of the work when it's a public company
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  falls to the CFO, I mean, obviously the CEO, you know, is involved and talks about the future and
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  the vision and and what we're going to do and all that kind of stuff. But I was pretty fluent,
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  you know, and and you know, by that point, you know, I started to develop at least a local
• 17:40
  reputation because, you know, we were an early stage mid tech company that was innovating. And so,
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  you know, people, people like to write about that. So in the Twin Cities area, we were known.
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  It's a little bit of work. It's something to consider. But obviously, I mean,
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  if you have the right people around you, it's, it's not going to be like it's going to,
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  it's going to stress you out too much. I think that's really the, that's really the secret to
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  doing something like this and going to this kind of transaction. And I guess it really
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  opens up a lot of liquidity too, which is nice. And that gives you some cash to play with,
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  which is important because the alternative is staying private. Like a lot of companies do when
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  raising rounds and rounds and rounds. And then, I mean, as the founder, you're, you're
• 18:22
  devaluing your own equity position repeatedly. And then obviously you're accountable to more
• 18:27
  professional investors, like not just accredited, but you're accountable to now like VCs and whatnot.
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  So it's a strategy. I just don't know many people that have done it. So it's very interesting,
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  but you did it successfully. So I just wanted to learn a little bit as to how that process goes.
• 18:39
  But you would do it the same way. I wouldn't, it depends, you know, I mean,
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  you know, in our current company, I wouldn't do that. I mean, first of all, the market conditions
• 18:49
  have changed. The market was very accepting at that point of really small cap companies. And so
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  that was a plus. You're right. I did one access to capital. But I didn't realize that I would need
• 19:04
  the kind of access to capital and the value of being a public company until the next idea came
• 19:10
  along in that business. And that's, that's when there was really a transition. And I was really
• 19:16
  happy to be a public company at that point because, you know, our VP of operation says I got a friend
• 19:24
  and he was like to meet you. He's got something he wants to show you. And so I said, sure,
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  I said, I'm happy to meet him. Came into the office and we met in a little conference room. And
• 19:36
  and he was talking about the product a little bit, but he wasn't showing it to me. And,
• 19:42
  you know, his name is Bruce. And I said, Bruce, I said, you think I couldn't see it?
• 19:47
  And he reaches into his briefcase and we're sitting across a table. And he doesn't take it out
• 19:52
  and he hands it to me. He takes it out and he hands it. He puts it on the table right on his side.
• 19:58
  And I looked at it and I said, Bruce, I said, you think I could touch it?
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  And he adds it to me. And it's a cure ad bandaid with a piece of plastic glued on top of it.
• 20:10
  And he had been describing it. And he says, well, you know, it's it's like, I got this idea. I
• 20:15
  had a nasal breathing problem. I got this idea when I went to the state fair. And I was standing
• 20:20
  on smelling avenue right across the fairgrounds and I saw this arch and I go, that's it. I got
• 20:25
  to build an arch over my nose. And I looked at the product and I, you know, we were in sleep at that
• 20:32
  point for six years. So I knew all about the issues about sleep and breathing. And I just looked
• 20:38
  at it and I said, I love it. I love it. I'll license it. And I knew, I mean, you know, Scott, we were
• 20:45
  publicly held company at that point as high tech medical. And I knew that if I took this product
• 20:52
  to my board and they would say, you're nuts. You know, we're not going to license a consumer product
• 20:58
  that's a nose bandaid. You know, so I did it without their permission or without their knowledge.
• 21:05
  How do you do that? Like, how do you even do that? As a, I mean, you're accountable to the board.
• 21:10
  I mean, you have to, you have to, you're public. Everything's exposed. So, well, you know,
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  I did it because I knew they couldn't fire me. You know, and boards are very sensitive to optics.
• 21:21
  And here I was, the leader of the company. And I salvaged the company with a failed OR machine
• 21:28
  and then had a successful sleep business. And by the way, I knew everything that was happening
• 21:32
  in the business is not easy to replace somebody who's sort of the central figure across as,
• 21:38
  you know, the departments for the most part. And so they had to live with the decision.
• 21:43
  And so I figured, you know, sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.
• 21:50
  And this was one of those examples. I knew they wouldn't take it. And I could see the future
• 21:54
  of this business. Now, were they pissed off? Yeah. And two days after the board meeting when I showed
• 22:01
  it to them and I told them what I did, there was a contingent of the board waiting for me when I
• 22:06
  got into the office that morning. And they said, they said, you know, we don't like what you did.
• 22:13
  I said, yeah, I figured it. I said better. This is going to be a good business. And they said,
• 22:19
  well, you like it so well, you figure out how to make it work. Because I had already started
• 22:25
  to search for, you know, somebody who was consumer guy, somebody who worked for a pharmaceutical
• 22:31
  company who could understand, you know, how all this worked. I had four finalists that I was
• 22:36
  interviewing. And I said, you want me to run breathe right? I said, who's going to run sleep?
• 22:40
  I said, you figure that out. Hire somebody that's going to run sleep. You do this breathe right.
• 22:45
  In essence, they were setting me up to fail so that they could then fire me.
• 22:48
  And they want to just, they wanted to show that this was not going to work. And then when it
• 22:52
  didn't work publicly, then they have an excuse to get ready. Exactly. And I said, all right,
• 22:56
  you know, I've never done it before. But I love to learn new things. I said, I'll figure it out.
• 23:01
  How did you know that this was going to be so, I mean, you're in the sleep space. But
• 23:07
  how did you know that this particular product, which would force someone to slightly modify their
• 23:14
  behavior to actually adopt this product? I mean, because nobody's using it at this point already.
• 23:20
  It's not like you're, you know, you're not like bringing a different type of coffee to market
• 23:25
  when somebody's already drinking coffee every day. No one knows what this is. Nobody has any
• 23:29
  experience. It's a very weird experience. The first time you put it on, it's like, it's like
• 23:32
  literally nothing else that you're using your day to day. So how did you know looking at this
• 23:37
  product that this was going to be a hit? You know, sometimes you just got to go if you're gut.
• 23:42
  All right. And I think too many people don't do that. You know, they don't have a belief in
• 23:48
  themselves. They don't have faith in their ability to get something done, even though they don't
• 23:52
  know how they're going to do it. And they're, you know, they're low on the scale of risk taking.
• 23:57
  I mean, when you're an entrepreneur, you are a risk take after all. And one of the things I think
• 24:02
  most people don't understand is thinking versus feeling. Okay. I mean, you know, you just asked
• 24:09
  the right question. How do you, how did you know knowing is a felt sense? It doesn't come from
• 24:15
  up here. Everybody thinks knowing comes here comes from the gut. It's like, oh, I just know this
• 24:22
  is going to be successful. I mean, when, when Bruce handed me that nose bandaid immediately in my
• 24:29
  head, I, I saw football players wearing it. I, I, I, I, I saw the design of it. I saw the stock
• 24:37
  market chart climbing in my head. I mean, there was just immediate knowledge. And so that's why
• 24:43
  I just went with it. I just want to take a second and thank the HubSpot podcast network for
• 24:46
  supporting success story. Now, if you enjoy success story, you're going to love other podcasts
• 24:50
  and their network like business made simple hosted by Donald Miller. If you've ever wondered why
• 24:55
  some businesses take off while many struggle, Donald Miller takes the mystery out of growing your
• 25:00
  business with actionable strategies you can implement today, whether you're trying to build a
• 25:04
  stronger team, craft a clearer message or boost your bottom line business made simple delivers
• 25:09
  the frameworks that you need to succeed. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your
• 25:13
  podcast. So, okay, so your board is not super happy, but you don't care. You're going to figure it
• 25:17
  out anyway. So, how do you take this to market? I literally conceived of a plan that I thought we
• 25:26
  could implement. Okay. And the plan was ultimately get it on football players. But before you get it
• 25:33
  on football players, remember, this is pre-internet. You can't go on a podcast and expose this to a
• 25:39
  million people. You know, you know, you had radio interviews that, you know, I, I felt like I was
• 25:46
  talking to the cows in Montana in some of those. Yeah. And also radio doesn't work so well when
• 25:51
  you're trying to describe something that nobody's ever experienced before like a band-aid on your
• 25:55
  nose that helps you breathe at the little. That's right. So, so the key was, all right, I need
• 26:02
  the press ultimately to get behind this. And so, and we had done the medical studies, you know,
• 26:08
  we were getting it through the FDA and we had to file a denovo application because the FDA said
• 26:13
  what you just said. There's nothing like this. So, even though it's just a nose band-aid,
• 26:18
  it became, it became a class two medical device. You know, yeah. And you had to do this testing
• 26:24
  and prove it. So, essentially, what I needed to do was get the press on my side. So, my partner
• 26:31
  called, she got 700 reporters for newspapers in the business, business writers, medical writers,
• 26:39
  sports writers to agree to take our press kit and not file it in the trash can.
• 26:45
  Okay. And I've read to all of them who said, look, you know, this fall football players are
• 26:50
  going to wear this. You're going to need access to this so you can write articles about it. And they
• 26:54
  agreed, you know, they didn't know. We didn't know that football players are going to wear it. We
• 26:58
  had to make that happen. And so, so we got that seeded. We had to get distribution, which was
• 27:05
  really tough for a new company because the pharmacies wouldn't take it because the wholesalers
• 27:09
  didn't have it. The wholesalers wouldn't take it because no, no pharmacy was requesting it.
• 27:16
  So, we literally had to close loops between the customer, the pharmacist, and the wholesaler.
• 27:22
  So, I did 400 radio interviews to get 3,000 pharmacies on board, you know, so that we could get all
• 27:30
  the 10 wholesalers to take it. And then I went to Walgreens, and I said, this product's going to be
• 27:35
  a success on the head of the cough cold, you know, section says, how much business are you going to
• 27:40
  do in the first year? I said, 23 million. And he goes, you're full of shit. I said, probably.
• 27:46
  So, you know, you didn't take it, of course. And he goes, no, I'm not taking the product. I'm
• 27:52
  not giving you a shelf space. I said, oh, you're going to take it. I said, you'll see. And so,
• 27:56
  when I left his office, the first person I called was the regional manager of the Walgreens
• 28:02
  stores in Twin Cities. I took him out to lunch. I said, how do we get this into your stores?
• 28:07
  He says, oh, he says, I have control over the counter space. I said, really? I said, and it doesn't
• 28:13
  need a perk to be approved by headquarters. He goes, nope, that's my domain. As I showed him the
• 28:19
  product, I said, what do you think? He goes, I love it. I'll put it on the counter. And so,
• 28:23
  it sold, you know, anything sells on my calmer right by the cash register. That's how it sold
• 28:28
  really well. He called four of his buddies that were regional managers and other parts of the
• 28:32
  country and they took it and they was doing well. And then I get a call from the cloth cold by
• 28:38
  and he goes, get your ass in here. He totally went around them, totally ignored them, whatever,
• 28:46
  it's in your stores anyway. That's right. That's how he, you know, I got in there and I said,
• 28:50
  tell it selling really well, isn't it? He goes, you can sell shit at the counter. He says,
• 28:55
  I said, so why do you want to take the product now? He says, because you're a pain in my ass,
• 29:00
  I have to process all those waters from those regional, you know, stores separately by hand.
• 29:06
  Let's take it up my whole day. I'm taking this product just to get rid of you.
• 29:11
  That's so funny. That's so funny. So again, it's not, by the way, anybody who's never put out a CPG
• 29:18
  brand, a consumer goods brand into the market, like what you're doing is exceptionally hard to do.
• 29:25
  Yeah. Because now it's so I don't, I don't think that you can just do that same playbook
• 29:31
  in 2024. I have no idea, but that seems ridiculously hard to do to go. Unless you have the
• 29:37
  relationships, I guess that is an X factor that you can lean on. But if you don't have those
• 29:42
  relationships, it is very hard to get that kind of distribution without the sales traction or the
• 29:47
  revenue traction. Right. If you're at the stage of you were at. Well, and then to get the
• 29:52
  distribution, I mean, I had some independence with it. And then I finally got Walgreens. I took
• 29:56
  their first order. Their first order was 200,000 to stock the shelves. And the first thing I did
• 30:01
  was that with that is I went down to the best regional broker firm in the country because they
• 30:07
  were all regional. There were no national firms. And it was the Pan Cal brothers. And they were
• 30:13
  known as sort of the premier group. They were based in Chicago. So Walgreens was headquartered in
• 30:20
  Chicago. So they took care of the Walgreens account. I walked in there and they were two proper
• 30:26
  gentlemen in three piece suits. And they said, well, Dr. Cohen, what can we do for you? And I said,
• 30:32
  I've got a check for you. And they kind of looked at each other and go, well, wait a minute,
• 30:36
  we're supposed to like write you checks or you write us checks on this and that. What do you mean,
• 30:42
  you have a check for us? And I said, well, look, I got an order here for $200,000. You know,
• 30:47
  from Walgreens, I want you to take over that account and I'll give you this as a starter.
• 30:53
  And they said, well, that means you have to pay us commission on that. I said, yeah. And they go,
• 30:57
  well, okay, why are you doing this? I said, I need a favor from you. I want you to call the best,
• 31:04
  you know, eight other regional firms that are brokers and get them to meet with me. And they
• 31:11
  said, done. That's a, so we uptick distribution in no time. And we were in 40,000 stores.
• 31:19
  You know, I don't want to take you. Well, you know, I'd say the whole process took about seven
• 31:26
  months. It's very good. But I mean, get it there for football season. I was going to say,
• 31:32
  if you didn't have it, if you didn't have it in the stores, then none of the strategy would work.
• 31:40
  So I'm assuming if you wanted the football players to wear it, you need to have proof that
• 31:46
  there was a, it was like adopted by the market. Well, actually, it wasn't adopted yet because it
• 31:52
  was just going on the shelves. I needed proof from the head trainers, the head NFL trainers.
• 31:58
  So we started to badger them, you know, at a guy that was literally calling every NFL head trainer
• 32:05
  every week, and saying, have you used them yet on your players? Have you used them? And finally,
• 32:10
  one of them did. He put it on Herschel Walker and Herschel Walker scored a couple touchdowns.
• 32:15
  And there was a photographer right behind the, the goal, you know, the goalposts and he had a nice
• 32:21
  picture of Herschel wearing it. And a beat reporter, we could turn it up on page six on Monday,
• 32:27
  you know, the sports section in the Philadelphia Inquirer beat reporter, then cold us up. You know,
• 32:32
  she saw it on Wednesday and she says, well, what's the story about this? And so then she wrote
• 32:38
  an article and she entitled the article bandage to beaks breathing better. Back in those days,
• 32:48
  color prints on newspapers were rare. And there was a six by nine inch on the front page of the
• 32:55
  sports section of the Inquirer. So we made color reprints of that. We sent it back to all the other
• 33:00
  trainers and we said, hey, other players are wearing this. Your players are behind, you know,
• 33:05
  and I said, post this in your locker room. And then Jerry Rice saw it and said, hey, I got a nasal
• 33:11
  breathing problem. And he went into Lindsey McClain, the head trainer and says, I'm going to,
• 33:15
  I'm going to try one of those. He put it on. He loved it. He said, he wore Monday nights football.
• 33:19
  And at this point, like, I mean, you're still like, but you're still running the two companies.
• 33:23
  You know, you still have this pub co that's like now running both of these companies. But
• 33:27
  I'm assuming that there's a point where where breathe right starts to outpace, like all the
• 33:32
  traditional medical tech that you built out. Yeah, exactly. And so we ended up selling it.
• 33:37
  So did you sell the whole pub co? No, we just sold them just sold the sleep part. How do you,
• 33:42
  how do you do that? How do you package out a piece of a public company and then sell it? What's
• 33:47
  this do? What's the strategy to do that? It was really easy because, you know, the patents were
• 33:53
  so different that the IP, you know, could be split, you know, companies back then they tended to
• 34:00
  just buy technology and incorporate it into their, their stuff. So it was really providing them
• 34:06
  all the engineering material, you know, our sales history, the intellectual property, you know,
• 34:11
  and so it was a transaction that, you know, didn't, didn't take much. And this was so, I mean,
• 34:18
  when you sold to, you sold the GlaxoSmith client in what was the 2006, correct? Yep. That was
• 34:23
  breathe right. Okay. Obviously an amazing exit. So that was for $566 million that you sold the
• 34:30
  IP for breathe right and all the sort of. And the bismarage. I mean, there was another product,
• 34:35
  fiber choice. We launched fiber choice chewable fiber tablets to compete with Metamusel.
• 34:40
  So and that business was doing well. So we, at that point, we had about $140 million
• 34:45
  business, but it was generating a lot of profit, even for a consumer goods brand. Oh, well,
• 34:51
  the margin is basic. I mean, a breathe right nasal strip, you know, we were making them in the
• 34:56
  billions. And, and, you know, a strip cost at that point, two and three quarter cents. Oh,
• 35:04
  cheese. Right. Okay. So you could, I mean, you know, you had a 90% margin. So, okay. So then you have
• 35:10
  an amazing exit. At this point, do you keep CNS? I mean, it's publicly traded. I mean, you,
• 35:18
  you could, in theory, I'm assuming at this point, and quasi-retire. And, and you could figure what
• 35:23
  to do next. So this isn't the end of your story, though. I know that you just started another
• 35:27
  company. So even after that transaction, just what happened in your life as an entrepreneur,
• 35:32
  massive success. Now everybody, you know, knows your brand at the household name. So where do you,
• 35:36
  what do you do next? You know, I went back to my mid school days, because it was something that
• 35:42
  really bothered me that I learned in medical school. And that was 75 to 90% of all medical conditions
• 35:51
  are made worse or caused by stress. And so I asked my professors, well, you know, why don't we
• 35:58
  do something about it? They had good answers. I won't get into the details. But I wanted to see if
• 36:04
  we could solve that issue. So my partner and I said, you know what, let's, let's start a separate
• 36:09
  company. And we did this while CNS was still operating. You know, and, and it was the idea of,
• 36:15
  let's do some research. Let's figure out if we could make a technology that would do this.
• 36:21
  Yeah. And, and so we started that company in 97. Actually, even though it, you know, we go,
• 36:28
  we go by the name of soltech health right now. It really round river research quirk dba soltech health.
• 36:37
  So soltech you started like a while ago. This is not a new venture. This is just a venture that
• 36:41
  you kept going. Yeah. Well, what happened? Well, the reason we named it round river research was
• 36:48
  because we knew it was going to be like navigating around river. And we were going to have to go
• 36:52
  around and around and around to figure out the solution. When you, when you started round river
• 37:00
  before we even jumped on here, you mentioned that sort of the first company that you started,
• 37:05
  like CNS was radically different in the way that you started it. And you operated it versus round
• 37:10
  river, which eventually turned into soltech. So maybe just paint a picture for just how you thought
• 37:16
  through starting round river versus when you first started CNS. Okay. Yeah. I mean, the two companies
• 37:23
  are dramatically different, but having the experience of the first, especially having been a public
• 37:28
  company raising funds the way we did VCs, then public doing all of that, you know, engineering work,
• 37:36
  the consumer work, the consumer research, you know, all of that taught me so much that when we
• 37:43
  started the second one, it was, you know, we're going to have to do a lot of research. Let's keep
• 37:47
  the team really, really small. It's not spend a lot of money. You know, we're going to put our own
• 37:53
  money into this because we didn't know in the beginning whether or not we could solve the problem.
• 37:59
  So we, you know, we were betting against ourselves. Actually, we committed a lot of money to it.
• 38:05
  You could say out of guilt because, you know, we made a lot of money. It was like, wait a minute.
• 38:10
  I went to medical school. I didn't want to sort of trash that education. What if we could actually do
• 38:15
  this? And so, so it was, let's see what we can do. Let's, you know, go on the cheap in terms of,
• 38:23
  you know, expenses because we're going to have to do, we're going to have to work at this for a
• 38:27
  long time, you know, before we come up with a discovery. And that was true. I mean, we, we kind of
• 38:33
  knew that. We started in 97. We didn't have our first major discovery until 2014. That's a
• 38:40
  wild amount of time. Yeah. That's an absolutely wild amount of time. How does a business
• 38:48
  go and operate for, you know, seven years without having some sort of discovery or product that
• 38:57
  makes, oh, wait, no, you said 2014. So, so it was 17 years. Yeah, 17 years. How does a business
• 39:04
  operate for 17 years without figuring out what product it's going to sell? Very low burn rate.
• 39:11
  We weren't taking a salary. So, weren't we weren't paying ourselves. So we put in the money. We had a
• 39:17
  very, very small team, you know, dedicated people who loved the mission. So, you know, we didn't,
• 39:25
  we didn't pay high amounts of money. We didn't even form a board for a long time. And, and it was
• 39:34
  one of those deals where you just don't spend much money. That type of business would have not been
• 39:42
  possible if you raised venture capital. No, because, no, they would have been, well, best funds
• 39:48
  last 10 years. They finished their investment cycle after six. They needed an exit. They don't like
• 39:54
  returning stock to their investors. So, it was totally impossible. Now, we did take some money
• 40:00
  towards the latter years. And we started to make a little progress with some of the technology we
• 40:05
  were playing with. And so, friends and family were interested. Some angel investors were interested.
• 40:11
  So, we started to collect some, some investment. But again, we kept the dollars low. We kept the
• 40:17
  valuation well. And it was a lot of research, you know, it's a sort of a good result. And does it
• 40:23
  make sense the way that, so, are there a lot of companies, because I don't know this space,
• 40:28
  that a lot of companies that are just focused exclusively on, on, on just research without revenue?
• 40:35
  That seems to be like something a university would do. Not like a private company per se.
• 40:40
  Yeah. There are a number of private companies that do that, but they typically fund it through grants.
• 40:46
  So, they have grant writers, and they do that, and they have to be patient too. So,
• 40:51
  there are a number that do it that way. You know, I was too impatient to do grant writing. So,
• 40:56
  it was like, no, no, I just rather pay for it. Do you prefer one style of business over the other,
• 41:03
  raising versus not raising? Oh, yeah, it's easy. If you don't have to raise money, then you could
• 41:09
  focus on the business exclusively. Yeah. And so, I did that. But then, because we're a small business,
• 41:14
  and we adopted that strategy, and I didn't want VCs in this business, because you didn't know when
• 41:20
  you're going to really be able to productize your invention. I couldn't afford to bring them in.
• 41:26
  So, to me, it was keep it small. I mean, I still spend a lot of time fundraising, you know,
• 41:34
  right now. I mean, it's really funny, but we do it. We do it so differently than the way other
• 41:39
  companies do it today. It's like, you know, if you, you can do a 506C filing, you know, with the SEC,
• 41:47
  and that allows the company to market its own stock. All right. And so, we almost always have an
• 41:54
  offering in process, and I'm always selling. Yeah, I mean, so I mean, we have an offering open
• 42:03
  right now. Hey, Scott, you want to invest? It's a really good. Yeah. Why not? Yeah. Listen,
• 42:07
  you have a track record. I'll take off. You have a track record. So, I mean, this is, this is kind
• 42:14
  of what we do. But, you know, we, we didn't get bold about seeking investment until we knew we had
• 42:21
  something. You know, we had a discovery, and then it was figuring out, all right, how do we best
• 42:26
  productize this? Because even from the time we had a discovery up until now, it's been 10 years,
• 42:32
  and we're finally now launching the product and getting it out to market. So, there was still
• 42:38
  so much more work that needed to be done. And then, and we learned so much along the way. So,
• 42:43
  it wasn't, it wasn't just one discovery. We've probably made 10 meaningful discoveries that every
• 42:49
  one of them could have resulted in, you know, a series of medical publications. But we're a business,
• 42:56
  and we have to be accountable to our shareholders. So, this turned into a huge investment in intellectual
• 43:01
  property, because ultimately when you sell a business, it's all about IP. And, and so, you know,
• 43:08
  when I realized what we had, particularly in 2018, okay, we had, we had taken the technology far
• 43:16
  enough where we realized the same part of the nervous system that we had to stimulate to reduce
• 43:21
  stress is the same. It's a pacemaker of deep sleep. And so, that was a fascinating revelation.
• 43:30
  And so, the first thing I did is I called a friend of mine who ran a sleep lab. I said,
• 43:33
  Marty, I said, I got to bring this in. We got to do some work to, you know, look at this and see
• 43:39
  what it's doing. I think we're stimulating sleep naturally in terms of the actual pacemaker,
• 43:45
  not like a sleep drug where you're not, you're not causing sleep, you're causing sedation.
• 43:51
  Okay, that affects the cortex. Sleep is, the pacemaker is in the brain step.
• 43:56
  It's in the reptilian part of the brain. And, you know, you may have heard of the autonomic nervous
• 44:02
  system, iter flight versus rest and digest. Well, it was the rest and digest part, the parasympathetic
• 44:08
  division. And we had to treat this. We ended up using a technique that had never been proven.
• 44:16
  It was hypothetical. No. And so, it was called entrainment. We had to get that part of the nervous
• 44:22
  system to react to an external safe stimuli. And so, so think about it. Trainment is too tuning
• 44:30
  forks that are tuned to the same frequency. You start one and you don't even touch the other.
• 44:35
  You just move it closer and then the other one starts vibrating because the air molecules,
• 44:39
  you know, do it. So we to do the same thing, but obviously not with air. And then the brain works,
• 44:45
  you know, electrochemically, but the electrical part was interesting. And so if we could get,
• 44:50
  you know, electric waves to, you know, which essentially is magnetic waves, to interface at the
• 44:56
  right frequency, you know, we could probably stimulate that part of the nervous system. And we did.
• 45:02
  You know, since I doubt how to do that. And then, and then we realized, you know, it's sleep
• 45:07
  stage dependent because of different safe stages. Fortunately, I had all that background,
• 45:12
  you know, we pioneered in the last in CNS, the automation of sleep diagnostics. So, so I knew,
• 45:18
  I wrote for that. Ready? Yeah. You know, how did you, how do you know that, like, no, sorry,
• 45:23
  I'm so curious. How did you talk? Because it's so interesting how the sort of like the two
• 45:28
  businesses that you've built actually play together very nicely. But how did you figure out that
• 45:35
  stress is tied to sleep? Because that, that's, that was, I mean, obviously, years of research. But
• 45:42
  what was the, what was the discovery that led you to understand that if we have this device that
• 45:47
  stimuli, I'm not going to remember any of the medical terms that you just mentioned. So I'm not
• 45:51
  even going to try it. But if you have a device that stimulates this particular part of the brain that
• 45:55
  induces true sleep and not just sedation, then that has a like a downstream effect to your stress
• 46:03
  levels. Because stress, I think from, from a layman is, is, is based on cortisol to a degree. But
• 46:11
  also the, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system and how those two play together. So,
• 46:16
  I mean, there's a lot going on there. And it's just interesting how you found out that the thing
• 46:21
  that you spent your first, you know, whatever, X amount of years building actually gives you a lot
• 46:24
  of information that will help you build out the second thing that actually solves for, for stress
• 46:29
  and people. It was very easy. As we made it work for stress, you know, once we made the key
• 46:35
  discovery, yeah, I mean, we started testing it on people. They were full sleep. That's so funny.
• 46:42
  So we said, okay, you know, and I knew what area of the nervous system we were affecting. And
• 46:47
  then I started to do some literature research. And I found these papers that had identified, hey,
• 46:52
  this is really the pacemaker asleep. And so, okay, fine, they'll, everything fit beautifully.
• 46:57
  So then we started to do that testing and worked, worked through all those things. And, okay,
• 47:02
  so then this devices the pacemaker asleep, it triggers something. And then you fall asleep,
• 47:09
  and then obviously that helps your stress. And let's actually get into, let's get into the,
• 47:16
  let's get into the mechanics of stress and sleep in a second before we do that. I think it's
• 47:22
  just interesting because you mentioned IP, intellectual property. So talk to me just from a business
• 47:26
  perspective, because then we can sort of shift off business for a second. But from a business
• 47:30
  perspective, when you're building a company, I don't think a lot of first-time entrepreneurs think
• 47:36
  about IP, intellectual property, trademark, all of that, because it's expensive and time-consuming,
• 47:41
  and you need legal help to do it. So I think you're just trying to figure out how to make your first
• 47:45
  dollar. But talk to me about the importance of IP and intellectual property in a business
• 47:49
  of how you defend it. And sort of because you've done this a few times, you know, IP is a cornerstone
• 47:56
  of any successful business because, you know, let's face it, you're going to start out,
• 48:00
  you're going to be a small business. If you don't have IP, somebody's just going to walk in,
• 48:04
  you know, copy what you've done, and they've got the financial resources you're done, you're over
• 48:09
  with, you know, and so without IP, I don't know how you value a company. Even if they have revenues,
• 48:16
  if they don't have IP, a bigger company comes along, copies them, and wipes them out of the market.
• 48:21
  So to me, IP was always the cornerstone. And so when I realized what we had in 2018,
• 48:28
  I found, you know, we already had a patent firm, but I wanted more than that. I wanted a patent
• 48:33
  genius. And so I found one, you know, and, and I went out and met with him. He was out on
• 48:42
  Bainbridge Island, you know, off of Seattle. And he says, look, he says, if I take you one,
• 48:49
  as a client, he says, I bring in a team of engineers, and I do six months of research on what you
• 48:55
  have, because patents are all about the disclosure section. He says, you got to look at a patent
• 49:01
  like it's a time machine. And if you put all this information in the disclosure section,
• 49:07
  you can keep revisiting that patent for the next 20 years and creating continuation applications
• 49:14
  that keep extending the patent life. And he said, so he says, my strategy is all about disclosure,
• 49:20
  disclosure, disclosure, and try to envision the future. And I just loved what this guy was saying.
• 49:26
  It made so much sense. And so we developed an IP team. And this guy I put in charge of the IP
• 49:32
  team, I said, I'll keep feeding you ideas based on what I'm seeing clinically and how I think
• 49:37
  it's working. You guys do the research. And then this guy, this guy was a world class patent guy.
• 49:44
  I mean, this is the inventor of general motors on star technology. But then, you know, he went
• 49:50
  off and did all these other things. He owns 19.7% of all the intellectual property on autonomous
• 49:58
  vehicles, which he's licensed to the top 22 car companies around the world. All right,
• 50:05
  any prosecutes and he defends his own patents. And this guy's brilliant. And so, you know,
• 50:11
  basically, I just said, you're a charge of this. We'll just pay the bill. And so we just,
• 50:16
  we spent a fortune with him. But he loves learning. And so, you know, he's now partially retired.
• 50:24
  We're one of two clients of his, the other one is his kid. You know, and so, you know,
• 50:30
  so he and I worked together, worked together for six years, you know, developing a mammoth IP
• 50:36
  portfolio. And that's the value of our company at this point. Can that be the, because as a company,
• 50:42
  I think a lot of people focus on revenue, but you just actually mentioned something that's actually
• 50:45
  really interesting. If you get your IP done right, licensing.ip could be a revenue stream.
• 50:52
  Right. And that could be the whole business. Yes. That's right. Well, and I got you.
• 50:57
  And when, when we started to look at our technology, we realized, oh my god, you know,
• 51:02
  it get back to the 75 to 90% of all medical conditions are either made worse by or caused by
• 51:09
  stress. Yeah. Well, okay. So we can go to the FDA and get claims for all these things.
• 51:17
  You have a mammoth medical business. We even have shown that this thing works for non-stress-related
• 51:24
  conditions like diabetic peripheral neuropathy. There's 200 million people around the world with
• 51:29
  that problem. Okay. And we not only take away the pain, we start regrowing the nerves. So
• 51:35
  sensation starts to come back. Nobody's been able to do this. So you look at that market alone,
• 51:41
  we can go out to all these companies and just license that. Or we can divisionalize the pattern
• 51:47
  in such a way that we could sell that part of the business. You know, we can sell the consumer
• 51:51
  part just to fund the medical research and the medical business is going to be worse so much more
• 51:57
  than the consumer side. How much does it cost to go through this kind of process to get the IPs
• 52:03
  and the patents and everything set up properly? Well, we've spent an inordinate amount of money
• 52:10
  in that in that area. Simply because this is all brand new and we wanted to encapsulate,
• 52:17
  we wanted to basically have a monopoly on this area. So we select millions. We've got three
• 52:24
  million dollars or not. Three million. Yeah. And that's considered, I don't know this game,
• 52:28
  so that's considered a lot. That's like the higher end of the spectrum for IP. For a startup,
• 52:33
  you know, a small company, it's an enormous amount. For a large company, it's not not a big deal.
• 52:38
  But yeah, of course, but for a company like us, it's a big deal. If you have like a message for
• 52:42
  entrepreneurs that are looking to build something right now, but maybe there's less invention involved
• 52:48
  in the company they're building, is there are there things they should focus on a focus on trade
• 52:54
  marking or patenting over others? Like if I'm thinking of a company that's building out some
• 53:00
  software for example, do you recommend they even patent their code? Is that something that
• 53:08
  that people would do? Yeah, there's usually some tricks in the code and you could either patent
• 53:12
  that are maintained as a trade secret if you think that somebody's code in the art can't figure
• 53:17
  it out. But you want to you want to investigate it, you know, or, you know, the other thing is
• 53:23
  haven't have an exit in case, you know, you're not going to be able to win in the marketplace.
• 53:30
  Know who the buyers are going to be and get to know them so that so that they're aware of you.
• 53:36
  And you know, if they look, if they make you the right offer, consider it.
• 53:41
  I want to take a second and thank Range Rover Sport for supporting today's episode. Now,
• 53:44
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• 53:50
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• 53:55
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• 54:01
  you're trying to build, the challenge that you're taking on, it finally starts to take off.
• 54:06
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• 54:13
  when you get behind of the wheel of a Range Rover Sport because we've all had that perfect drive
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• 54:54
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• 55:10
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• 55:17
  that I think that, you know, you mentioned, again, before we repress records, excuse me,
• 55:24
  you speak to a lot of entrepreneurs and I speak to a lot of entrepreneurs as well. And it's
• 55:30
  definitely different for a second time entrepreneur who's done this before. But I think the first
• 55:34
  time entrepreneur just focuses on building and a lot of the ones that I speak to, they don't know
• 55:38
  who their buyer is. They don't know what the exit plan is. They don't know if it's going to go to a
• 55:42
  strategic or if it's going to go to a private equity firm or if they're going to IPO at some point.
• 55:49
  As an investor, that's incredibly scary because you want to know when you're going to get your money
• 55:53
  back. But when you build a business, what's just some advice from even like what you're building
• 56:02
  right now, when you think of an exit plan or an exit strategy that like a nearly stage entrepreneur
• 56:07
  could learn from, let me tell you how I thought through our exit through this company. So you'd
• 56:13
  appreciate it. I think see the pieces. Okay. We have a system that has a couple components to it.
• 56:19
  We have this magnetic generator that goes under the bed. All right. And it generates the frequencies
• 56:25
  that we want to do the different processes, whether it's, you know, increased deep sleep, which we
• 56:30
  can do. We can restore deep sleep, which people lose as they age. Okay. Again, that's the first.
• 56:36
  All right. So, so you've got that generator. We had to develop our own wearable because I was
• 56:42
  interested in looking at heart rate variability in the frequency domain, not just the time domain,
• 56:47
  so that we could understand the frequencies to, you know, to really figure it out and fine tune,
• 56:52
  what we tell the generator to do. So it's a closed loop feedback system. So our wearable in real time,
• 56:59
  you know, tells the generator, hey, you know, he's moving into deep sleep, you know, send them
• 57:03
  these frequencies now. Okay. So there's a wearable. Obviously, there's an app, you know, and you have
• 57:08
  to be iOS and, you know, Android compatible. And then, and we have a, you know, a cloud-based
• 57:15
  database that to store all the data so that again, we could do research. So you got four different
• 57:19
  components there. Well, of those components, you know, which one is most relatable to other
• 57:28
  companies that could be interested in us? And it would be the wearable companies, right?
• 57:34
  And so then we did research on why are the wearable companies in this business? You know,
• 57:41
  what's the main reason? You know, there's a lot of wearable companies and they come and go,
• 57:47
  but who are the ones that are going to win in the long run? Okay, because, you know,
• 57:51
  because we can make our generator, we've done enough research now to make our generator wearable
• 57:56
  agnostic. Okay. And that's all that. And that's the key part. And so if we want to team up with
• 58:02
  some wearable companies, you know, they could, we could let their wearable run our generator.
• 58:08
  Okay. And we already had identified a relationship with Best Buy. You know, they're,
• 58:13
  they're headquartered here. We know they're, you know, executives. And so, you know,
• 58:19
  they wanted to take on our product because it was novel. It was electronic. They like to get
• 58:23
  into healthcare stuff. And so, you know, I went to them and I said, look, you know, we're thinking
• 58:28
  about making the generator wearable agnostic. You know, you want to make some introductions for us.
• 58:33
  And then you guys can bundle this, you know, and they said, yes, sure. And so, you know,
• 58:38
  so we did the research on the wearable companies and we looked at them. We said, who is the top
• 58:42
  for wearable companies? And it turns out it's Apple, you know, um, Samsung,
• 58:50
  on a Xiaomi and Huawei to Chinese companies. And then you say, what's common amongst those
• 58:59
  companies? In other words, are they in the wearable business for just wearables? These are mammoth
• 59:05
  companies. And, and their wearable revenues and profits are in there. They're round off there.
• 59:13
  You know, not on their PNL. And so then you go, there's something other, there's another reason
• 59:19
  why they're in the wearable industry. Well, sure enough, those are the top four smartphone
• 59:24
  companies around the world. And once a consumer hooks the wearable up to the smartphone,
• 59:31
  they're less likely to, you know, change to a different smartphone. Okay. So they're doing it to
• 59:37
  protect market share of a much larger business. So right away, what that tells you is, man,
• 59:43
  these other wearable companies are in trouble because, you know, there's not a lot of IP associated
• 59:49
  with a wearable. Okay. And so, so you look at that, you go, these big companies can outspend all
• 59:56
  of these smaller, you know, 1000%. Yeah. And so if you look at the smaller companies,
• 1:00:01
  and say we're public, you know, you might consider shorting their stock, you know, because
• 1:00:06
  how long are they going to be able to compete with these other companies? And so what they've,
• 1:00:11
  some of them have tried to do with to create little niche, you know, applications. I mean,
• 1:00:16
  I think the smartest one is Garmin, because they've got a select type of customer and they're
• 1:00:22
  going to buy, they're going to be loyal to Garmin. So they're going to buy a Garmin wearable.
• 1:00:27
  Yeah. But you look at some of the others, look at Fitbit, you know, even though, you know,
• 1:00:32
  you know, Alphabet could have tied that into the Google phone better, you know, they never did.
• 1:00:38
  And they bought Fitbit early in the process. They claimed for the purpose of having more data,
• 1:00:43
  because at that point, Fitbit had like 28 million customers. All right. But you'll look at the
• 1:00:49
  newer companies that got into it in the past five to 10 years, you know, the number of users
• 1:00:58
  is in the low millions. So it's like, you know, where are they really going to go?
• 1:01:05
  But it's interesting though, because I know some of the companies that have been built in the
• 1:01:09
  past few years, and they're trying to compete with the giants, the behemoths. And when you look at
• 1:01:17
  your strategy, what you're saying is, I'm not going to try and compete with those behemoths.
• 1:01:22
  I'm going to find a way to tap into the ecosystem because now I understand why wearables are
• 1:01:27
  even part of their ecosystem. And that's my strategic exit or my strategic buyer on the consumer side.
• 1:01:33
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, would we sell the consumer part of this business? Yeah. Because we
• 1:01:41
  get a lot of money for it. And then we wouldn't have to raise more money and dilute our shareholder
• 1:01:45
  interests and fund the medical stuff. And probably take the medical stuff as an IPO early. So
• 1:01:52
  again, our shareholders would have complete liquidity. Yeah, that's smart. That's very, very smart.
• 1:01:57
  So, and I mean, also, if you keep reinvesting in the medical stuff, I'm assuming you can
• 1:02:04
  license that to whoever purchased the consumer stuff because they're going to want to keep advancing.
• 1:02:08
  Well, yeah. Or other medical companies. There's lots of medical companies that specialize in
• 1:02:13
  different areas. You could just say, okay, I'm going to license this product to you for depression.
• 1:02:17
  And you could have diabetic peripheral neuropathy. And you could have asthma. And you could have
• 1:02:23
  migraine. You could have, you know, ADD, ADHD. You know, it goes on and on and on and on.
• 1:02:30
  I want to unpack sort of the science of stress and sleep. And I think that's going to be
• 1:02:34
  really interesting to me to add about. But just sort of some last just a couple last thoughts on
• 1:02:39
  the business of it. So where does this company go? Like, where do you want to see it going in the
• 1:02:43
  future? What are some maybe some advancements that you're working on now that you're excited about?
• 1:02:47
  And then let's talk about some of the science under the hood. Yeah. I mean, you know, I mentioned
• 1:02:51
  DPN and we've already had early discussions with the FDA. So we will take that one, you know,
• 1:02:57
  through the process to get FDA clearance on that. And that's that's nice. And then there are
• 1:03:02
  other neurologic conditions that are kind of related in terms of the pathophysiology.
• 1:03:08
  All right. And but one of the things that's very interesting to me is we can restore deep sleep
• 1:03:17
  that we lose as we age. Deep sleep is the most important stage of sleep because it essentially
• 1:03:25
  it restores the body every every night. So it's it's it's definitely the key driver in terms of
• 1:03:33
  cell repair, cell regeneration, even DNA repair, you know, let alone regulating the endocrine system
• 1:03:40
  and boosting the immune system. Okay. And that's vital. When you look at a graph showing you how
• 1:03:49
  you lose deep sleep, how much you lose as you age and you compare that graph to the number of
• 1:03:56
  chronic diseases that you accumulate with age, you have you literally have inverse correlation.
• 1:04:03
  Wow. So you can tell by looking at outside of the fact that that everybody on earth, every human
• 1:04:09
  being ever loses deep sleep as they age, you can look at somebody's deep sleep graph and you can
• 1:04:16
  find out how all the other things in their life are going based on how much deep sleep they're
• 1:04:21
  pretty much. I mean, it's a very primary indicator. And you know, someone argued that it's also
• 1:04:27
  the indicator for longevity, you know, and so will this reverse aging to some extent? I can't
• 1:04:33
  answer that question, but you know, there's a lot of hypothetical, you know, evidence that would
• 1:04:39
  suggest that's a possibility. Yeah, because everyone's into everyone's into biohacking and longevity
• 1:04:45
  and reversing aging now. And there's so many, not gimmicks, but things that people are trying,
• 1:04:52
  but it seems like this is, this is sort of like the first thing you should focus on.
• 1:04:56
  Well, it's your deep sleep. Not only that, but I mean, look at it another way. I mean, I can't
• 1:05:01
  promise that you're going to live to 120 if you use our equipment and you restore your delta sleep,
• 1:05:06
  your deep sleep. But you know, let's say you're going to die at 90, you know, or if if this thing
• 1:05:14
  allows you to live to 95, are those extra five years worth it? And I would say they're only worth
• 1:05:20
  it if you can be healthy during those five years. I mean, if you gave me the choice, live without any
• 1:05:26
  disease until I'm 90 and then die or live to 95 and accumulate these diseases, I would take the
• 1:05:33
  first choice. I would say, no, no, I'll take 90 good years, you know, you get out the last five
• 1:05:39
  years. I agree. And do we know why deep sleep deteriorates as you get older or shortens or
• 1:05:46
  no, but it isn't interesting that it does. It's sort of one of those biologic clocks that,
• 1:05:53
  you know, you wonder about. But now we can reverse it and we can reverse it naturally. In other words,
• 1:06:02
  we're not doing it in some sort of way to affect the cerebral cortex to create delta waves,
• 1:06:08
  you know, that are associated with deep sleep, because we're migrating through the entire
• 1:06:12
  sleep circuitry, which affects the entire brain and has secondary effects on things like the
• 1:06:19
  immune system, the endocrine system, you know, cell repair, cell regeneration. I mean, I was talking
• 1:06:24
  to Brian Dawkins the other day, you know, the exe, eagle, you know, his whole famer, you know,
• 1:06:30
  and he says, man, he says, why didn't you invent this when I was in my 20s because I already
• 1:06:35
  felt deterioration when I hit my 30s. I said, well, Brian, you're right. I said, you start
• 1:06:41
  losing deep sleep in your 20s. And it just progresses until you're 80 and you don't have anymore.
• 1:06:47
  The cycles of sleep or stages of sleep are, I guess, our light sleep, deep sleep, which is like
• 1:06:52
  you said, delta. And then what's, what's REM that dream sleep? So that's drain sleep. Okay,
• 1:06:58
  if you look at sleep and you divide it up, you know, you spend about 25% of your sleep time,
• 1:07:06
  not time in bed, because there's a difference, because there's a lot of time in bed that you're
• 1:07:09
  awake. Let's say typically an hour. All right. And so if you look at just a sleep time, your time
• 1:07:15
  in dream sleep, REM sleep is about 25%. And, and the percentage of time that you are in what's
• 1:07:22
  called non-rem, which is light and deep is 75%. And so about 50% of that is light and 25% is deep.
• 1:07:31
  If you're, if you're a normal 20 year old, okay, healthy, normal 20 year old. But then what happens
• 1:07:37
  over time, your deep sleep gets lighter and lighter. So it's no longer deep. And your
• 1:07:42
  lighter sleep also gets lighter and lighter. So your sleep becomes more fragmented and you have
• 1:07:47
  much more wake type. And so it's not nearly as restorative as it was. And we deepen all of that
• 1:07:54
  non-rem sleep to make you feel better the next day. And to obviously have the health benefits.
• 1:08:01
  And, and just to tie that. So when you, when you deepen the deep sleep, so that impacts a lot of
• 1:08:08
  things. But how does this impact your stress levels and your nervous system and your, and your,
• 1:08:14
  and your quarters, if you mentioned it, it also backs your, your endocrine, and endocrine system,
• 1:08:20
  you mentioned system, and that's all your hormones, right? So maybe like showing percentages or numbers
• 1:08:26
  or, or some sort of quantifiable so that people understand how this deep sleep impacts your stress
• 1:08:33
  directly. Well, remember that there's, we're talking about the same area of the nervous system.
• 1:08:39
  Yes. Okay. Number one, number two, I'm sure you've heard of the term neuroplasticity.
• 1:08:45
  Of course. Yeah. Okay. So your brain, your brain as you learn and your brain forms new
• 1:08:49
  neural pathways. Exactly. Okay. Back when I was in neurology training, that, that, that concept
• 1:08:56
  didn't exist. Okay. It's really been the past 30 years or so. They people have realized,
• 1:09:01
  hey, wait a minute, the brain is dynamic. Okay. Well, because we're supporting and influencing
• 1:09:09
  this primitive part of the brain that has connections throughout the entire brain,
• 1:09:14
  it's restoring all of these areas. Like when we restore deep sleep, it doesn't happen the first
• 1:09:19
  night you use it. If you already have the circuits in place when you're 20, yeah, you're going to
• 1:09:24
  get, you're going to get an effect very quickly. Okay. But if you're 70 or 50, you know, even by the
• 1:09:31
  time you're mid to late 40s, you've already lost 60 to 70 percent of your deep sleep. So,
• 1:09:37
  you know, you've got to grow back those circuits. So depending on how old you are and how damaged
• 1:09:42
  your brain is, it's going to take you, you know, a month, two months, three months, and then it
• 1:09:47
  continues. You know, it continues to improve in terms of your deep sleep. And so, so number one,
• 1:09:53
  recognize that, but it happens through neuroplasticity. Okay. Now I've explained all that in relationship
• 1:09:59
  to sleep, but it's the same circuits related to stress. So now you've regrown all those.
• 1:10:07
  And we have, in our app, we have two sections. Once dedicated to sleep, the others dedicated to
• 1:10:14
  relaxation or meditation, stress reduction. And so you can run that as well. And that will impact
• 1:10:21
  those areas of the nervous system. And what's nice about that is you're awake and aware. And you
• 1:10:28
  can feel what's happening to your body. And when you can feel those changes, you know, humans are
• 1:10:34
  very good at recreating feeling states. And so then you learn what it feels like to have reduced stress
• 1:10:40
  because most people don't know. If you ask somebody, do you know what it feels like to have zero
• 1:10:45
  stress? I always have some stress. You know, I know where I'm at. I'm just, you know, I'm kind of
• 1:10:51
  that way. You know, and so people don't know, but when they start to experience lower and lower
• 1:10:58
  stress levels and profound levels of relaxation, as I wait a minute, this is how I should be operating.
• 1:11:05
  And by the way, this is how you optim, or this is how you optimally operate when you're in low stress
• 1:11:12
  states, because then you're receptive. That's when you can make really good decisions from a business
• 1:11:16
  standpoint. That's when you can feel your guts, say, screaming at you, no, no, this is that the wrong
• 1:11:22
  path. This is the right path. Okay. So then you, that's how the two are interrelated. You grow back
• 1:11:28
  the circuitry. You exploit that circuitry. You learn what it feels like. And you do it during the day
• 1:11:34
  too. I've some people that that have a system under their bed. They don't feel like moving in. So
• 1:11:39
  they bought another one under their desk. And they just turn that on during the day while they're
• 1:11:44
  doing their work. And they really, if you just had the system under your bed that's helping you
• 1:11:50
  with that deep sleep and that neuroplastician regrowing the things that deteriorate over time,
• 1:11:56
  then you're you're lowering your stress baseline. But then the second you wake up and you move
• 1:12:00
  away from that environment that you elevated again. So you got to find a way to in sleep and and
• 1:12:05
  when away, you have to find a way. Well, I guess a way to sort of take advantage of that lowered
• 1:12:11
  stress baseline that your deep sleep is allowing you to have when we're combining, you know,
• 1:12:15
  those functions in our app right now, you know, we'll have an update in a couple weeks where you
• 1:12:20
  there's a now a choice. It's relaxed to sleep. So it runs a relaxation session. And then at the end
• 1:12:27
  of that, it automatically switches into a sleep session because it's a good chance you will have
• 1:12:32
  already fallen asleep. So then you get the benefit of the relaxation. You can feel it and then you
• 1:12:37
  drift off and then it goes into your typical sleep session because all the other things that people
• 1:12:42
  do to help with sleep. So, you know, they say, shut off your phone, X amount of minutes before
• 1:12:48
  you go to bed or an hour before you go to bed, it don't eat too late and obviously no caffeine.
• 1:12:53
  I mean, these these all help, but they're not going to have the same impact. Oh god, no. No, we
• 1:12:58
  recommend all those all those sleep hygiene tips are yet. They're all good. They're all beneficial.
• 1:13:04
  But this is actually supporting the mechanisms that subserve sleep and stress. How does this
• 1:13:10
  device and deep sleep? How does that play into cellular repair, cellular regeneration,
• 1:13:18
  even even I'm assuming like cognitive diseases or cognitive decline as well, Alzheimer's,
• 1:13:28
  dementia. So I mean, obviously the benefits affect everything in your body. So we don't have to go
• 1:13:33
  through every single thing that can happen to people, but those two items in particular,
• 1:13:37
  those are interesting to me, mostly because Alzheimer's dementia is in my family. But secondly,
• 1:13:41
  I think that I think that the cellular damage you mentioned that before is also a really
• 1:13:46
  interesting point as to how deep sleep impacts that. So maybe you can speak to both of those.
• 1:13:52
  Sure. Well, when you think about it and when you're growing, you're going through cell
• 1:13:59
  degeneration, cell repair, cell growth. Okay. And one of the things that's very notable in your
• 1:14:05
  endocrine system with growth is growth karma. Okay. It subserves that function. And that happens
• 1:14:13
  during deep sleep. Okay. 70 to 80% of your growth hormone is secreted during deep sleep.
• 1:14:21
  And so, you know, since you lose deep sleep, you're obviously losing that functionality.
• 1:14:27
  So the question we have is are we restoring growth hormone levels, you know, by increasing deep
• 1:14:32
  sleep. We know we must be doing something because we see an effect. Okay. We haven't actually measured
• 1:14:38
  growth hormone levels. So I can't tell you definitively, but we know with deep sleep, people are,
• 1:14:43
  you know, being physically restored to a much greater extent. We also know that because,
• 1:14:49
  you know, if you're 70 years old, you know, you might have good deep sleep one night with our
• 1:14:54
  system. And then the next night it's not so good. And people call me up and they say, hey, why is
• 1:14:59
  my, now that I have deep sleep again, why don't I have it every night? And I said, well, are you
• 1:15:05
  active every day like a 20 year old? And they go, no, I said, well, that's why. So your body's not
• 1:15:10
  telling your brain to put it out like that. Okay. So, so again, it allows you to increase activity,
• 1:15:16
  but it's there for you now. So cell repair, cell regeneration, that's all part of the of the deep
• 1:15:23
  sleep process. Okay. And then, you know, look, do we, does, does medicine right now know everything
• 1:15:30
  about every kind of hormone and every kind of chemical in your body? Absolutely not. We're discovering
• 1:15:35
  things like that every day. So there are all of these mechanisms at play and we know they're at play
• 1:15:40
  in deep sleep and in the different stages of sleep. Okay. So we know we're having an effect by
• 1:15:46
  being able to restore deep sleep. We see the effects, you know, daytime in terms of people's level
• 1:15:51
  of restoration and health. So we know, formally, that's a big issue. On the other side is the immune
• 1:16:00
  system. The immune system is constantly surveilling every cell in your body. Is this when developing
• 1:16:06
  cancer? Is there an infection? Do you have enough white blood cells? Are you stem cells doing what
• 1:16:11
  they need to do to fight off issues? All of that is happening. And we know we bolster that because
• 1:16:17
  again, that's a deep sleep restorative issue. And that's really key. So, you know, we see less
• 1:16:24
  infection. You know, I can't speak to cancer because we don't have the data to speak to that.
• 1:16:30
  But it's going to be interesting to see. But I would expect over time, this will have some effect
• 1:16:35
  because the immune system is getting better and your body can naturally heal and detect these things.
• 1:16:41
  So I look at those things and say, yeah, there's going to be broad ramifications with this technology.
• 1:16:48
  You're going to remember, we're not developing a product here that we're starting an entire
• 1:16:53
  industry with I said, is that allergy? And then you mentioned dementia. There's debate about
• 1:17:00
  what are called towel proteins, you know, in the nervous system in neurons that are associated with
• 1:17:09
  Alzheimer's disease. And we know deep sleep allows for those proteins to be cleaned out of cells.
• 1:17:18
  And so if that's really true, you know, by promoting more deep sleep, then we should be removing
• 1:17:24
  those waste products. And so we'll have to see over time whether or not this decreases,
• 1:17:30
  you know, Alzheimer's disease can it can it reverse the effects? Can it plant it again?
• 1:17:36
  You know, we have decades of research ahead of us to understand all these phenomena.
• 1:17:41
  But this is the first thing that has to be solved for before we can start to study all the
• 1:17:47
  potential online positive effects of having more deep sleep at a much later age.
• 1:17:54
  Well, you're seeing, I mean, people are calling us up with, hey, this is getting better and
• 1:17:58
  that's getting better. Yeah. And I can't name these things at this point because that would be
• 1:18:02
  a medical claim. But yeah, we know it's happening because of what we're doing for non-rhym sleep.
• 1:18:08
  We're amazing. I guess then a very, a very simple question is how much sleep is act? I have
• 1:18:14
  two questions out of this or it's very exciting. I find this fascinating. So first of all, how much
• 1:18:18
  sleep do you actually need to get? Because when sit somebody says six hours, seven hours, eight hours,
• 1:18:23
  nine hours, I'm assuming what they're trying to do is they're trying to create a total amount of
• 1:18:30
  sleep where you actually get the deep sleep that benefits you in that timeframe. Because if you
• 1:18:35
  could guarantee X percentage of your sleep is deep sleep, then I don't think you need the eight or
• 1:18:41
  nine hours that are recommended because you're getting the deep sleep that's actually benefiting your
• 1:18:45
  body, which is really seems to be the most important kind of sleep that you get. You know, you're
• 1:18:49
  bringing up a really interesting point. You know, from an evolutionary standpoint, if deep sleep
• 1:18:55
  is the most important stage, you would expect that you would get your deep sleep earlier,
• 1:19:02
  right? And you sleep under it. Just in case you are awakened. And indeed, that is what has happened
• 1:19:08
  in terms of evolution. So almost all of your deep sleep happens in the first half of the night.
• 1:19:17
  So then, so then the question is, well, okay, so if I got all the deep sleep I needed in the first
• 1:19:22
  four hours is that all I would need? And I would say no, because the other stages also confer
• 1:19:30
  benefit. And just like you get most of the deep sleep early, you get most of the dream sleep
• 1:19:34
  later, you know, and dream sleep is helpful from an emotional standpoint, from a memory standpoint,
• 1:19:40
  and as is light sleep. So there is a certain amount of sleep that you need for health. There have been
• 1:19:46
  numerous long-term, you know, studies that have been done, you know, involving tens of millions
• 1:19:53
  of people, you know, so these are large studies that have been done over 20, 30 years to determine
• 1:19:59
  how much sleep is is best. And they really didn't determine how much is best, but they determined
• 1:20:05
  the minimum amount of sleep that is needed to prevent major illnesses or to lessen the incidence
• 1:20:12
  of major illnesses. And what that showed was six hours seemed to be the cutoff. However, here's
• 1:20:20
  the caveat. All those studies were done over many years before there was any kind of home testing,
• 1:20:29
  like we have now with wearables. So most people were recording time in bed and you're awake
• 1:20:36
  for about an hour when you're in bed. So is the real answer five hours, you know, to prevent illness?
• 1:20:45
  I don't know, but I would suspect it somewhere between five and six hours of sleep to absolutely
• 1:20:51
  do it, but also note that some people need more than others, you know, I'm not a long sleeper,
• 1:20:58
  but one of my kids will regularly sleep 10 hours, you know, and I'll be happy with six,
• 1:21:04
  and I function great. So that's kind of the typical range that we see in the population.
• 1:21:10
  So some people need more and some people need less, but if you can get that delta sleep that
• 1:21:15
  deep sleep early, you're going to be in much better shape. And then I guess the other question that
• 1:21:20
  I have about this is everybody's wearing an aura ring right now to look at their or their
• 1:21:25
  sleep score is important, doesn't really matter the device, the sleep score is important.
• 1:21:30
  When you look at sleep score, is that measuring delta sleep or is it measuring the wrong thing?
• 1:21:35
  You know, different wearables have different types of measurements.
• 1:21:40
  The yeah, yeah, and you have to remember that they're not measuring what you measure in a sleep
• 1:21:46
  lap. So the level of accuracy is not sleep lab quality. Okay, so there's inaccuracies there,
• 1:21:53
  and there's more artifact. Okay, the only way to know precisely what your sleep looks like is to
• 1:21:59
  measure, you know, brain waves, eye movements, chin muscle activity, none of the wearables measure
• 1:22:05
  this kind of stuff. No, okay, you got to measure all of that to be able to do accurate sleep staging.
• 1:22:10
  Now, are the wearables bad, you know, are they worthless? No, they provide some information.
• 1:22:16
  And what's nice about a wearable is you can see whether or not you're improving and you can
• 1:22:22
  correlate your score with, hey, that was a good night's sleep. Therefore, if you keep getting that
• 1:22:27
  score, it's probably going to be good. All right. So they have real value. The problem with wearables
• 1:22:34
  is they in and of themselves don't do anything to improve your sleep. I mean, that was, that was
• 1:22:39
  what we were, we were looking at it and saying, hey, you know what? You know, we want to build something
• 1:22:44
  that helps your sleep. And we built a wearable just to refine our generate. And it's just to show
• 1:22:50
  you it's not like it's showing you that what you built is working. Right. Well, not only that,
• 1:22:56
  we needed it to refine the frequency. So ours is the only wearable as it looks at heart rate
• 1:23:00
  variability and the frequency domains. So we can get a more accurate assessment, particularly of
• 1:23:05
  deep sleep. Okay, because that's the most important stage of sleep. That's what we were most
• 1:23:09
  interested in. And so we had to be really good at that. Now, if we, if we encrypted or provided
• 1:23:17
  an encrypted firmware module to the other wearables that didn't ruin their battery life,
• 1:23:23
  we could give them the equivalent. Okay. And so we would do that in a license arrangement with them.
• 1:23:28
  So they could be a little bit more accurate in the whole depth of non-rem sleep. And we pride
• 1:23:34
  ourselves in being able to look at that depth on all of non-rem sleep. You know, and we can divide
• 1:23:40
  what's happening at the brain stem level versus what's happening at the cortical level of sleep
• 1:23:45
  to see what the interferences. I think that I think that, you know, just after even speaking
• 1:23:50
  you for the past hour, I think that, you know, the one concern that I that I immediately think about
• 1:23:57
  is everybody's trying to optimize their sleep score. But nobody had like outside of these like
• 1:24:03
  sleep hygiene best practices. Again, it's a great device. It gives you some data, but are they
• 1:24:10
  really optimizing for the right thing? Or are they maybe thinking that their sleep is a little
• 1:24:14
  bit better than it actually is because they have this score that's associated with their sleep.
• 1:24:20
  When really they should be trying to figure out, okay, how do I actually get more delta sleep? How
• 1:24:24
  is that actually going to impact my health? Because it's just it's not great to give people false
• 1:24:29
  markers of health. That's really what I'm taking away from this. So I think that that's where the
• 1:24:35
  benefit of your actual device comes into play because it's it is truly correlated with very
• 1:24:41
  positive health markers as opposed to just measuring what you're capable of without, you know,
• 1:24:47
  like assistance is the best way to put it. Yeah. Well, and it allows us to personalize because
• 1:24:54
  yeah, we now give you the stimulus per stage of sleep number one. Number two, along that spectrum
• 1:25:01
  of the autonomic nervous system, people operate at different frequencies. And so we have to find
• 1:25:06
  what's right for you. So we do a calibration process and it's ongoing to say, okay, you know,
• 1:25:12
  where is Scott operating in this range between point one five and point two five cycles per second
• 1:25:18
  and so we can give you that for your delta sleep. So we've gone through a lot. I appreciate it. I
• 1:25:23
  think that, you know, if you've looked at your career, you've always innovated. You've always built
• 1:25:29
  very incredible pieces of technology and you've always really been on the bleeding edge. So
• 1:25:34
  I guess the question is like, what's next for you? Well, I'm not going to disclose everything,
• 1:25:39
  but you know, my wife says I have to retire when I'm 88. I'm only 72. So I've got one more project
• 1:25:46
  left in me and I've learned so much in this project that I think there's a discovery that we can
• 1:25:54
  make that's really going to be fascinating in terms of brain versus mind because a lot of people
• 1:26:01
  think that well, mind only comes from brain and that's Western thought, you know, that life is
• 1:26:06
  chemistry and so the brain generates mind and it does. It generates your egoic mind. But from
• 1:26:13
  everything I've learned over the years and even back when I was in residency taking care of patients,
• 1:26:19
  there's another level of mind and I think I understand how they interrelate and I think I can
• 1:26:26
  measure that process. And so I'd like to devote the rest of my career to that. Explain what
• 1:26:34
  that means, that that concept for people that are listening to this. So explain how that impacts
• 1:26:38
  them in their day to day. Like, what would this research try and uncover? What it would do is to show
• 1:26:45
  people that they're more than what they sing and that if they put themselves in a mindset of greater
• 1:26:55
  receptivity, those ideas from that higher mind would come into their conscious awareness.
• 1:27:05
  And that would give so much more comfort and direction in life. And it would cause much,
• 1:27:13
  much greater relaxation, reduced stress and it would sort of open up our eyes to much greater
• 1:27:21
  cooperation amongst people. And I'm assuming I'm assuming you're going to find a way to create some
• 1:27:26
  device or IP that's going to allow us to tap into this state. I think at this point, we already know
• 1:27:32
  how to do it. And I think it's, this is a lot better than working 17 years for your first
• 1:27:38
  discovery because because at this point, I think we can get right to the technology and fashion it
• 1:27:44
  and test it. So, so this is a, this for me is a short-term project of like five years.
• 1:27:50
  Just a, just a little baby five-year project. Right.
• 1:27:53
  That amazing. Yeah. If people want to, if people want to connect with you, if people want to
• 1:27:59
  sort of go learn more about what you're building, if people want to try some of the things that you've
• 1:28:03
  built, where should they go? The socials, website, all of that. Yeah, I think the, I think the websites
• 1:28:09
  probably the best place. And it's, uh, www.soltechhealth.com. But let me spell it because some people
• 1:28:16
  misspell it. So it's, Soltech is S-O-L-T-E-C. And then health. So it's S-O-L-T-E-C-H-E-A-L-T-H.com.
• 1:28:28
  So there's only one H in the middle there. You know, a lot of people think Soltech should be S-O-L-T-E-C-H.
• 1:28:34
  And it's really just T-E-C and then health. Perfect. And I'll put those links in the show notes as
• 1:28:39
  well. And when people go to that website and they, and they want to get started, what is the,
• 1:28:46
  the first device or the first setup that they should, they should purchase, they should try out? Like
• 1:28:51
  what are the, um, I guess the, uh, the instructions for somebody who actually wants to incorporate this
• 1:28:58
  device into their life? Um, you know, there's lots of written material there and blogs. Uh, they can
• 1:29:04
  learn about the technology. They can go right to the technology section and, and start to see it
• 1:29:09
  and see what the system is and, and how it interrelates with the different pieces. Um, and, and the,
• 1:29:16
  you know, the use instructions. Uh, it's, it's actually, even though it's a very, very sophisticated,
• 1:29:22
  you know, system is really simple to use. So we've got a lot of expertise in terms of user
• 1:29:29
  experience. And the last question I like to ask is because you've had such an incredible career
• 1:29:34
  and you've gone through so many different seasons of your life, building different companies
• 1:29:37
  and, and, and sort of exploring new ideas and inventions. Um, you could go all the way back to
• 1:29:43
  your 20 year old self and you have, uh, the opportunity to tell that person, um, that, that young
• 1:29:48
  Dr. Dan, uh, one lesson. So what would that one lesson be that you'd want to tell your 20 year old
• 1:29:54
  self? I would steal the phrase that Nike developed and it's just, just do it. Just go for it.