Latest / Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman / Tony Crescenzo on Neuroplasticity, PTSD, TBI and the Future of Brain Health | Broken Brains Ep. 108

Transcript

Tony Crescenzo on Neuroplasticity, PTSD, TBI and the Future of Brain Health | Broken Brains Ep. 108 · Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Hey folks, welcome to another episode of Broken Brains with your host Bruce Parkman, the official podcast of the Mac Parkman Foundation, where we're looking at the issue of repetitive brain trauma in two forms repetitive head impacts from contact sports and repetitive blast exposure from our veterans and what these two conditions are doing to the futures, mental health, and well-being of our children, athletes, and our veterans.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Why is this important?
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because this is not trained in our nursing, psychological, or medical communities, making you the front line of defense.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why we bring on most amazing guests so you can get a 360-degree perspective about this issue and make informed decisions to protect those that you love.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: On the show today, another amazing guest that we have today, Tony Crescenzo, is a U.S.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Marine Corps veteran, entrepreneur, and technology executive with more than 30 years of leadership uh experience.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: He serves as president and CEO of Intelligent Waves, a great company, by the way, and is the founder of Peak Neuro, where he is focused on advancing brain health, resilience, sleep, and cognitive performance.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Throughout his career, Tony has remained committed to serving the military and veteran community through leadership, innovation, and advocacy.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Tony, welcome to the show, sir.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Cool beans, man.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, tell us uh tell us how you got started.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you're a Marine Corps veteran?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh how I got started, like when a man of life like how'd you where'd you where'd you pass start?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know you start in the Marine Corps, do you go to college, or where'd you go?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: How'd you get in the brains?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: I had uh I had a kind of interesting Marine Corps experience.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was uh uh I went to the uh uh a lot of people go to really good schools, and then there's me.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: I uh I went to the only college in America with a nude beach, and it's in New Jersey, so not everybody's that attractive.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I I made a wrong turn on the way to a Charles Coralt lecture and ran into a Marine Corps recruiter, and I'm uh I'm a Navy brat.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: My stepfather is a retired Navy captain.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I thought, what a great way to spite my parents.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, kiddies, for those listening at home, don't join the Marine Corps to spite your parents.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bad idea.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't work out well.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I uh I got um uh I'll use the gentle phrase, uh I was asked to leave college with one semester to go because I ran out of money.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was paying for my own education, working full-time.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I enlisted in the Marine Corps after I'd been through OCS and was the uh honergraduate.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I enlisted in the Marine Corps.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh kind of interesting.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like a reverse Mustang, right?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh I was a uh counterintelligence marine, I'm a Beirut veteran, uh wasn't permanent personnel in Beirut.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: I transitioned back and forth with uh 3rd Land Battalion and 2nd Fab Battery.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: When I came back from that, I was assigned to work undercover for uh what you know as NCIS.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Back in the day, it was called NIS, which I love the TV show, man.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: That is the coolest, you know, all kinds of high tech.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's a great investigator, but it back in the 80s, uh most NIS agents were guys who flunked out of the FBI Academy.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it was not a it really wasn't the same kind of organization.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I wound up uh spending three years uh on an undercover operation that went pretty badly for me.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh at the end of it, a couple of the there were four witnesses, two of them were killed.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a couple of attempts on my life.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And what really uh started me on this path was it's kind of interesting.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're a uh you're a green beret, you guys have an ethos and a creed.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so is the Marine Corps, Semper Fi, always faithful.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: We never leave our dead or wounded on the battlefield.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Every Marine is my brother.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh instead of moving me out of the area when I was a sole witness and a general court martial, um the Marine Corps, in its infinite wisdom, uh actually kept me in the same place, so I was an easy target.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And there were a couple of attempts on my life.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um I had written letters to my congressman, the sergeant major of the Marine Corps, never heard a thing.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the Marine Corps is a small organization.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, everybody knows everybody, 170,000 people.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and an entire inspector and tructer staff, save two people were indicted in this investigation.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh the Marine Corps, since the Marine Corps is small, uh, you know, everybody knows everybody.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: So when the when the first sergeant gets relieved and the new first sergeant comes in, he's just a buddy of the old first sergeant.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: So there are a lot of uh a lot of interesting shenanigans that went on.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: But after I testified and they were all convicted, I was court-martialed as a Marine for being 20 minutes late to work and fined$20.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh lost a lot of security clearances.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um never heard back from the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, never heard back from my congressman until the night of my court-martial when my monitor called and said, Hey, I have instructions to send you anywhere in the world.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: We heard from uh from Congress, uh, where'd you like to go?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it was a corporal at the time.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I said to my monitor, send me to the closest place to my homer record because fuck you, I'm getting out of the Marine Corps.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's about where I was.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was pretty salty at that point.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they transferred me to an independent duty station in Garden City, New York, about places, where they made me a files clerk because I lost all my security clearances.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I spent eight months in a windowless room where no one wanted to talk to me because I was had the distinction of being from the uh one of the most notorious units in the Marine Corps where almost everybody got court martialed.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And eight months to the day later, in walks uh Commandant uh PX Kelly's aide-de-camp, uh guy named Frank LeBrutti, who eventually became a three-star general, with um a check for$20 because they overturned my court martial, a meritorious promotion, a medal, and a a letter, a copy of the letter of apology that the commandant wrote to my mother.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I got reassigned back to counterintelligence duties, but my enlistment was coming up, and quite frankly, I was pretty burned out.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I was lucky.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: I got recruited to work on a you know Wall Street firm.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, back in 1988, sergeants didn't make very much money.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think I quintupled my No, they didn't.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I wound up having this great sort of uh this run.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: I worked for the uh a company that became the largest MA transaction of 1989, worked for some really amazing people.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh unfortunately, you know, in those days, uh being a veteran was not a good thing.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'd go to I'd go to venture meetings, pitch meetings, and people would say, So tell us about your background.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd say, Well, I went to this college and and I was in the Marine Corps for eight years.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they'd look at me and go, Oh, that's too bad.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: You couldn't get a real job.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and in the 80s, if you had a high-end type, people thought you were a punk rocker.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it was there wasn't the uh positive stigma, but uh a stigma, but I remember my first job out of the Marine Corps, I was writing pill bottle quality control code for MERT, the pharmaceutical company.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And their uh facility is this 300-yard long giant building in Rahway, New Jersey.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm in a room full of programmers, and you know, it's Jersey, so there's gonna be a couple of.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, I hope you guys don't mind direct language, because that's pretty much a uh the the one of the beta scientists was kind of a dick.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he uh, yeah, one of these guys that drives a Ferrari or a BMW, he wears a suit with no socks, wants to tell how smart he is.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, in the Marine Corps, we don't have HR.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: You have a problem, you just go behind a squad bag, get a little exercise, have a beer, everybody goes home happy.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought, okay.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: I told the guy to keep talking to people like that, I'm gonna knock you out.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he got up and uh started running, and I chased him out of the building and into the parking lot and into his BMW where he drove away.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Get a phone call 20 minutes later, because before cell phones kitties who are on this call, my boss calls and says, Come to the office.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I walk upstairs.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And now I'm thinking, well, this is the part of my career where I become a UPS driver.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: My boss looks at me and says, Tell me what happened.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, I was a I was kind of an ass to everybody, and I told him, Don't do it.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And if he did it, I was gonna knock him out.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm a man of my word.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: He laughs and says, Well, you know, be that as it may, uh, that guy is kind of an ass, so we just fired him.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, go back to work and don't hurt anybody.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, what the hell just happened?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it turned out, lucky for me, my boss was a 31 mission uh Air Force veteran, Vietnam combat pilot.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: But for him, I'd be unloading trucks at UPS.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: This is a guy who really understood a fellow veteran's issue and paid it forward for me.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what really put me on a path to helping other veterans.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been, you know, uh what amazes me is my experience was over three years.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was unique.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't, you know, it wasn't uh breaching houses in Fallujah.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was alone uh uh with no one, with no support system for three years.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: But these guys who, you know, I've got guys at intelligent waves, they 32 years old, they spent seven years in combat, seven years of their life downrange.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: One third.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: What must that be like for someone like that?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we talked about you know traumatic brain injury.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, back back in my day, we didn't have that much of uh TBI unless you were an artilleryman.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: But for the most part, you didn't have all this overpressured blast stuff that was going on because we just didn't have the same kind of weapon systems.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: And today, you know, just just firing a uh uh just firing a sniper rifle, 50 cal sniper rifle, because we're talking about our friend Mark.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's what happened to him.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: He got a lot of us TBIs from too much trigger time, supposed to fire 10 rounds and get off the gun, and you know, you know, you're on there for 200 rounds because it's a combat situation.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: So um over time, I've just you know I've had uh uh the opportunity to be part of the Sumper Five Fund and America's Fund is on the advisory staff.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've been on a couple of uh of nonprofit boards, but you know that that's pretty much all I got here.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh joining the Marine Corps despite my parents and then trying to figure out how I was gonna deal with the out the aftermath of that.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Cool beings, man.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Great story.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and thank you for your service.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate that.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for yours.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, it was a long time ago, man.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just an old man.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: But hey, I mean, so uh talk to uh talk to us about Peak Neuro, all right, because um and um what got you, you know, intelligence waves uh support some really good foundations.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: I got the Warrior Ethos program um that Jared started back in the day.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I've met some you know wonderful people through that, you know, Medal of Honor winners, you know, really great guys that he brings around.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know, nobody supports the veteran better than that young man.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: So um uh, you know, talk to us about how your journey through life started, you know, coinciding with uh you know an interest in supporting veterans and getting into brain health.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I've I've always been uh you know, you you you know this.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And um uh Bruce, you're the uh you're the Green Beret.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Denny must be a veteran.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Denny, what's your service background?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: Denny's a Green Beret too.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: Green Berade.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: He don't talk about it a lot.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: We call that like phase two of Marine Corps boot camp, but we take that conversation about that.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know the um you you go ask, and again, not not to not I'm I'm gonna say it the way I'm gonna say it, because you know how veterans work, right?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: You go ask a uh someone in the Army what they do, they say I'm in the Army.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: You ask uh an airman, I'm in the Air Force, I'm in the Navy, ask a Marine, and they'll tell you I am a Marine.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a little different, right?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: That for us, you know, I I've got uh five generals on my board at Intelligent Waves.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: No problem.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're all with the exception of two of them, they're all younger than me.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't mind calling them by their first name.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: I could never call a Marine General by his first name.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: I just can't do it.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I've been a big supporter personally of the Semper Five fund for a long time.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Several years ago, uh I was at an auction and I bought a fly fishing trip in Montana.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and your guide was uh your hunting guide was the retired Commandant, uh General Conway, and the uh general who fought the Second Battle of Fallujah, largest battle since Vietnam, a general by the name of John Sattler, who's just an amazing person in a lot of ways.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And when we went out there, we were having, you know, having a good time, telling some stories, and uh turned out uh General Sattler and I kind of knew each other from another life.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: And um, one of the folks we were out there with was a young Marine who had done uh two tours in Iraq and a tour in Afghanistan.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And three weeks after he joined my prior company before Intelligent Waves, he j uh jumped off a four-story parking garage on a Sunday, knowing on Friday he was gonna do it.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Spent the whole weekend with his family saying goodbye.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't kill him.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was a radio man, right?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: He had right legs like tree trunks.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that saved his life.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um but that sort of led me to looking for solutions because the VA doesn't have solutions.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, I you know the VA is a great idea, but I remember I went to a VA counselor in the 90s, and after two sessions, he told me he couldn't treat me because I was triggering him.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: He was a Vietnam veteran.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that guy was going to be great for me.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I got no relief there.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And half the counselors have never chewed the dirt, done the things that any of us have done.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And what the hell do they know, right?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: So no nobody wants to talk to someone who hasn't lived that life.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: No one wants to relive stuff that created trauma for them.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not even, you know, I I don't know what your story is, uh Bruce, but I don't I I I don't regret a lot of the things that I did in the military.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: I I regret some of the things that I didn't do, or some of the things that I walked away from that maybe I shouldn't have.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I thought this was something that I needed to, you know, to spend a little bit of time on.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: I I I'm on my fifth company, I've I've made some money, I had a I've had great life, and I really wanted to have an opportunity to see if I could do that for some of the younger guys who clearly have had a much tougher time than I have.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: With all of the the issues that I have had in my own struggles.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I've had a very uh a very successful career.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um But up until I found Peak Noro, I was that guy.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I was the don't get in a car.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like my wife didn't want to get in a car with me because you cut me off, it's on.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm gonna follow you for 10 miles just to punish you for whatever.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I see everybody smiling, laughing, because it we're all like that.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um I had been, when I was 55, my wife, my second wife, because my first wife and I are divorced now, my second wife told me that I'd been in more fights than all the men she'd ever met in her life combined.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, I looked at her and said, I never started a fight in my life.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, sure you haven't.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: You just poke them, poke them, poke them, and then they swing at you and you knock them out and go, I had no choice.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I see you guys laughing because you probably live the same kind of story.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: And for us, it doesn't even feel different.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: You're just like, well, that's you know, they started and I'm just doing what I'm doing.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I really had no idea how angry I was.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: My my ex-wife, my wife, my daughter might tell you.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: But within a week after experiencing the early versions of Peak North's technology, it it transformed me.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it changed my life completely.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we had a pandemic, everybody was uh apart for two years, and at the end of the two years, I'd run into people I hadn't seen, and they would say, My God, you're so different.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what what what happened to you?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: But in a good way, right?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: And my my current wife would tell you that it changed me completely.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: So uh, you know, I I wanted to start a a full-time business to take care of this, even though, you know, Jared and Jared's at Hyporia, I'm at Intelligent Waves.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I've had a long career in the software industry, so we brought in, I brought in an old friend who I'd done a lot of work with who knows software, and we began building the technology that is now Peak Nora.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we've had 29 uh veterans come through the program, um, the pilot program that we put together today, we've uh conducted a 161-person six-month longitudinal study with the technology.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it creates high neuroplasticity.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: It helps your brain be more flexible.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um and, you know, at the end of the day, what it what it really does is if you've ever been to any kind of uh uh psychotherapy, uh couples counseling, marriage counseling, individual counseling, that entire approach is uh is um is based on narrative.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's about meaning making.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've got this autobiography, and this thing happened to me.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: And when this thing happened, it it I couldn't understand it.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the brain is a prediction engine.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: And when the when it predicts something that doesn't come true, that's how that's essentially what trauma is.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: The the wider the gap between expectation and reality, the larger the trauma.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: So um as as we started to to put this entire uh approach together, we began pulling uh volunteers who were you know having some issues into this and and testing it.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and at this point, you know, we've had uh we've had a tremendous amount of success.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: We're working now with clinical psychologists, uh psychologists, uh retired VA psychiatrists who are using the technology adjunctive to their psychotherapy.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you're you're doing meaning making, you're in a you're you're in a you're in a session telling the same story about the the thing, the reason you're there over and over again.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: And who wants to relive that?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, how many, how many people in this audience have been to some sort of therapeutic, been through some sort of therapeutic system, uh cognitive behavioral training, family systems therapy, whatever it is, and you just keep reliving the same stuff with somebody who's never lived it.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, reliving it doesn't necessarily make it better, right?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: So all of that, by the way, since we're on a broken brains broadcast, takes place in the prefrontal cortex.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: The whole front of your brain is the neck is the executive network.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's the place where all the activity, the electrical activity around rumination, uh uh hypervigilance, all of those things take place in the front of the brain.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: So essentially what we do is we suppress your brain's ability to even think about that kind of stuff, to create the narrative that uh represents the trauma for you.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: We suppress the prefrontal cortex, we open the parietal cortex and some other things, and we slow you down a lot.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens is instead of resolving your trauma semantically through talking to someone, you can relive that entire traumatic event without emotion, completely disconnected from it with your body.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Think of it as digesting it somatically instead of semantically with your body.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: So does it happen overnight?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: No, but you can ask our friend Mark, took him about four months to go from uh a completely dysregulated state to uh clinically not having PTSD.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um the the reference task for PTSD, there are two of them, but the first one they'll give you is a PCL5.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Mark's going in PCL5 score was 89.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: His current PCL5 score, I think, is a 33, which is clinically doesn't have uh PTSD.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: So we're not clinicians, we work with we work with clinicians.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: But what it does is it essentially looks for the patterns in your brain waves, and then using neuromodulation through acoustic sound, which means you just go home and put on a set of headphones, um, it slowly changes your brain waves to a new pattern.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it negates the pattern that you have.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And because of the technology and the way we've designed it, these are not temporary changes.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: You don't put on the headphones for a half hour, feel better, and then two days later you're back to the way you were.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's like exercise.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: Over time, if you don't overdo it, we're able to make trait level changes in your neurophysiology so that after, you know, I'm an average of about three months of doing the program, uh you are for all practical purposes normal.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's that's the first sort of challenge, right?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: What is normal?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the entire focus of psychotherapy, any of these uh uh remedial therapeutic technologies is to make you, is to bring you within one standard deviation of your cohort mean.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: What that means is you want to be within one standard deviation of the average for your age, handedness, and gender.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: Handedness matters in brains because right brain, left brain, right hand, left hand.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, which is great.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: But what it really means is I want to make you average.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: And people don't want to be average.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: So our first goal is to relieve this dysregulation.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh PTSD, TBI, concussions.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: We work with NFL players, retired NFL players who have multiple, multiple dozens and scores of concussions.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, gymnasts, Olympic gymnasts who have uh, you know, it's kind of funny.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: You look at a brain of an Olympic gymnast, it looks a lot like a brain of a special operator, someone in the South community.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Lots and lots of physical activity that breaks your body, lots and lots of high concentration that can break your mind.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we're working with a retired Olympic gymnast who's been to Ireland 15 times and can't remember ever being to Ireland because you lose the memories.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's a that there's some issues there.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: So over time, we can very carefully change the base uh neurological profile of someone uh from dysregulated to regulated.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we're at a point now where we've essentially created a human performance platform.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're wearing an Aura ring or a whoop device or an Apple Watch, we can correlate that data.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: So if we give you uh a sleep prescription, because sleep is really the basis, the foundation of good brain health.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you're not sleeping well, that's uh you know, that's the first thing that we need to address.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we can correlate.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say we give you uh uh a recipe for something to listen to when you're sleeping.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: We can watch your aura ring to see your sleep scores go up or down.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: We can tune this and we do it individually, right?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: You can go to you can go to Calm or you can go to some other Modulation technology, some meditation app.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: And they're, you know, they're sort of one size fits all.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: What we do is we fingerprint your brain.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Not just your brain, but your physiology as well, your heart rate variability, your respiratory rate, 92 different metrics that we use, both from neurological, physiological, and psychological.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: We pull those into the platform.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: And through AI that's based on essentially, we've built agents that are neuroscientists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, our chief medical officer is a Harvard neurosurgeon, our chief science officer is an MIT and DARPA neuroscientists.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we essentially created digital versions of them so we can create an individualized recipe of modulation routines for someone.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of interesting.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: I was just at the Air Force Research Labs in Rome, New York, home of the 7th, 11th Human Performance Wing.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a colonel there who had done some studies in 2022 around the efficacy of treatment of PTSD at a distance.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: And as it turns out, the farther you go from a service member's home of record or their duty station or a veteran's home, the farther you go, the lower the probability of success for PTSD treatment.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: You go two hours away or more, it's about the same success rate as alcoholism, which is around 17%.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the closer you come to home, the higher the rate goes up.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the goals for us was can we can a service member, can a veteran, can anyone who's dealing with this kind of trauma and brain injuries, can they do it at home?
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: And they can, right?
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: We essentially uh we have to bring you in for a physical intake.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: We take an EEG, we give you some psychometric testing.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole questionnaire that comes with that.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then we will be able to uh deliver the modulation technologies to an app on our cell phone.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: You just pick it up, put on your headphones, we'll send you what is a what looks like a recipe, it's a protocol.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, three times a day for a half hour you'll put on a set of headphones.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you'll come back in two weeks because your brain is gonna change.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's like working out, right?
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: Your your physiology changes as your as your health changes.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: So what we're doing is we're moving you from a highly dysregulated state, and we're gonna pull you maybe to here, and then we're gonna check on you to make sure you're okay.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: And we're just sort of moving you along until we get you to a dis uh a non-disregulated state, and then we can look at optimization.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we work with um currently, right now, Olympic athletes that are at the Olympic Training Center in uh New York uh that were in the last Olympics that want to do better in this Olympic.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we can, you know, the issue here isn't so much trauma, it's about creating the state that matches the situation that you're in.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you need to be, do you need to sleep?
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: We can downregulate you.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Do you need to go jump out of an airplane and be focused and concentrated because you're going to go snatch a high-value target?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: We can give you that kind of focus and regulation.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: We can train you how to achieve those states yourself.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not just about solving dysregulation, it's about creating essentially helping people reach their own personal peak.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we call it peak neuro.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's amazing.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, this uh I mean, so the technology is a neurobiomodulation technology or essentially it's modulatory sounds inside of, it's masked inside of white noise, brown noise, pink noise, sometimes music, depending on what the purpose of the modulation is.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: But it's, you know, you and I both were uh for those in the audience, we have a mutual friend, I'll just call him Mark, who uh is uh was in our booth at South Week uh talking about his experience along with our other friend Alex, along with the uh retired deputy commander of Marine Corps Special Operations of uh Scott Conway, who've all had exposure to the program.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so it it it literally all you need is a set of headphones and a cell phone, and you can do this anywhere in the world.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: You can do it.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um our friend Alex is uh he's now the head of executive protection for uh the president of FIFA.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: And every once in a while he'll send me a text.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: He needs some executive protection right now.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of ticket holders out to get him.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Every once in a while he'll send me a text, you know, I'm in New York, I hate the traffic, I hate the people, I want to kill everybody.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Can you make something for me that will stop me from wanting to do that?
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well stop, and I'll show you the text message, right?
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: We're offline.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's funny, man.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: That is funny.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: But it is, it's uh it's a way to dial in states of consciousness that are supportive to where you want to be as a person.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I'm again, I'm kind of a poster child for it, kind of like the hair club for men guy, right?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh I'm not just a I'm not just the president on the client, right?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the biggest client who uses it.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the good news is it changes your brain, it doesn't change uh anything else.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: So um I'm I'm 65.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh when I started this program, I think when I was 60.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: The average 60-year-old gets 18 to 22 percent restorative sleep.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: The sleep that actually helps your emotional uh and physical recovery.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um I used a program for six months, and now I haven't used it for two years.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and my sleep score last night was 52.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: My average is around 47, which is twice what anybody my age usually gets.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I get twice the rest with half the sleep for people in my age category.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we can demonstrate that in almost every category.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't take anything other than the commitment to do the program, and that's usually a half hour at a time, two or three times a day.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: And at night when you go to sleep, we give you something to listen to, you just play on a speaker.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds a little too simple, but you'd be amazed at the technology that sits underneath of it.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's pretty crazy, man.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um did you got uh so when you built this, what's your what so where are you at right now?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: Are you are you commercially, you know, out there in the space?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh are you aligned with universities or treatment clinics, or you know, what are you have any military programs ongoing?
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: So uh where's the technology now?
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, it's kind of funny.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: We we did this, sorry, pull my chair up.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: We did this on the cheap.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, we spun it off, we brought in a very small crew, lots of veterans in our crew, a couple of Delta Force uh veterans who work at who worked at Peak Neuro.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um but we've been very careful.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: This kind of technology uh is powerful, right?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we've been spending the last two years developing and testing.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: And we're we're going to launch uh a full launch uh early next year at the American uh psychological conference.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: We our our our two first things that we work on are through clinicians, through EMDR therapists, uh psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and we're in a beta program with them now where they're actually treating patients and giving us good feedback on how the system works, what the interface looks like.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh on the side of that, we work with veterans right now, all the time.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I just had uh an email from a a friend of mine who's retired from the uh from a major intelligence agency in the science and technology division, who of all things runs an eSports business.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they have a you know friend of a friend of a friend, a woman who was in the army, two tours in Iraq, she was raped twice, uh, several attempts at suicide, struggling to recover from everything that happened to her.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: We actually had a couple of the other veterans in the program call her over the weekend and speak to her, and we're gonna start with her uh early, early next week.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: Her company is gonna fly her up to Virginia so we can do the the intake.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but we work with veterans today, and if anyone on this call knows a veteran who's in crisis who wants access to this, just reach out to the hosts and come come to us.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: It won't cost you a dime.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um so on on the academic affiliation, this is kind of hilarious, right?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because I told you I went to uh the only college in America with a nude beach in New Jersey, right?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a lot of people that probably wrote that, they probably took that note.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, here's a college my kid ain't going to.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's a it's a big university now.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a legit school.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I, you know, I I went up there for for a reunion.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, man, I this is this is really this is like a real place now.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um but two years ago, uh at Columbia University, which uh America's oldest teacher's college, uh, a friend of mine who's a Harvard neurosurgeon, who's our chief medical officer, asked me to go up and give a talk at an AI conference about that.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it was what I was really talking about was uh the democratization of learning, right?
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: We have the democratization of education today.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone has access, who's a citizen, has access to public education in primary and secondary school.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: Problem is if you live in my neighborhood, I live in Falls Church, Virginia, which is I think the uh richest city per capita in the United States.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: Big houses there, man.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: Big houses.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I I bought my house from a guy who worked in the Bush White House for eight years.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: He's now the chief lobbyist for Ford.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: So my house has an Oval Office.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: He really liked living in the uh working in the White House.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: Good for you.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: Three miles away in Anacostia in Washington, D.C., kids are dodging bullets to go home.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: They probably don't have both parents.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: They're eating dinner at a Dollar General, and they don't have access to any of the support systems that others do.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're able to build neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to adapt and learn, you can literally help them, uh help their brains be more capable of learning.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the democratization of learning.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I went up and I gave a talk at Columbia at the Blue Sky conference last year.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: That led to a relationship with the university.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's a professor there, Zhao Donglin.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: She's uh she studied failure for 26 years with Simone Biles and uh Michael Phelps.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: She's writing a book about it.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: So when her book comes out, you should read it.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: She's a pretty fascinating woman.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but she and I are collaborating.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: She's actually helping us do some work for the active duty military.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: We have a at Intelligent Waves, we have a cooperative research and development agreement with the United States Air Force.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we have some SIBRs.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: We have uh working on a SIBR for the Navy to create a monitoring system, physiological, neurological, and psychological, uh, disconnected from the internet if you're on a ship or a submarine.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's monitoring all of essentially monitoring your internal systems to alert you when you need to go see the dock or you need to need to you need to go get some rest.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um that that's part of the platform is being able to monitor and identify dysregulation before it becomes a problem for others around you.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um let me I've been talking a lot.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: I want to stop there because I feel like I'm dominating the conversation.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you're supposed to.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: Don't worry about it.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're a Marine.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: No, I I think it's uh it's fascinating, man.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now on the um this sort of dysregulation you're monitoring.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: So we're um we've been approached to help uh some very large agencies with brain optimization work.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: And monitoring that is uh, you know, it's it's one of those key uh you know factors in um you know in producing the results that everybody wants.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: There's number one, you know, you know, catching tragedy before it happens and pain and suffering, and then also being able to monitor for relapses or you know, you know, indications that it's coming, right?
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: And uh or in healing, right?
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: We got you know, healing's always part of that.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: So uh as part of a monitoring package, so do you what do you establish a baseline for that individual and then just uh see where it goes?
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is essentially how it works.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: You you come in, um, we we make you wear something that looks like a Russian cosmonaut hat for about an hour.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's an EEG device.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh I'm not putting it on because it's too damn embarrassing, but it looks a lot like that.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: You'll wear your hat on, you'll close your eyes for eight minutes, you'll open your eyes for eight minutes and stare at a wall.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's our baseline, right?
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: Eyes open, eyes closed.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're the generators in your brain do different things when your eyes are open and closed.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then we give you a it's about a 40-minute what we call reference exercise that sort of pokes around in different parts of your brain, and while it does it, we're recording what happens.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so once we have that baseline, we can identify uh, you know, we're not a diagnosis organization.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: We we identify patterns, uh patterns for TBI, patterns for PTSD, patterns for ADHD.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we have about 17 different patterns we can see.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I can I can probably tell you without even looking at your EEG, what your brain would look like as a as a as a Grain Beret.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, interestingly enough, the slower your brain waves, you would think for most people that would make you a slower thinker, but a lot of combat veterans, a lot of people in high stakes, uh uh uh former undercover operatives from the uh national uh and local, state and local uh law enforcement have these just expanded uh slow waves, delta waves, which for anybody else would look like you're asleep.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but for you, it's really it's kind of interesting.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh you can answer the question or not if it makes you uncomfortable.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: But and I know Green Berets kind of work, they work not in groups either.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: They're they're pretty solo, right?
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: You're out working with indigenous folks and taking care of business.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're on an operation and if you're you're downrange, uh I always ask veterans, you know, when when you're when you're walking past the point of departure and you're you're walking towards a target, do you ever wonder where everybody else is?
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is always no, because you just know.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's because you practice a lot, but a lot of times it's because you're just connected.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like the same way you get connected to people in the military.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: My best friend is my complete and total opposite.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: He's a retired Marine Corps chief warrant officer.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: He looks like a fire plug.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think he hit me once and my grandfather yelled at me.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he's just uh, you know, he looks like a guy you can chew nails, right?
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but because of some of the things that we did together, we're just always connected, right?
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so you're like that with guys in combat, right?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: You never make better friends than people you're downrange with.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because there's that connection.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: So those slow waves look dysregulated to anybody else, but in a veteran, they actually protect you.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: They actually help you uh be connected to everybody else.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: So um the the the the focus of this is not just to get you to is not just to alleviate or remediately uh remediate um a PTSD or treat TBI, it's to prevent it, right?
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not just about recovery, it's about resilience.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: How do I create a brain that's flexible enough to deal with something that it doesn't really that has never seen before?
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: That when it, you know, typically what happens is you have an expectation of reality, and if it falls within this little window, you're like, okay, that's what I expected.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: And when it doesn't, you walk outside and the sky is green and there's flying saucers everywhere, half the world's going to vapor lock.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: The half that doesn't vaporlock's probably seen that before, right?
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: You have some notion of it or they have some way to deal with it.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: So ambiguity is what causes these kinds of issues, ambiguity in the brain, no ability to comprehend or understand what they're seeing in front of them.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, one of the things that we have under our uh uh research and development deal with the Air Force is they're really interested in how do we prevent PTSD, how do we prevent trauma by creating a resilient brain that's capable of withstanding the kinds of changes that happened, not just in combat, when you think about how war fighting has evolved.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, up until very recently, if a commander in the field wanted to know what the enemy was doing, just poked his head over the burn.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's the Russians, there's the Germans, there's the Japanese.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: Today we don't do it that way.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: We do it with sensors.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: My Indo-Paycom has a whole bunch of sensors, thousands of miles and nothing.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: And China has developed a doctrine of warfare called intelligence warfare that's all about attacking two planes.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: The perceptual plane, the commander's ability to understand what's happening in that AO.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: And how do you do that?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna do it on the electromagnetic spectrum.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna send uh uh radio waves or laser or SATCOM.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: And what the Chinese and the Russians uh focuses on, and by the way, China hasn't been in a fight since 1975, and the Russians can't beat the damn Ukrainians.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: So nobody, nobody on this planet wants to get kinetic with the United States.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: We're just good at it and we kind of like it.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, what's the goal for those organizations?
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's not to not to win a kinetic fight, it's to obviate the need for a kinetic fight.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, one of the things that they'll do, and if you're interested in seeing this in reality, go watch how House of Dynamite on Netflix.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: All the technical advisors are retired Air Force generals who gave them basically it's a real scenario.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: So think about how the Chinese might attack perception.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna attack your RF comms, they're gonna degrade, deny, or spoof, put false information into your RF comms.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they're gonna attack and hack your networks.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want to shut them down, they want to put false information in there so that the commander doesn't really know what's going on.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's confusing.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: That creates the inability to understand what's happening.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that's attack surface wand.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: Believe it or not, that's intelligent waves is bread and butter.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: We have technology that, hey, uh uh F-35s are stealth aircraft.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can't see them, hear them, find them on radar.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when the pilot keys a microphone?
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's RF energy.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's easy to find.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: You can do it anywhere.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: Even the Russians can triangulate.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a technology that we uh we have a joint venture with Phillips Lighting where we take modulated light, photons, and we can talk wingtip to weak tip, aircraft to aircraft, with light.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: So no way to intercept it, no way to degrade it, no way to deny it, no way to spoof it.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: And we can move data around from, say, the aircraft lights to the fuel refueling drone.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: We do this in Ukraine right now with uh uh uh certain kinds of communication when you're when you're doing indirect calls for fire, right?
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: The Russians, as soon as you call for fire, you got about six minutes before they get a reverse azimuth and you gotta scoot and shoot.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're using modulated light, you can shoot a light beam 600 meters in any direction to an RF antenna, and the Russians are just blowing up trees until you run out of antennas.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's the first surface, the perceptual surface.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: The second surface is the cognitive surface.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: Cognitive domain warfare is what's happening right now.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: You look at the national defense strategy that the Pentagon writes every year, and line of effort four is human performance.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's about keeping commanders' brains online.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody sleeps in the military.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: One of my board members, General Sattler, he was uh, I think the first COCOM for AFRICOM.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: And he tells a story about General Abbazi just screaming at him because he was always drunk.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not drunk on alcohol, but when you don't sleep, you you act like you're drunk.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't sleep in those roles, right?
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: So uh having this kind of technology downrange for people who need to get that kind of sleep, need to get re-regulated, is uh is just critically important.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: So the whole issue of attacking the cognitive plane is about slowing down your ability to make decisions so that I can get inside your loop and win.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's China's deal.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um they're even looking at things like, you know, if you look look online right now and you see where the hacks are happening, what are they hacking?
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: Financial information and healthcare.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, think about something that just happened recently.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: The Pentagon took all the biographies of senior commanders out of the websites for all of the places that they work.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because once you know the biography, I can figure out where their health care is being stored, I can get their financial records, and now I've got psychological operations targeting, which is what you're finding on social media.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: So imagine for a minute, before you even deploy to go downrange, you get an email from some unknown address with a video, deepfake, of your family tied up in a van that says, if you get on that plane to deploy, we'll kill your children.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because that is a problem that our Pentagon is working on right now.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's one of the biggest issues that we face with troops in the homeland, not just downrange.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: So there's both an active duty component of this, and then there's a, you know, there's what happens to people after their service.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: So both of those are important.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and and you know, talk about the cognition.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, when we talk about the cognition domain, it is the new, you know, the front, and we're basically at zero right now, according to most of the leaders that we talk to and trying to catch up.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now, uh, you know, taking the brain, what what you're doing with the brain and making it more resilient, does that mean that our troops can experience higher levels of trauma without the deleterious or you know, the negative impacts of that trauma hanging around forever or being, you know, not being processed so it, you know, that gets buried and causes problems later on?
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the way I would classify it, it's not so much higher levels, it's broader levels, right?
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: We're all um how how would I describe this?
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh I've spent most of my career in high consequence environments, uh startups, turnarounds, national defense industrial base.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I can't say much in a podcast about some of the things that we do, but we have people, well, putting it this way, um for the first time in my career not very long ago, I had to submit casualty reporting templates to my customers in case my people got hurt somewhere.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so you know that is uh that is that's a very uh different kind of leadership role than you find in a company that does help desk work or uh in a in a in a in a manufacturing company, right?
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um so when I say it's broad, not deep, it's uh when people ask me, you know, how do you how do you not like lose your shit in a job like that?
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's all kinds of crazy stuff that goes on.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you know it's the equivalent of how do you learn how to fight?
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you learn how to fight by getting punched in the face a lot.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't care what anybody says.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: You can learn all the technique you want, but if you don't know how to get punched in the face, The face, the first time you get hit, the fight's over.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: So essentially, uh Green Beret training, uh, Marine Corps training, I don't, I assume the I know the buds is like this, right?
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's all immersion training.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna overwhelm you with stuff, so you're so used to it.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you're you crawl through uh machine gun fire, so you're not worried about the snap of the bullets, it doesn't bother you.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: They expose you, it's exposure training.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost the same way with your brain, except we're not exposing you to trauma, we're exposing you to neuroplasticity.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: We're creating the the ability for the brain to deal with a lot of different things, and we're creating an ability in you to self-regulate.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: So if you start to feel like the front of your brain is picking up, right?
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when uh uh when you're when you're in a situation where you don't understand what's happening, it's confusing, it's loud, uh, your your limbic brain takes over, your amygdala lights up, your brain gets flooded with chemicals, and you absolutely literally lose the ability to think.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now you're in fight or flight mode, and your emotional brain takes over, and you literally have no way to actually think about something.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: What we do is we train your brain to be able to get to the point where when that happens, you can, in the matter of 30 seconds, take a deep breath, do this exercise that we teach you, and shut off that rumination part.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: And they stay in the fight, stay able to think, to cogitate, to use your executive network, to reason your way out of a situation.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, all too often what happens is if we don't, you know, the whole sort of evolution of warfare, right?
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: I can reduce it to build a bigger tank, build a bigger gun, get some thicker armor, get a bigger gun, right?
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: Over and over again.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that's exactly what's kind of happening uh in the in the uh the the neurophysiological part of this.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: We want to create people who aren't necessarily um tough is the wrong word.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: Resilient is the word that we want.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: We want people to be able to absorb new experiences uh and inculcate them very quickly into their worldview without uh without having to break that, right?
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: What happens is you have an experience and now you have to somehow make sense of it.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and sense making it takes up an awful lot of your uh of your of your cognitive abilities.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the brain's an interesting thing.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you guys are on a broken brains uh podcast here, but you know, it takes about 12 uh 12 watts of energy to have a thought.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: And once the thought's over, you know, what we're doing is we're making your brain more efficient, right?
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: So when you have a thought, when you're ruminating, when you're when you're stuck on something, I'm anybody who's listening to this podcast has probably walked out of a room at one point in their life and said, Why the hell did I say that?
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: Or what did they mean by that?
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you're gonna spend the next three hours going, holy shit, what was that all about?
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: What really happened?
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the ability to not do that, the ability to take that offline and not get into that rumination cycle is something that we focus on.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: That happens, that that's a physiological response that we can intervene and teach you to slow down and get right back to equanimity.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, of course, you're going to react strongly to an event.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: How quickly can you reset and come back to a quiet level?
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: How quickly can you quiet your mind so you can get back on the gun, back in the fight, back and do the thing?
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you might not even get out of the fight because once you learn these techniques and your brain learns them, right?
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: You're essentially creating states of consciousness that you can dial up on demand.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: Do I need to be calm today?
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: I can do that.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: In this situation, do I need to go find the mad monkey?
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: Turn my rage on?
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: I can do that too.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us are really good at turning the rage on.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: Turning the rage off, that's a whole different story.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's like wildly coyote.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: What I learned in the Marine Corps was it's not really hard to get 18-year-olds to start shooting.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to get them to stop.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, amen.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about a little bit um about the you know, you talk about neuroplasticity.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the foot brains that we're dealing with right now have been damaged during due to you know blast exposure, repetitive impacts.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: And we've got uh you know vast amounts of neuroinflammation, which is you know the number one in our minds, you know, cause of damage to the brain over time, long-term neuroinflammation that just you know eats up that brain.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, any idea on how your technology's impacting uh neuroinflammation or the ability to uh you know repair, regrow neuronal circuits, or is it more of just working with what's there to make that more efficient?
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, it's funny.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh repair and regrow, I can't speak to.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have any scientific proof.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I won't talk about things that I can't prove.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I can tell you this uh TBI creates a lesion on your brain, and that lesion is for all practical purposes permanent.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: But if you increase neuroplasticity, what you're really doing is increasing your brain's ability to work around that lesion.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_00: You can create synaptic uh connections, right?
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: You got neurons, all different types.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: Neurons connect the synapses, synapses connect neurons together and create a communication infrastructure.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: So often we think about we're just gonna change the oscillatory pattern in the brain and get people's brainwaves right, but that's only one third of the issue.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: Second part of that is the regulatory system.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: Am I capable of engaging both sides of my brain at the same time?
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hemispheric synchrony.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_00: Think of that as if you're walking on snow with no snowshoes and it's three feet deep, you're gonna go right up to your hip.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: Put on a pair of snowshoes and you're you're placing that weight on a much broader surface, and so it can be resilient and hold you.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: When we create higher coherence in the brain, not super high, because then you get brain locked, but when we create the right amount of coherence and the ability to shift coherence, we essentially allow you to put much more pressure on a much broader surface.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: And because you've got higher levels of neuronal connection, and we actually have uh developed um a metric called neuroplasticity.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: The only way to really measure neuroplasticity is to look at white matter in the brain and an MRI.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we have derived a feature so we can do this with an EEG.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's a number of metrics that look at how your brain does certain kinds of things under perturbation.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: We give you a task to do, and then we watch how your brain deals with it.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we can show, and we've got, again, our six-month longitudinal study shows 16% increases in neuroplasticity.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: So for folks like our Navy SEAL friend who had 21 TBIs, still has 21 TBIs, which create brain fog, the inability to concentrate, the inability to concentrate for periods of time, that looks an awful lot like what happens to the brain in a concussive situation.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: We're still working with, although he's sort of graduated from the program, uh, a retired NFL linebacker, Super Bowl winner, 200 uh concussions in his career.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, he had a hard he had a hard time remembering his name, let alone mine, the first time I met him.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he's you know, he's doing great now.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: We can test your reaction time, your memory.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of times short-term memory gets affected uh by a TBI.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: So there that that's a uh that's the that's the hippocampus and theta gamma integration is a is a technique that we've I won't say perfected, but developed to improve working memory, to improve the short-term memory in your brain that allows you, and by the way, when you get a good night's sleep, your long-term memory imprints.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we can, you know, we don't we focus a lot more on the outcomes than the root causes of uh of a TBI.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the outcomes are typically inability to concentrate, uh, sometimes you get emotional flooding and short-term memory loss.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we start with how do we get the brain more coherent?
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: We make the neighborhoods work together, how do we get hemispheric uh symmetry and synchrony working together?
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's essentially like you go to the gym and today we're gonna work on your arms, and tomorrow we're gonna work on your legs, and next week we'll work on your back.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty soon you've got a symmetrical, uh, well-developed physique.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we seek to do with brains.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't repair anything, uh, but we allow the brain to find another way around to build new neuronal connections around those PDIs.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now, now, what I can tell you is that's uh that's core that's a correlation.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_00: I can't tell you that it's causative because I just don't have$10 million to spend on a two-year clinical trial.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_00: But what I can tell you is if you were to talk to our friend Mark about this program, and I would encourage you to, or Alex, or any of the other folks that have been in the program who are willing to have their uh their their names uh known, they would all tell you the same thing.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, six months, three months, one month, uh complete relief from some of the stuff that goes on.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've you know, it's kind of heartbreaking, although I've been through it myself, where you talk to somebody who says, Yeah, I've been married 20 years and I sleep in a different room than my wife because I wake her up three nights a week and nobody wants to get in the car at me.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_00: And oh, by the way, I'm really uncomfortable if there's not a gun three feet away from me.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: Right, I've got to be able to reach my pistol.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: They've been home for 10 years, right?
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's just those are the kinds of cycles that we want to break.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: And those are patterns, right?
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: We're not we're not doing anything other than establishing a healthier pattern for your brain.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so you you bring up a good point as um, you know, the the you know, obviously, you know, you feel and it seems that the technology is very successful.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: It does what it's supposed to do.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's non-invasive.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, obviously probably a you know just a quick question.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: I ask everybody that's got a technology.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: What percentages of people that have been through your program have indicated that it's helped them out?
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: A hundred.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: So now we come across, so you know, this is a this is the problem that we're trying to address through legislation and you know, not coercion, but you know, dialogue is why yeah why are these treatments, you know, not available, right?
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: When we have you know a suicide rate that's unacceptable, that has not degraded, has not declined at all.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, some medications already increased this year.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we do know that I would say a statistically significant amount of these uh suicidal ideated men and women are caused from RHI, repetitive ed impacts, repetitive blast exposure, which has not been properly diagnosed at this time, but are unaware of it.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: And there is trauma.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm not saying there's not trauma out there that doesn't cause mental health issues that need the same technology.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_01: But you're one of many technologies that we come across that have an unbelievable track record, yet, you know, are they not FDA available or what uh FDA approved and all this other dumbass stuff?
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what you know you know you know, how do we get around this?
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, what is I mean, because we we are, and because I mean I deal with all kinds of course it's all nonprofits, it's all funding, but how do we get around this?
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, because there is, you know, this this needs to be addressed, you know, because obviously if something has 100% of people been through it and you've got hundreds of people that have been through your program, then it's something that needs to be tested.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it does not need to be, if it's something that's not going to kill you or injure you, then it needs to be made available, just like, you know, you can buy stuff at the god dang drugstore that's not FDA approved, and we you know we see it all the time.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, where where where is the where is the flexation point?
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: Where do we where do we start seeing?
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh, you know, the this uh you know, it's obviously it's something that's a it's a very big bone with me to pick at.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: So um, you know, where where what has you been your experience with trying to get this been made available for you know people that need it?
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: About as frustrating as yours has been.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: It drives me crazy.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh I'll give you my opinion.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably not going to be very popular, but um uh DARPA and DIU um and a lot of the uh human performance organizations inside of the military are peopled with scientists and academics.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you what one of the things I learned about academia is that I don't want to be part of academia.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'll talk to um I'll talk to a uh neuropsychologist about an issue because we have a lot of advisors at Peak Neuro.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not a I guess I'm a neuroscientist now, but I don't have a PhD in neuroscience.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: But so I'll call these time.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'll say I'll play one on TV, right?
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'll ask a question about uh what I think is uh neuropsychology, and they'll say, well, that's that's computational neuroscience.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: I don't do that.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_00: Or I'll talk to a uh, you know, all these things work together.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_00: Psychology and and and neurology are complementary.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: So go talk to a cognitive behavioral psychologist about a problem, and they'll tell you, well, that's abnormal psychology.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: I don't do that.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_00: They're so narrow in their thinking, uh, and they don't really do anything.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_00: They just have a bunch of theories, right?
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the problem is the answer to almost any of these problems is a multimodal cross-domain solution that involves a number of different things.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_00: And because that's not put like that.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in the data business, by the way.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: So you just you just use data words on a on a brain broadcast, which is pretty darn impressive.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: Good.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: I like it.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'll either, I don't know, I'll take the win or apologize, whatever makes sense.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um but the issue there is you have people who just don't have I think of it in terms of behavioral economics.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing in it for them to help you because if it's coming from computational neuroscience and I'm a neuropsychologist, it doesn't help me anyway.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, which really, you know, any kind of breakthrough that happens in this happens with people from outside the discipline.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's historically true.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you've got to have a different kind of view.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you're thinking like everybody else, you're gonna get the same results.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I'm I'm a I'm a marine and a technology guy.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I didn't enter this through a neuroscience lens.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_00: I entered it through, I gotta fix some shit.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a much different approach than a lot of people take.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the second part of this is our friend Mark, right?
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I get a lot of questions about well, how long does this last?
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is it permanent or not permanent?
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you you've met our friend Mark in person, right?
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: He's about 6'2, 6'3, 220.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty big guy.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I can't recall.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, he's a big dude.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: I got, I mean, he's bigger than me.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh now imagine that guy is so dysregulated that he wants to fight you, he wants to fight you in the driveway of his house the first time you meet him.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: And six months later, he's doing great.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he's got a great new relationship.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_00: He's actually engaged now.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if he told you.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um things in his life are going terrific.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: He taught himself French so he could give his give the toast for his daughter in Paris at her wedding.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so completely turned around.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then you go to him and you say, Hey buddy, listen, um I need to find out how long this lasts after you stop doing it.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_00: So would you mind stopping?
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: And of course he's gonna look at you and go, Don't you dare, I won't do it.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: So um having a hundred, two hundred, three hundred people go through a two-year study is what they want for FDA approval.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_00: And quite frankly, most small businesses can't afford to do that.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're too busy solving problems than to spend.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh the first study we did at Intelligent Wave cost us$750,000 to do 161 people.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I did that because the Air Force Fighter Weapons School asked us to come up with a way to help fighter pilots deal with some of the issues that they were having.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the net result of that was we had a great study that nobody cared about.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I can run around with that study all day long.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so it's a it's a p-value of five.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it's you know completely credible.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it somehow just isn't enough for a scientist whose job it is to apply academic rigor, you know, they they they want to they they want to have so much testing that by the time you get through the testing, all the guys you're trying to cheat or trying to treat, excuse me, treat, uh, you know, either died from old age or killed themselves.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to be a scientist to look at a study with 100% uh improvement and and acceptance rate or you know, or just you know, you know, just you know, just from patients.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: The worst thing that happens is a headache, so you don't do it anymore.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you don't need to be a scientist to say we need to move forward with this and we have kids dying, right?
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that's my point, is that I'm done with scientists that want to not share research, that want to research the same stuff over again, and then just refuse to look at new technology that is being proved effective and say, you know what?
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's too hard, so we're just gonna let the kids die.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because we have we have pharmaceuticals, right?
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: We we we can medicate them.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's the that is the you know, I've I've I deal with some of those you know entities on the on the technology side, they're equally as frustrating because sometimes they just don't understand technology or don't want to hear that technology can evolve.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so yeah, big problem, and that's one of the things that we're gonna go ahead and and try and fix.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_01: So as we close out, Tony, tell people this is where it's uh the Tony moment, right?
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_01: Take some time, talk about yourself, the technology, how do people find you?
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how do they get you know, you know, find you, get in touch with you, learn about you so that um, you know, after the show, uh they can reach out and uh and get some help, assistance, or learn more about your technology.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, good news for me is when whenever anybody asks me for a CV or a biography, I just tell them to use the Google.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um I have an unusual name.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's not a whole lot of guys named Tony Crescenzo around.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's a great guy in Chicago who's like a marketing guy.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: You should be in a mafia movie with that kind of stuff.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, being from Jersey, too, man, you know.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, Tony.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna tell you this.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in South Philly in the uh in the neighborhood that Rocky ran when Rocky was made.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, fair enough.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_00: Just between us, there is no mafia.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_00: And if you say there is, I'll have your legs broke.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, that's what I'll joke.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um no, uh uh so it's uh www.peekneuro.com uh is where you can go and download the technology.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a veteran, fill out a form, we'll give you a code, you don't have to pay for it.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um one of the things that we're doing is we're working with the Home Depot Foundation.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one of the founders of Home Depot passed away.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_00: And well, you know, you you never know how poor you are until you meet a guy who created a foundation that has to give away$420 million a year for 20 years.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um that foundation is focused on three areas.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Jewish causes, because he was Jewish, um, the trades, because Home Depot, and veterans in healthcare.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_00: So we're working with them to try and get them to fund Warrior Zethos with a grant.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: So Warrior Zethos can can provide uh Peaknoro technology to veterans at no cost.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_01: Good for you.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we're not done with that yet, but that's something that we're working very hard on.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: So uh but if you're a veteran, if you're a first responder, if you're a cop, a fireman, you uh you're in any one of those kinds of occupations and you're struggling, go to www.peaknoro.com.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_00: You can download the app today uh off the App Store or Google Play.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's called PeakNora.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: There are already exercises in that app.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_00: We have a commercial sort of offering with upregulation, downregulation, sleep uh that are sort of made for the general population that are they're effective.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, those are the ones that I started with.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_00: And until about a year ago, we didn't have the ability to actually customize this for every individual.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_00: So at the high end of this program for elite athletes and the military and uh through clinicians, through trained uh psychotherapists and psychiatrists, we can develop individualized programs.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a general program available today at peaknoro.com and on uh on Apple uh Apple Store and Google Play.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you can reach me at Tony at peaknore.com.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: Don't try to spell the last name.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't spell it until I was 15.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: But if you just write Tony at peaknore.com and send me an email, I will be happy to answer.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_00: I I answer the emails, I will answer questions.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you're, you know, if you're dealing with something, you're concerned about any kind of stigma, uh, send me an email.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: There, there's a there's always a way to treat this.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_00: Look, I was I was one of those guys who went to the dark places every once in a while.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_00: Not not every day.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_00: I would just have these periods where, you know, I really want to be around anybody.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh kind of interesting.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_00: He's he's just just passed away.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I would tell you that a good friend of mine, who is a retired Army Ranger, uh, retired as a colonel, um, uh, two tours in Iraq, uh, was one of these folks who, you know, suffered from chronic depression his entire life.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he just passed away from cancer.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_00: But the last three years of his life were were pretty good.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_00: And they were pretty good because he was using the peak neurotechnology, and it really helped him uh uh with some with some equanimity before the end came.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was really a uh uh just a terrific guy.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he's actually uh I don't think Jared knows him, but do you know Lee Doherty?
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh not off the top of my head, sorry.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Lee Lee and Jared and I are all together at uh at IW.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_00: Lee's a lawyer, Lee's our our general counsel.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um those are you know those are the kinds of those are the kinds of people that we don't care if you have any money, we just want to help you.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_00: So uh that that's how you find me.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can also Google me, but you know, be careful with the spelling.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know who's gonna come up if you if you mistype that.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_01: You go you break their legs.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Tony, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about the tech.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_01: Very interested.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_01: I do want to reach out after you uh after this and talk about you know our summit.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we have a you know big technology section.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think it would be uh you know it would be great to have this tech there so people can learn about it.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but yeah, yeah, really appreciate your time.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for your service.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for the what you're doing for our veterans, and um I I wish you all the best as you take this promising technology forward, and um, I will assure you that we will be back in touch for sure.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: Appreciate it.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: No problem.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_01: Folks, another amazing episode of Broken Brains.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_01: Where Denny finds these folks, I don't know, but you know, I got to tip off the old hat to the producer there, Denny Caballero, man.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_01: Great man.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, remember, as we close out, we've got our summit coming up September 16th and 17th, the only summit in the world on repetitive brain trauma.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_01: We've got General Fenton as a keynote.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_01: We just signed Lee Steinberg.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_01: We've got Robert Gallery, former NFL player.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_01: We've got panels on brain help for athletes, brain help for kids.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_01: We've got legislation, psychedelics, we've got all the modalities, and we have an entire technology section this year where Lee Steinberg will be signing his new book.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the technology exhibits are represent some of the most amazing movements in brain tech right now.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_01: So we encourage everybody to attend.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_01: We're already half sold out.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_01: So please move, get on the website.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's at the Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_01: We're in partnership with the University of South Florida this year.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so please, September 16th, 17th, come on in.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the uh check out the the speaker list.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be an amazing time.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we um and so look, uh, you know, as we get forward, we are one of the fastest growing podcasts on the internet right now that's concerning brains.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_01: And we also know that this is not just a small niche sampling of America's population.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_01: We've had almost one billion kids play contact sports since the 80s.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: We've got millions of American veterans still out there suffering.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_01: We've got, you know, car accidents, domestic abuse, and and all these other ways which the brain becomes impaired.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yet this is the least recognized form and the most misdiagnosed and mistreated form of mental illness in this country.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_01: And this all has to be changed.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that is our mission together.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_01: So please take a look at not only the foundation.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um I we wrote the only book for parents that's on the website.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_01: So get that, that's for free.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_01: We got an app, Head Smart, which is the you know, only concussion app out there, ads for free.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's got repetitive ed impact, repetitive black exposure stuff all in it.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_01: So look, if you can, please like us, share us, talk to your friends about us, you know, push us out there on the internet.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_01: We, you know, we have a massive mission that we're undertaking right now, and we really appreciate all of your support.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_01: Till next time on the podcast, uh, thank you very much for uh you know that's for working with us, for supporting us.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, your kids only have one melon.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_01: Please take care of that and keep learning.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_01: We'll talk to you later and see you next time on Broken Braids.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_01: God bless you all.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_01: Take care.