The Neuroscience Of Stress - Jim Poole | Modern Wisdom Podcast 342

Jim Poole is the President and CEO of Solace Lifesciences. The last year has been one of the most stressful in memory, add on top our always-on technology, poor sleep schedules, alcohol, political tensions and it's no surprise that the second great wave of stress is upon us. Expect to learn how the balance of your autonomous nervous system is constantly being hijacked, how the crazy technology underpinning Jim's flagship product NuCalm works, why the sleep industry is in such a mess, how manipulating your brainwaves can impact your mood and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 3.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Get 20% discount & Free Shipping on awesome vegan meals at https://vibrantvegan.co.uk/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Check out NuCalm and get 50% off your first month - http://modernwisdomnucalm.com Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #stress #neuroscience #sleep - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What's happening people, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Jim Poole. He's the president and CEO of Solis Life Sciences. We are talking about the neuroscience of stress. The last year has been one of the most stressful in memory. Add on top are always on technology, poor sleep schedules, alcohol, political tensions, and it's no surprise that the second great wave of stress is upon us. Today, expect to learn how the balance of your autonomic nervous system is constantly being hijacked, how the crazy technology underpinning Jim's flagship product New Calm works, why the sleep industry is in such a mess, how manipulating your brainwaves can impact your mood, and much more.

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  Honestly, if the technology that Jim's talking about manages to give you half the energy that he appears to just ambiently exist in, I'm going to consider it a win. I have played around with the New Calm system myself, and it does make me feel really great. So if you like the sound of it, once he finishes talking about it toward the end, you can go to ModernWisdomNewCalm, that's N-U-C-A-L-M dot com, and you can check it out. I think they've put a discount on for people that listen to the podcast. So yeah, if you, if you like what he talks about, then feel free to go and check it out. He's got some awesome insights around stress and how our systems work, how we're being limbically hijacked almost every day. It's a real good one. I hope you enjoy this.

• 1:22Speaker 01

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• 2:47Chris Williamson?

  But now, it's time to learn about the neuroscience of stress with Jim Paul. Welcome, friends. It's been a little while since we had this planned, and I've finally got you here.

• 3:14Speaker 06

  Well, it takes a while. You're a busy man, busy schedule, so I get it.

• 3:19Chris Williamson?

  As are you. What are you an expert in?

• 3:21Speaker 06

  Ah, that's a great question. Expert's kind of a loaded word. Let's say, um, let's say well-versed. I'm well-versed in, uh, brain physiology, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, psychology, uh, the stress response, anxiety, the whole continuum of the seven diagnosable anxiety disorders. And, um, I think just an overall understanding of how the brain operates, that's kind of some level of knowledge that I possess.

• 3:56Chris Williamson?

  What links all of those together? What's the common thread between all of that?

• 3:59Speaker 06

  Evolution. It's really quite fascinating to me. We're kind of, we're, we're, we kind of stage a battle in our own heads, uh, for most of our life, um, derived from two things really in particular. One, your central nervous system, and two, your primordial midbrain autonomic nervous system. And this is fascinating to me. As we evolved as humans and what separates you and I from primates is this prefrontal cortex and frontal cortex in this area of our brain, which is our forehead, is our executive functioning, our left brain analytical thinking, but it's also access to our personality and our character. It allows us to be patient, be good listeners, be empathetic.

• 4:45Speaker 06

  And then you have another structure in the brain called the reptilian side of the brain or the midbrain, which is the autonomic nervous system. And that piece is designed for primordial survival. So that fight or flight mechanism is so much more evolved because it's 40 million years of neuronal circuitry, 40 million years.

• 5:10Speaker 06

  That's hard to fathom. How much learning goes on in 40 million years of the structure of the brain is really quite phenomenal. The frontal cortex and the prefrontal cortex and our character and our personality and our ability to logically think through and decision make and executive functioning is four million years evolved. So Chris, we as a human being are constantly perpetually challenged with a 36 million year head start to this primordial side of our brain that's really, really nefarious in its ability to create insecurity and expectation and fear and doubt and self-loathing and it's just bizarre. But that's what it means to be a human. So yeah, that's what kind of links what we do is the neuronal circuitry of the brain. And how important is it?

• 5:55Speaker 06

  It creates everything that we do. Everything we do, we think that we control ourselves. We think that we're in control. We're not in control. Not at all. Your brain, your central nervous system and your autonomic nervous system are light years ahead of you. Light years. Think about craving. Think about the idea of craving. Think about the battles you have in your head, whether it's around a carb or a sugar or an alcohol or marijuana, doesn't matter. Think about if you can, if you have enough self-awareness, the last time you succumbed to craving and think about when the craving started. It wasn't hasty. It wasn't, hey, this is going to happen on impulse. That craving started a couple of days before you actually gave up and said, I'm in.

• 6:41Speaker 06

  Right? Who's in control?

• 6:45Speaker 06

  You're not. Your brain knows what it wants. When you walk into a restaurant and you crave a hamburger, it's not because the hamburger looks good on the menu. It's your brain knows you need protein at that point. You're deficient and it knows, hey, hamburger is the best way for protein. If you're in psychic pain and you're having a tough day, your brain knows that alcohol is really predictable and fast acting to get me out of psychic pain. I can deal with my problems tomorrow. That's the challenge. So I look at this and I think of people who think they're in control and little do they know. Ignorance is bliss, I guess, but they have no idea. The advanced circuitry of your brain.

• 7:24Chris Williamson?

  Is it a constant battle between you and your brain?

• 7:27Speaker 06

  Constant battle. I'll give you a good example. Your central nervous system and this area of the brain is focused on survival. Now, when you think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and you think of the need and sense of belonging and intimacy and food and water and higher consciousness, all that is great, but it really is inconsequential if you're not alive. Okay, so survival supersedes everything. That's your central nervous system's challenge. Your central nervous system has all five senses and your intuition. Your intuition's probably more powerful than your other five senses. You know inherently and intuitively when you're at risk. Okay, maybe part of it's socialization, but when you're walking

• 8:10Speaker 06

  home and it's a dark night and there's a couple people or shadows in the distance and you're like, uh, I don't feel comfortable. That's your central nervous system saying, hey, this doesn't feel right. It activates the only tool it has in the shed. So if you look at the central nervous system as Batman, the autonomic nervous system is Robin. It says, hey, amygdala, you need to go do what you do and mobilize for a threat because something's gonna happen here that I don't like. That's kind of how it all works. So I think about something simple and something behavioral. Say you were at a party and you got humiliated for whatever reason. You know, you had a interpersonal conflict that got loud and gregarious and you felt like you'd been belittled or whatever. Your central nervous system doesn't really appreciate shame.

• 8:53Speaker 06

  Okay, shame's internal, guilt's external. Shame is harder to deal with because it's internal, your own battle. So your central nervous system is like, mm, I don't really like that, Chris. That wasn't fun. So then there's a party coming up next Saturday. What happens on Thursday? You start coming up with reasons why you can't go to that party. It's not because you don't want to go to that party, but your central nervous system's memory bank says, hey, I remember when we did that. And the person that emasculated me is going to be at that party. I don't think we should go. See, this is how the brain, the central nervous system and the autonomic nervous system, and the autonomic nervous system with fear, stress, anxiety, depression and worry,

• 9:35Speaker 06

  and the continuum of our behavior is challenged by all of this circuitry. And yet we think we're in control of any of this stuff, which we're not. But your brain has an incredibly memory center. And it remembers every time that you failed physically, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically. It remembers every time of public shaming. It remembers every time that you were hurt. And it tries to avoid these things out of primordial need for survival. So what do you think? How's that for a way to kick off a podcast? There's a lot of challenges to being a human.

• 10:08Chris Williamson?

  It's difficult, man. I'm surprised that anyone makes it through alive. Well, actually.

• 10:15Speaker 06

  Alive, but not acting to their core and the honor of who they want to be.

• 10:20Chris Williamson?

  Well, life, the only thing that we can guarantee is that none of us are going to make it out alive. Unless David Sinclair manages to do his unlimited immortal NMN infusion bullshit before we hit the end of the century. Yeah, man, I mean, I've been fascinated by this for a long time. The fact that we have a little bit of metacognition, right? We can think about thinking. We can observe the cravings as they arise inside of us. And determinism aside, we are able to act or not act on those impulses, at least as our system sees fit to do so. So the fact that we get a little bit of a glimpse as these things go past us is a source of a lot of suffering for people, right?

• 11:03Chris Williamson?

  The fact that I could have done differently, I should have done differently. If everything ran purely automatically, you wouldn't really have much of a place for regrets because you didn't make the choice. Now, again, arguments about free will aside, that's for a different podcast, but. When you're waiting to watch and see what next occurs in your mind, you don't choose where it comes from, but you can choose how you respond to it, or at least it feels like you can. And that does cause conflict.

• 11:32Speaker 06

  You can. All right. So you bring up a really interesting point, and it's the physiology of resource allocation. Okay, let's talk through evolutionary psychology here. If stress happens, well, first and foremost, to the thought process, according to the monks, we have a thousand thoughts an hour. That's a lot. Of those thousand thoughts, maybe 990 are externally derived. So that's kind of sucks.

• 11:58Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 11:59Speaker 06

  So it's coming from the external world, these thoughts. They're not really generated internally. If you're meditating, maybe, but for the most part, they're external. So we're having to react to our environment all the time. But a stress happens, a stress response happens, anything, whether it's perceived, or you're thinking about a date, or you're thinking about a dental appointment, doesn't matter what it is. What is going on? So the central nervous system is the one that's kind of governing you and kind of knows your schedule and your executive functioning and knows what's happening, what's not, and also has the memory of shame, guilt, and all your failures. Isn't that amazing? If you interrogated your central nervous system, you'd be like, wow, I had a lot more failures than I remember. It holds a lot of cards, man, I'm telling you.

• 12:44Speaker 06

  So the central nervous system perceives a threat, real or perceived, it doesn't matter. Something happens physiologically, and this is important for people to understand. The amygdala is an almond-shaped piece of the midbrain, and the amygdala is kind of the flight deck of the fight or flight response. And it's an almond-shaped piece in your midbrain. That pings the HPA axis, which is the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal cortex. This axis drives the adrenal cortex to secrete adrenaline.

• 13:13Speaker 06

  So the central nervous system brain, your executive thinking, has a fear. That fear triggers the amygdala to mobilize you for a threat. And this is some important stuff here. Number one, when this happens, there's no neuronal firings to the frontal cortex. Your brain doesn't know you're even preparing to mobilize for a threat because your primordial midbrain is saying, hey, we've been asked by the central nervous system to go into high alert. We need to mobilize. Something's happening, not sure what it is yet, but let's go. So all of your resources go to your visceral organs to prepare to fight. The heart rate, the breath, the musculature, your olfactory, your peripheral vision. And here's what's happening.

• 13:56Speaker 06

  It's called resource allocation. If all my resources in the form of oxygen-rich red blood are now leaving the frontal cortex of my brain to go to the body and to midbrain to solve these problems, I am no longer cognitively associated and connected with my being. So that's what's happening. You and I can be responsive to a stressful stimulation and not reactionary in the event that we are in this place of autonomic nervous system balance. Most people aren't. So we're easily triggered. And when we're triggered, we lose the concept of our personality and our character. And we go into a behavioral pattern that's in fight or flight and survival. And we learn these patterns. We're socialized to these patterns.

• 14:40Speaker 06

  So what happens is your fear or your stress or your anxiety or your worry, it's all kind of in the same continuum. It accesses this body's physiological response that negates the ability for my brain to think clearly. So I'm cognitively dissociated. This is the curse of being human. This is the curse of every day waking up and trying to battle this. So when you think of mindfulness, or you think of meditation, or you think of things that'll help you get to a place of higher consciousness. That path in and of itself is a different conversation. But in reality, all you're trying to do is allocate proper resources in the form of oxygen-rich, red blood cells to the frontal cortex.

• 15:22Speaker 06

  So if I'm in a state of well-being and I'm balanced and I feel good, you can come at me with stress. Okay? But I will be able to interpret it and I'll be able to measure it and respond to it on my terms using both my primordial midbrain and my frontal cortex. What happens in most human behavioral modification issues is that the blood flow and the resource allocation leaves the frontal cortex entirely and you're left in this fight or flight response. And you've seen this your whole life. I don't know how old you are, but you've had many, many experiences across your life. And you've had many experiences where you saw people handle stressful situations well and not handle them well. And we find ourselves easily judging these people like, wow, that person's a loser.

• 16:06Speaker 06

  Or wow, they're weak or wow, that dude was crying. No. You can't judge them for doing what they're set up to do. The neuronal circuitry has them protecting themselves and staying alive. There's no judgment. They're simply surviving. And they don't have access to their personality and their character and their well-being because there's no blood flow there. So that's the biggest challenge. And so there is semblances of control and being able to be responsive to stress as opposed to reactionary. And the path you take to higher consciousness is the path to enlightenment. The physiological challenge there is simply oxygenating the frontal cortex. So when you meditate, what are you doing?

• 16:49Speaker 06

  You're trying to synchronize and slow down your respiration rate to one breath every 10 seconds. 10 breaths or six breaths a minute is the ultimate diaphragmatic breathing for a human being. And oxygen-rich red blood cells is the path to healing physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. That's the challenge. So when we look at, hey, mindfulness seems ethereal. Mindfulness seems like an attainable aspirational goal that I can't achieve. Mindful, no. It's not, and I don't care what path you take. You can take meditation, you can take yoga, you can take Tai Chi, you can take Wim Hof's breathing. It doesn't matter. The key is to slow down cortisol in your monkey mind and oxygenate the enterprise. The enterprise being

• 17:34Speaker 06

  your body and your mind, because when your body and your mind are oxygenated, you're in a place of well-being. That's the key.

• 17:43Chris Williamson?

  I have been in situations where my recovery and my balance between my autonomic nervous system, I don't think has changed a massive amount, but my experience, my conscious experience of a situation has. Let's say it's my industry running club nights. Between the ages of 23 and 28, I think if anything, I got poorer recovery. I think I was more chronically in sleep debt. Training was the same, diet was the same, but my experience, my conscious experience of the situation had changed and improved. So how would that fit into the model that you've just given me there? Because that's-

• 18:26Speaker 06

  Complete, complete left turn. And this is awesome. I love, I love these types of conversations because you have no idea and expectation where it's going to go. So what you're speaking of is completely different. And what you're speaking to is a different part of the human experience. You're speaking to this network of experience and this wisdom and this growth through a network of experiences. What the, what the hell does that mean? We have something called a reticular activating system, and it's the body's filtration system. It's the most sophisticated filter in the history of this planet. Your reticular activating system governs all stimulation into your brain. All five senses in your intuition. Think about the job that has. That's a big responsibility. Think about how much comes into your visual cortex on a daily basis. Everything.

• 19:09Speaker 06

  You couldn't absorb everything. Your brain would be like, ah, I'm done. So reticular activating system is the key and is the filter. The reticular activating system has two primary functions and it's exceptionally good at. Number one, pattern recognition.

• 19:25Speaker 06

  Number two, finding shortcuts. So you're in this space from 23 to 28 and you're living this life, your circadian rhythm is compromised, your stress level is high, your nutrition is probably poor, your sleep is messed up, your cortisol is high, you're pushing the limits of what it means to be a human. And you're young and your sense of mortality doesn't exist yet, so you can do this.

• 19:47Chris Williamson?

  I'm made of rubber and magic between the ages of 23 and 28, Jim, I was fine.

• 19:51Speaker 06

  It's amazing, isn't it? You're very malleable and it is, it's amazing. I'm 52, so I have a three-day hangover now. I just don't like it and I don't tolerate it. Anyway, so the reticular activating system from 23 to 28 is taking all these disparate experiences and it's networking them. And so you're taking pieces from this night and you're saying, hey, I saw that before and this is how this works. That's how we build this ability to gain wisdom and experience on top of everything that we do. It's a different aspect of the evolutionary psychology of the challenge between the autonomic nervous system and the primordial midbrain and the central nervous system in your prefrontal cortex.

• 20:33Speaker 06

  Different aspect, but it's a fascinating aspect because we have to be able to be malleable and we have to be able to be adaptive to our environment. And life comes at us, right? There are 7.6 billion people on this planet, 7.6 billion. Think about the energy involved in just that. But then you add in everybody's inner wisdom, or what I like to call the itty-bitty shitty committee. It's not so wise. It's a committee that tells you, you suck, you're insecure, you're a loser, they're not going to understand you, people aren't going to like you at this party. You know that committee that kind of talks to us every day since we're little? And we don't really tell people about it? So in essence, Chris, we have 7.6 billion people plus 7.6 itty-bitty shitty committees.

• 21:19Speaker 06

  We've got 15 billion plus enterprises on this planet occupying energy, right? And entropy. And it's incredibly fascinating. But there are ways for us to create a semblance of patterns. We can be resilient and we can be adaptive to any, it appears to me, anything on earth. Anything from war to space travel, to deep sea travel. Anything that humans set their mind to, they can adapt to it. It's because of the capability of the reticular axillary system to understand patterns, understand how to find shortcuts and then build upon each experience. So from 23 to 28, you were pushing the limits physiologically of your body, but you were learning every day and each experience was stacking on the prior experience.

• 22:04Chris Williamson?

  How does someone, we're talking about going back to the autonomic nervous system and that balance and getting that right.

• 22:12Chris Williamson?

  I'm not meditating when I'm out on the front door of a nightclub or in a stressful situation. So there must be some sort of carryover. My recovery that I have done prior to the event must somehow permit me to have a bigger window of tolerance of stress within the event when it occurs? Is that the way that it works?

• 22:32Speaker 06

  Yes, yes. So it's a reserve.

• 22:34Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 22:34Speaker 06

  I look at it as a seesaw, right? Seesaw's never really balanced. One's up and one's down. Most people live with the sympathetic nervous system, which is the stress response in full depressed accelerator. Foot's on the gas, man. That's most people living like that. A lot of people aren't in balance. Most people aren't in balance. But it's a continuum. So the more you do nutritionally, the more you do sleep wise, the more you do kind of meditative wise, the healthier you build that reserve so that you have the resilience to deal with stressful situations. So just intuitively, without even understanding what you're even observing, you're observing exactly that. Your observations and what you do and how you do it, you're finding this evolution. But you obviously are on a quest for balancing the autonomic nervous system.

• 23:19Speaker 06

  You may not even have been aware that you were doing that. So yeah, that's what's happening.

• 23:25Chris Williamson?

  What do you think more people should know about stress that they don't?

• 23:32Speaker 06

  That it's necessary, it's a necessary piece of the puzzle, right? Certainly, the survival piece is, the intuition is. But I think there's a lot of burned wasted calories in stress, fear and worry. It's really quite unfortunate. Now, something interesting for your listeners. Your brain and my brain are different than a female's brain. We know this intuitively. We know this through the lack of empathy and, and the complexity of a woman's thought process versus a man's. But in reality, it's physiologically different. The corpus callosum, the bridge between the laterality of your left and right brain,

• 24:16Speaker 06

  is bigger in a woman's brain than a man's. So if we say, hey, I'm not worried about that. I'm not being dismissive or callous to my wife. I'm incapable of worrying about it. So if you say, hey, what's our 14-year-old daughter gonna wear picture day three weeks from now? I am incapable of worrying about that. So I'm not waking up at three in the morning and perseverating over that for 90 minutes. Okay? Second thing that's important to note, difference between a male and a female brain, is that with the corpus callosum being bigger and the laterality being greater, the packets of information from the left and the right brain and your analytical and your creative brain, a female is capable of multitasking where a man isn't. So there you go.

• 25:01Speaker 06

  So personally, I think about that and say, wow, I feel really blessed to be a man because I don't like to worry and I can't. I can't multitask either. So here you go. So that's the reality we live in. Forget the complexity of a woman, of a woman's brain and their ability to... So men are more focused in left brain and solution-oriented. Women are more empathetic and emotionally connected. And so there's a dissonance. It almost doesn't make sense that a man and a woman should be together because like, you know, and this, it doesn't make any sense. We don't communicate in the same manner. And so I learned years ago, my wife didn't want the answer because when I gave it to her, it just created six more layers of problems.

• 25:46Speaker 06

  She just wanted to hear me. She just wanted me to listen. Because they're not coming to you with a solution.

• 25:53Speaker 06

  They just wanna be heard. Fascinating.

• 25:56Chris Williamson?

  So two stories recently that I've heard from Adam Lane Smith, who is a psychotherapist specializing in trauma, and he was talking about the fact that men are treated for depression the way that women want to be treated for depression. All that you need to give a man, according to him, in order to get most of them out of depression is a purpose and the ability to complete that purpose. But when they go in, a lot of the time, therapy is geared around men being heard, being felt appreciated, but that's not what they want. They want a problem and they want to fix it. In fact, there were people during World War II in London who were in insane asylums,

• 26:36Chris Williamson?

  catatonic, completely catatonic, laid in bed, hadn't been out of bed for years. And as soon as the bombs started to drop, they got up, they went outside and they started shoveling, they drove ambulances, they did all of these jobs because they had a purpose and the ability to complete it. Another thing, second thing that I learned, one of my favorite facts from this year from David Buss, one of the founders of evolutionary psychology that was recently on the show, talking about the male overperception bias and the female underperception bias of attraction. So men are hardwired to overperceive the level of attraction that a female is giving to them. They.

• 27:13Speaker 06

  Like a scrap, like a scrap.

• 27:15Chris Williamson?

  Precisely. Well, yeah, they're there to look at something and say, well, her gaze lingered at me for 0.3 milliseconds longer than it usually does. It's like maybe you had sauce on your shirt, maybe she was thinking, God, it's that creepy gym guy again, like whatever it might be. But men are wired to view every potential sexual opportunity as one. And conversely, women do the opposite. And when they do self-reporting, speed dating, he's done it with tons and tons of different studies, women consistently report far less attraction from them to the man than the man reports, and the man reports far more attraction from the women to the man than the female reports.

• 27:59Chris Williamson?

  But this tells us, it explains so much around.

• 28:04Chris Williamson?

  Why men and women struggle to get along because they don't have the same makeups. Sexually, men want more sexual variety and they're happy to have sex more soon than a woman is. Women want more consistency with sex and it takes longer for them to do it. 61% of the time, men say that I love you first and they report feeling it at 90 days, around about 90 to 91 days after first meeting someone. All of these things, why are there these asymmetries? Because we are not the same, because we were not built to be the same. And yeah, it's an absolute, given the fact that it's about 50 50 split on the planet between men and women. You know, of all of the different wars between countries and geographies and areas and belief structures,

• 28:48Chris Williamson?

  the fact that 50% and 50% of the world aren't just tearing each other apart because we're quite different to each other is, I think we should be, we should be proud of that.

• 28:57Speaker 06

  There's a simple way to explain the sexual difference and that is a man needs to have sex to feel intimate and a woman needs to feel intimate to have sex. It's a nice little way to look at it and think, okay, it is, it's fascinating, isn't it?

• 29:12Chris Williamson?

  Another one that Rob Henderson uses, he says, "Men need an excuse not to have sex with a woman, women need an excuse to have sex with a man."

• 29:23Speaker 06

  Yes, it's a bummer.

• 29:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, it depends, it depends which angle you're coming at it from. Okay, so stress, autonomic nervous balance, we've got there. Talk to me about, given the fact that this is your special, special area at the moment and you've been in it for quite a while. Have your, has your research been showing increasing, ramping up levels of stress? Just how bad is it? Is it as bad as people make out? Are people just being sort of pussies at the moment? Or are we getting bombarded with dopamine from devices and such like? Have you been able to actually see any of these changes?

• 29:55Speaker 06

  It's worse, it's worse than people's demise.

• 29:59Speaker 06

  The stress level, anxiety level, fear level, uncertainty level. So prior to COVID, COVID kind of exponentially changes everything. But prior to COVID, we were already living in the second great age of anxiety. The first great age of anxiety was post-World War I. So your central nervous system, as we've already, you know, talked about, protects us, keeps us alive, and it needs some semblance of, of being grounded. It needs a pattern. The reticular activating system demands that we're creatures of habit. Okay? After World War I, the world didn't seem like itself. It was off kilter. And that lack of certainty leaves this feeling us not grounded. It leads to anxiety, anticipatory anxiety. So prior to COVID, we were in the second great age of anxiety. A lot of that has to do with

• 30:44Speaker 06

  the poor food supply. When your food is more acidic and more focused on sugar, you're not getting the balanced nutrients you need in the inhibitory neurotransmitter side of the equation. We have a lot of excitatory neurotransmitters and a lot of neurotoxins in our food. So for, say, the last forty years, our food balance has lost its way and we're far more acidic. That's not good for anxiety. Okay? It's not good for depression. That, that, it's not good for sleep. Our sleep has been compromised, whether it's our job choice or whatever. And then you have this proliferation of technology and the push of blue light to the brain constantly stimulating us. Okay? So that's the physiological piece. The blue light stimulates us, says, hey, it's go time.

• 31:28Speaker 06

  Let's get some adrenaline. And then you have all the research showing that this social media craze creates an addictive response of dopamine, much like cocaine. So when a child puts out something on Instagram and starts seeing who likes it or shares or whatever, that elicits a dopamine response. So we're, so between technology, between the lack of kind of the nuclear and extended family being around each other, the food supply, and then just kind of mass media. So follow the money. It's really the, the way life works, right? Follow the economics. I don't believe that the media is nefarious and thinking malicious thoughts, but what they do know is that they need ratings.

• 32:12Speaker 06

  They need ratings so they can make their money and stay profitable and pay their bills in their overhead and pay their salaries. Okay, great. So what do they learn? They learn this. They bring in some neuroscientists and they say, hey, I can elicit a fear response in a nanosecond. It takes me minutes to create this intellectual challenge and this story of good and releasing endorphins and oxytocin. So we're going to go fear mongering. Everything's fear mongering. Everything in the mass media is to elicit a fear response. And that fear response triggers the amygdala, the amygdala to the HPA axis, the autonomic nervous system, all your blood flow goes from your brain and you get in that fear pattern. I tell people when I lecture, I was like, when's the last time you turned off the news and you had a feeling of inner peace and calm and serenity? Uh, like never?

• 32:57Speaker 06

  Never. So between the food, the media, this disconnect of humanity. I've got three girls, 1917 and 14, when they have interpersonal conflict, I hear about it and my idea is, hey, go over to their house and talk to them or pick up a phone. No, everything's done through text. There's a, a layer. It's really strange. So there's a, there's a ton going on. So on one hand, you'd say stress is at the highest levels ever in the history of, of the human experience. That's a sad indictment, but that's reality. On the other hand, look at the resilience and ability for adaptive behavior. That's really quite exceptional. And what I have noticed personally is the adaptive behavior of my children, 1917 and

• 33:42Speaker 06

  14. They have adapted to COVID a hell of a lot better than I have at 52 years old. And why is that? It's not a miracle. It's not the demographic. It's simply the network of experiences that I have 52 years and 365 days a year has a big, big, big group of ideas and dogma and conventional thinking and what should be. You're more entrenched. I'm more entrenched and they have 1917, 14 year old thinking. So it's been really quite fascinating to look at all this, but I'll give your audience one example of how COVID is going to affect us moving forward. Number one. You need pattern recognition. Because if you don't, it exhausts your brain trying to figure out what the hell this is.

• 34:27Speaker 06

  This is the idea of a first impression. So I'm in Boston in August of last year, 2020. And it's, I mean, Faneuil Hall, which is literally like a tourist trap and thousands of tourists from all over and restaurants and the harbor's right there and the old, you know, England-style architecture. It's a beautiful place. It's August, it's about 7:30 at night. And I'm in Faneuil Hall and I look left and I look right. There's not a single soul out on the street. My brain can't process this. It can't. It's literally having to burn extra calories trying to figure out what has happened here? Is this an apocalypse? Did I miss something? So this is exhausting.

• 35:12Speaker 06

  So from March 2020 to today, it has exhausted us emotionally, spiritually, psychologically and physically because we've had to work double and triple and quadruple hard because our brain can't. Nothing is normal.

• 35:26Chris Williamson?

  It's just a novel environment. Everything is a novel environment.

• 35:29Speaker 06

  Every day. So it's just, and there's a lot of social anxiety. There's a lot of social divisiveness. There's a lot of vaccine versus non-vaccine and is this real or is this a hoax? There's so much drama going on. What does that do? It perpetuates this feeling of uncertainty. And uncertainty leads to anticipatory anxiety and depression. So if you had a proclivity to be depressed, the COVID accelerates and creates a more intense depression. Your episodes are longer and the intensity is greater. Same thing with anxiety. So this whole continuum is managed by the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system, in addition to fight or flight, governs human fear, stress, anxiety, depression and worry.

• 36:14Speaker 06

  The big piece of our behavioral modification. So I think the stress side is incredible. And I, I hope that we learn. I hope we're not in a rush to get back to a pace of life and a destruction of the planet that's really not tenable. You may say, hey, this was a universal intervention where the universe says, hey, enough is enough. There's 7.6 billion of you. You're egregious, you're wasteful, and you're ruining everything. Because from, from March 2020 to like December 2020, the animal kingdom was thriving.

• 36:54Speaker 06

  They were seeing schools of dolphins and whale pods, literally orca-type whales in areas of the in the country in America they hadn't seen in centuries. Right? So pollution's down, air quality is up. But as a human, I hope people stopped and said, wow, this is an unplug. This is an unplug for me to reflect and kind of introspectively look at my life and look what I thought was important. And why did I go to bed every night disappointed that I didn't achieve my to-do list? When I look at my to-do list, none of them are consequential to my life. I hope that we don't rush to normalcy when you look at normal and normal wasn't working.

• 37:36Chris Williamson?

  The problem is, a lot of people have only had that to-do list to keep them going through this period. You know, a lot of people are driven by the desire to do more, to achieve more, meritocracy, quantifiable metrics of success, fears of insufficiency, all of these things combined to make the to-do list completion one of the few things that you derive meaning from. And if you remove most sources of happiness as well.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  That's a great point.

• 38:02Chris Williamson?

  Happiness and meaning are two different pathways. I learned this from Roy Baumeister. It's awesome. And happiness is much more impulsive. It's in the here and now. Meaning is future-focused. It's purpose. It's a future event or state that lends structure to the moment, which is a really good definition for purpose. And they're not the same thing. And I think

• 38:24Speaker 06

  No.

• 38:25Chris Williamson?

  I have a As yet unproven hypothesis that I think a lot of people are struggling to find happiness and have done over the last 15 months and have tried to replace happiness with meaning. And the meaning has been found by set goal, work toward goal, complete goal, set next goal, work toward goal, complete goal. There hasn't been much opportunity for impulsive happiness, parties, you know, you can't really flex your new car on Instagram if you're not allowed out of the house, financial concerns, so on and so forth. And I'm, I think people have perhaps used meaning as a replacement for it.

• 39:04Speaker 06

  Well, I think there's another element there. So we do a lot of work with monks and we learn a lot from the wisdom of monks. Their path is different and probably similar. Happiness is external, just like guilt's external. Joy is internal and the path to joy may be commensurate with the path to meaning. But happiness is a futile attempt and it, it doesn't last because it is external, just like guilt's external. Guilt is imposed upon societal norms. Shame is inside me. So you're speaking to the same path of lower consciousness. You're speaking to the primordial midbrain occupying more of your resources than your frontal cortex.

• 39:47Speaker 06

  Your to-do list is rather inconsequential to your life and certainly doesn't derive happiness, ever. You buy a nice fancy car, great, how long does that, the endorphins last? Two weeks, three weeks? Happiness is a pursuit of futility and over expectation and disappointment. You want to derive towards joy. You want to get an understanding baseline fundamental of who you are as a core human being and what gives you joy, right? Was it having children? Is it having a spouse or a partner? Is it work? Is it purpose? That's the path to an enlightened life of wellness and well-being and.

• 40:28Speaker 06

  This pursuit of happiness or to-dos or this over pursuit of success based on what? Monetary success? That? No. Doesn't work that way. And we're speaking to the same stuck this in this rut of this continuum of fear, stress, anxiety, depression, worry. This is forty million year evolved thinking. No, we want access to here. I want access to my personality, like the honor of my humanity and my character, what's important to me, not what I think other people think is important to me. It's all stress modulated.

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  So you're this brain guy. You got all these insights into the brain and stuff like that. What? How are you deploying these in the market? What do you do for work?

• 41:15Speaker 06

  New column, baby. So twenty plus years ago, an exceptionally gifted neuroscientist, quantum physicist, naturopath, Dr. G. Blake Holloway, went on a quest. Literally took him twenty years. That in of itself is incredible badge of honor. Who spends twenty years trying to figure something out? But his clinical practice in Texas was resolving PTSD comorbid with addiction. So traumatized people coming out of the theater of war or female sexual, physical, emotional abuse victims. The PTSD side, you said you just recently had someone on with PTSD or talk about PTSD. It's exceptionally powerful and exceptionally gripping and it basically takes your life. If it doesn't take your life through suicide, it commandeers

• 42:00Speaker 06

  the rest of your life and you live a life of misery. It's a horrific place. Of the seven diagnosable anxiety disorders, PTSD is on the furthest extreme. It is the hardest life to live. And so we judge people for finding solace in drugs and alcohol, but we don't understand the neuronal network of the brain. If I'm in psychic pain and I can never get relief, and even in my dreamscape, I'm having memories associated with the trauma, I can never rest. I can never, my shoulders can never drop. I can never have a moment of serenity. I'm gonna find an escape. My brain's smart. It's gonna figure out how to get into cocaine or, you know, opiates or alcohol. That's how this all works, right? So it

• 42:45Speaker 06

  this technology was designed to resolve PTSD comorbid with addiction. That's the hardest profile of humanity to solve. Now, when you ask Dr. Holloway, "Why'd you do it and what were you seeking?" Today, conventional therapy includes narcotic-based pharmaceuticals to dull the pain, not solve the issue, dull the pain, and then do cognitive behavioral therapy on a brain that's not willing, enabled and open. The brain of a traumatized victim is in a constant state of hypervigilance. They have lost trust in the universe, and they've lost trust in you to protect you from the universe. This is gangbuster, fight or flight, all the time. Okay?

• 43:30Speaker 06

  This technology, this platform, this neuroscience platform technology, was designed expressly to balance the autonomic nervous system. And this is really important because people don't understand what the autonomic nervous system is, its value, and kind of what it governs in our, in our life. The autonomic nervous system has two sides. The stress response, which is called the sympathetic nervous system, and the rest response, which is called the parasympathetic nervous system. But in that, it also governs the fight or flight response and the continuum of mood disorders from fear, stress, anxiety, depression, and worry. That's a big job. The autonomic nervous system has a big job. It's not given enough right, liberty, privilege, honor, and respect for us to take care of it anymore.

• 44:12Speaker 06

  We're too eager to eat shitty food and not sleep well and drink and party and get on our tech all the time. We don't think about balance. And in fact, balance seems like it's weak. You know, meditation, yoga, Tai Chi is for weak people. No, it's not. It's actually the antithesis of weak people. It's actually the path to healthy. You want to live a good life. So, this technology was designed and derived to solve the problem of the stress response. Because if you don't solve the stress response, the body is not in a position to heal. I'm not even open, Chris, to begin the healing process if I can't take my foot off the accelerator.

• 44:51Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you say "healing"?

• 44:56Speaker 06

  To be able to, you want to get down to the core of it? It's really to shut down cortisol in your monkey mind. Shut down the stress hormones. Because the cortisol and the adrenaline and the catecholamines are driving all this mood disorder and all this poor food choices and addiction and all this stuff. It's all stress modulating. When we're stressed out, and we feel it, you can feel it in your stomach, right? There's too much acid in your stomach. When you're stressed out, it doesn't feel good. How would you like to live the entirety of your life in that space? That's exhausting. I wouldn't want that. I don't like it for one second when I feel cortisol in my stomach and I lose my appetite or I'm feeling distracted or I'm here with you present, but something else is distracting me. I don't like that feeling.

• 45:41Speaker 06

  So Nucalm is the core platform technology developed by this neuroscientist. And here's what's fascinating to me. The brain is the most complex organ in the history of this planet. Okay? The complexities cannot be overstated and the complexities are still not even known. But we do know a few things. One, the body is a closed loop ecosystem with trillions of cells. And the body and the brain is a compensatory mechanism with a complexity that's beyond our comprehension. What does that mean? For every action, there's a reaction. For that reaction, there's a reaction. For that reaction, there's a reaction. For that reaction, there's a reaction. Okay. So it's entropy. So you think about that and you say, okay, how would you create a solution to manage

• 46:25Speaker 06

  the autonomic nervous system on a regular basis? It demands a complex solution. And that's exactly what he invented in Nucalm. The brain and the body communicate in only two manners. Chemical messaging and electrical messaging. And if you don't command, control of both mechanisms, you can't have a predictable outcome. And we look at this and we see what's out there today. We see neurobiofeedback's been around for almost 80 years. It's not predictable. It's not predictable to the individual and it's not predictable across the population. We look at transcranial direct current stimulation and different stimulation devices that stimulate a certain area of the brain. They're not predictable. They're not predictable across the person. They're not predictable across the population. Then you take the other approach.

• 47:10Speaker 06

  That's electrical signaling. You take the chemical signaling. You talk about supplementation or transdermal creams or liposomal sublingual absorption, whatever. But they're not driving to anything and the body is not good at extracting a high yield of nutrients from supplementation. It's really good at taking nutrients from food. It does a really poor job. When you're talking about a seven to nine percent yield of what you ingest in a supplement, to me, it's like, why don't you just throw the whole thing down the toilet? Seven to nine percent is not that good.

• 47:39Chris Williamson?

  Is that the max?

• 47:40Speaker 06

  Nine percent, I believe, is about the max. Yeah. So, and you can mega dose, but it doesn't matter because you have to go through the whole metabolic process. You have to go through the liver. You have to go through the bloodstream. It's across the butter brain barriers. A million of inefficiencies in the body trying to extract. And, and, um, something that's really quite fascinating. What are we taking it for anyway? Why do we even ingest food? What is it all about? What's human biology about? Human biology is about cellular communication. It's all about bioinformatics, cell to cell communication. What are they communicating? They're communicating a frequency.

• 48:16Chris Williamson?

  Do they not need something, a resource from the actual supplement or the food itself, though, rather than it just being a signal? Is there not a resource in it itself, the seven percent or the nine percent which gets used?

• 48:30Speaker 06

  The, the resource and what you're looking for has a frequency. So if you're looking for vitamin A, that has a frequency. Vitamin B has a frequency. B12 has a frequency. Vitamin C has a frequency. Vitamin D has a frequency. Magnesium has a frequency. So when you eat a food, there's this whole process of inefficiencies that goes on. So I chew the food. I digest it in my esophagus to my gut. My gut digests it, then I process it through my liver and I metabolize it, then again in my bloodstream. And all it's doing is communicating a frequency of that nutrient.

• 49:02Speaker 06

  Human biology is resonance, frequency, and vibration. It's fascinating to me. So when you drink orange juice, you're not drinking it because there's a little vitamin C pellet that your cells say, "Hey, grab that vitamin C pellet, and let's wrestle it to the ground." No, there's a frequency, and that frequency resonates. So the cell gets the frequencies, "Okay, that's vitamin C," and it's like a tuning fork. It resonates at that frequency. That's biology. So when you look at the body and what we're trying to do, we're trying to impose our will through self-implication. You can't impose your will on the human brain. Good luck. It's not going to work. So when you take a step back and you understand the complexity of the brain, you have electrical signaling and chemical signaling.

• 49:45Speaker 06

  Dr. Holloway understood that to create a predictable outcome, I have to commandeer both channels. So Newcom is a systematic approach. It is a systematic, complex solution to a complex problem. And Newcom itself is one product, and it's designed to literally slow down your brainwave function, the opposite of what caffeine does. Caffeine increases your brainwave frequency and lets you to think faster and activate faster. Newcom is designed to slow down your brainwave function and to oscillate your brain in alpha and theta, alpha being synonymous with relaxation, rest, and creativity, theta being synonymous

• 50:25Speaker 06

  with healing, cellular restoration, and recovery. That's what he's doing. So Newcom is a gift to humanity. It's a gift to our contemporary lifestyle where we're not in control of ourselves anymore, and we're not thinking that balance and parasympathetic dominance and recovery and rest is really that important. We seem to override that a lot. If you look today at the global marketplace, the sleep industry alone is a $585 billion industry. $585 billion.

• 51:01Speaker 06

  We don't know that much about sleep. Academically, the science of sleep is 29 years old. Who, who thought that was a good idea? Sleep is paramount to life. You don't sleep, you die. You don't sleep well, you don't perform well. But what's the catalyst to create poor sleep? Stress. Hello, it's cause and effect. So to us, we look at high stress, poor sleep, high stress, poor sleep, high stress, poor sleep. And we say, hey, we have a solution that's clinically proven and patented to take care of that. How would you like to live in a world where you have great sleep, good stress management, great sleep, good stress management?

• 51:43Speaker 06

  So where we sit in America here, the companies in Delaware, we've built a platform of technologies designed to allow you to change your state on demand with no side effects by managing the human brain wave function. That sounds really complex and start tracking it. And it is. The complexity is incredible. The science is absolutely incredible. You could study this science for decades and not get bored because it's constantly evolving because we're learning more and learning more and learning more. Like, wow, that's really cool. Let's do this. But let's take a step back. The human brain and the body and your behavior and the outcome are all derived from this

• 52:25Speaker 06

  scale of a 41 hertz to 0.5 hertz continuum. Let's start at the lowest, 0.5 hertz. When your brainwave is in a slow waveform of 0.5 hertz, you are in dreamless coma-like deep sleep. Okay? We've all witnessed it where you literally can't wake somebody up. They're literally in delta, 0.5 hertz. When you go up from delta and you increase the frequency, 7 hertz to 4 hertz is theta, T H E T A. Theta is really, really important because it's the healing zone and it's the only time.

• 53:00Speaker 06

  When your brainwave function is in theta, that your cells clean their toxins and do their cellular maintenance, and your mitochondria is restored. That's the healing zone. It's also commensurate with the second stage of sleep. So REM, second stage of sleep, theta, brainwave function. Then you go up to alpha, 12 hertz to 8 hertz. When your brainwave function is in alpha, you're in the creative zone, you're relaxed, but you're also in the zone. Interestingly enough, when they did EEGs or they do cross-sections of brains, of fighter pilots in a dogfight, you'd think, wow, they must be fucking stressed out. They're not. Their brainwave is at 12 hertz. They are in the zone. They are focused, just like anybody who's ever been in the zone. We've all been in the zone before. We're like, wow, I'm in the zone. Your brainwave is at 12 hertz. That's alpha.

• 53:45Speaker 06

  Alpha is also synonymous with transcendental meditation. Then you go up into beta. Beta has the longest range, from 13 hertz all the way up to 38 hertz. 13 to 15 hertz is low-level, kind of adult functioning. You're awake and alert. 15 to 20 hertz is focus. Distraction-free, I'm focused, and I'm crushing it. 20 to 25 is stress. 25 to 30 is high stress. And 30 to 38 is you're out of your freaking mind, stressed out of your marbles. Seriously. You're not breathing well, your heart's palpitating, you're completely cognitively dissociated, you are in maximum fight or flight. Okay. Then you go above that. This is really fascinating. 39 to 41 hertz is a gamma brainwave function. 39 to 41 hertz is commensurate with higher consciousness

• 54:30Speaker 06

  and mistake-free, high-intense focus. It's kind of, it's kind of confusing. You're like, wow, that's pretty wild. So here's what Dr. Holloway invented. He invented a mathematical software model using algorithms, math, and physics to use your ears, so auditory motor cortex, as a way to deliver a signal to the brain to pace your brain in any outcome we want. We've created a platform of clinically proven patented physics where you listen to our tracks and you can either derive 41 hertz mistake free awesome focus intensity called ignite warrior brain, or you can do new calm, which is alpha and theta recovery cellular

• 55:13Speaker 06

  restoration, or you can do focus at 15 to 20 hertz, or you can do sleep at 0.5 hertz. So yeah, we've been pretty busy here, uh, working for about 20 years, literally it's 20 years and $28 million to get to this place. We built the only pathway to literally elicit a state change. So you as a human being, Chris, any day you can get up, you say, hey, I didn't sleep that well last night, and I know that new calm provides me two hours of restorative sleep for every 20 minutes. So I'm going to do new calm right now and I'm going to catch up on the sleep debt that I incurred last night. Cause I know the human body can't make up for sleep debt, but biochemistry and physics can. So I knew calm. I get up from 45 minutes of new calm and I feel like I slept great, even though I know I didn't.

• 55:57Speaker 06

  I feel like I did. Great. You know why? For that 45 minutes, we levitated your brainwave function in theta. Theta is synonymous with healing. And when you are in theta synonymous with being a monk, you're synchronizing your heart and your lungs and your breathing at the respiration rate of one breath every 10 seconds. So that's kind of how all that works. Dr. Holloway had the understanding and the kind of the mystified brilliance to say, hey, I don't need to exercise to increase my brainwave frequency. I don't need caffeine to increase my brainwave frequency. I don't need yoga and Tai Chi to slower to lower my brainwave frequency. I'm going to use physics to manipulate the brainwave frequency so that you can have whatever state you want.

• 56:43Speaker 06

  That's incredible. That's what we do. So new comb is our flagship product. It's been around for 11 years. We sold almost $25 million new comb. It used to be a complex four component class three medical device that sold for $6,000. Well, if your goal as a company is to change the world and liberate humans from stress, $6,000 price tag is not really going to get you to the finish line. So four and a half years ago, we invested a ton of money and time and effort and resources to say, hey, there must be a way for us to simplify and to get away from this and build a consumer product. So October 14th, 2020, and that's probably one of the reasons we're on this podcast is When we were selling a $6,000 clinical medical device, we weren't doing a lot of podcasts because it's kind of like, "Yeah, and you can get that for $6,000."

• 57:28Speaker 06

  No, that's not going to fly. We launched a subscription model. What we did and what we accomplished in four and a half years with Dr. Holloway, who's just an exceptionally gifted scientist, we were able to successfully move from a Class 3 medical device of four components to an easier-to-use three-component system that's actually better. Who does that? What do you mean? You're no longer regulated Class 3 medical device. You're simpler and you're better. And in addition, we lowered the price 99.15%. You can get New Calm now, which a year ago cost you $6,000. You can get it now for $39.99. When I say we're on a quest and a purpose and meaning, and I get up every day with the intention of changing the world,

• 58:11Speaker 06

  I've got 7.6 billion people to liberate from stress just with New Calm. It's a lot of work. I feel great about it. Someone says, "Wow, that's a commercial in itself." You have all this weight of the world on your shoulders and you're completely not stressed. I said, "What's there to be stressed about? Let's do it. Let's go." So that's what we do. So I, at 52 years old, running a global neuroscience company with seven industries across six continents. We work with the military and the VA and professional athletes. And we work with the gamut of humanity. Why is that? Because here's what we know. Everybody suffers the same consequence of being human. I don't give a shit if you're a celebrity. You have stress. And your stress response is exactly identical to my stress response. The amygdala, the HPA axis, the blood flow, all of it's the same.

• 58:56Speaker 06

  We are the same. 7.6 billion people live with the curse of stress and the stress response. So we have a solution. That's the only patented solution in the world, clinically proven. Just by virtue of saying that, no one else can make these claims, right? That solves the problem with no drugs and no effort. You literally just get in your bed. You put a disc on your wrist, a headphone on, an eye mask. And within four or five minutes, your brainwaves in theta. You bake there for 30, 40 minutes. And when you're done, you just kind of pop up like, "Hey." I'm ready to go. Let's go take on the day. That's new calm. That's what we've done. So at fifty-two, Chris, I've got the immune health of a thirty-seven-year-old. I've got the schedule of a carny, except I don't have small hands and smell like cabbage.

• 59:41Speaker 06

  I travel like a freak. I have a lot of reasons to be a stressed-out individual, and I'm not stressed at all. I drink a ton of water and I new calm every day. That's been my key to longevity, focus, high performance. I was on the phone with a CEO about a month ago, and he interrupted me halfway through a monologue. He says, "Mr. Paul, I just want to say one thing. You're like a super species. You're a freak." I said, "I know." I said, "Isn't it great?" I said, "I have a basket of goods in the form of physics and neuroscience, where I can dictate what state I want to be in. If I want to jack my brain up and go do a run, or go work out, or do whatever I want, I can just put Ignite on. If I want to be focused and look at legal paperwork, I'll put Focus on.

• 1:00:24Speaker 06

  If I want to sleep, I'll put on a Delta Track. I manage my life through physics, understanding how to manage my brainwave." Boom. What do you think of that, Mr. Chris?

• 1:00:35Chris Williamson?

  Talk me through the clinical studies. What did you learn from that? What was found out?

• 1:00:40Speaker 06

  Ah, that's a great question. We were always on a mission to manage stress. You have to stay in some sandbox, right? We can, we can make a lot of claims, because stress is the catalyst to everything bad in our life. But we focused on stress, and here's what we learned. It's really hard to manage stress and to quantifiably measure stress. So we started working with some of the best scientists in the world, from Harvard and NASA, literally the best mathematicians and statistical biophysicists. And what we did is we learned that back then, heart rate variability was kind of a burgeoning side in the medical equation, and has become the gold standard in medical, not in consumer. I wear an Oura ring and Whoop band and all that stuff.

• 1:01:23Speaker 06

  It's, it's, they're compromising convenience for medical-grade sensitivity accuracy. They're not accurate at HRV, but you get an idea of what it means. What is it? HRV variability is looking at the autonomic nervous system. There's something called the sympathovagal balance. So it's a ratio of the sympathetic nervous system over the parasympathetic nervous system. And you can see when someone's four to one, eight to one, 10 to one, they're too stressed and there's not enough rest. So what we did is we had a single A D C G device and we measured new calm, so five minutes before, during new calm and five minutes after. And we studied the Chicago Blackhawks, Stanley Cup champions in 2013 to 2015. So some of the world's top athletes and we studied stage four cancer. And they would have a single A D C G device. They'd attach it to their chest.

• 1:02:07Speaker 06

  It would capture 250 data points a second, 15,000 a minute. And all that data, five minutes before, during new calm, five minutes after. We would get all that data. We pass it over to Harvard Medical School. They would do all the analysis through this multi-scale entropy mathematical model and spit out the most sensitive, accurate measurements of your HRV. And what we learned was it didn't matter who you were. It didn't matter if you were a 31-year-old veteran, defenseman for the Chicago Blackhawks. It didn't matter if you had stage four metastatic brain cancer. New calm simply put the brakes on the stress response within five minutes and raise the parasympathetic to an equal ratio or greater. So what we see, anytime you do new calm, is that we will immediately put the brakes

• 1:02:50Speaker 06

  on your stress response and raise the rest and digest response. Your body, and my body, and everybody listening to this podcast's body, wants to be in balance. It's your monkey mind and cortisol and your worries and your thoughts that keep your body out of balance. Your body knows how to heal. Your body's had millions of years of training. It knows what to do. But your mind overrides it, mostly through the stress hormone cortisol. New calm says, "I don't give a shit. I don't care if you have cancer. I don't care if you're a professional athlete. I don't care if you're a singer or a pilot. I don't care if you're two years old. I don't care if you're 100. I'm going to take you to this place that I know is commensurate with healing and I'm going to allow you to spend time in that coveted place and give you the restoration your body needs.

• 1:03:34Speaker 06

  And the more you use this product, the more cumulative benefit because it eventually is going to balance your autonomic nervous system and you're going to live in your lifestyle, working clubs at night, thinking like a monk, living like a capitalist. Because you're going to be in a healthy place where you have that resource allocation, where you have enough oxygen-rich red blood cells to your brain at all times, where you're not able to be sabotaged by the primordial midbrain. Eleven and a half years of using this, Chris. I am not prone to sabotage. You're not gonna get me stressed. And it doesn't matter, doesn't mean I don't see it, feel it. I manage people for a living. There's always stress to be had. You're never gonna find me sabotaged by it.

• 1:04:17Speaker 06

  Because I've had such use and such autonomic nervous system balance. I have so many reserves. I could probably go two or three months without New Calm and still be in a place of resilience. And it's not because I'm great. And it's not because I give myself the gift of meditation or yoga tai chi. I don't do any of that. I don't take the time and that's not important to me. I use this as a tool to replace anything in that continuum that I know is necessary for good health. And really, to be honest with you, the health aspect is less important to me. It's the performance aspect. I wanna perform from 5:00 AM to midnight every single day. So I'm available to my team and my family. And I live the best proper life. And I'm honorable and integrous to myself and on the mission we're on.

• 1:05:02Chris Williamson?

  Five hours of sleep a night on average?

• 1:05:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, I got the stupid Oura ring, so yes, I can tell you exactly.

• 1:05:11Chris Williamson?

  There's no cheating the Oura ring, or the whoop sadly.

• 1:05:14Speaker 06

  You know, the H R V is not accurate, but I think the sleep is accurate.

• 1:05:18Chris Williamson?

  Would you be able to not sleep? And just do an hour of New Calm a day?

• 1:05:26Speaker 06

  I would, um, there are some people, and I'm not gonna name any names. There are some very high performing nuclear reactors of energy that think that that's an okay equation. And I am really upset that you would even think of that. Sleep is paramount. If you looked at the necessities of life and sustainability, sleep has to be the foundation. It has to be. Sleep is the foundation, okay? You can't use a replacement for sleep. Not because New Calm is ineffective. It's because we don't know the complexities and the variables to sleep are so profound. We still don't know enough about it. I do know that New Calm kind of mimics sleep architecture, but it doesn't do it fully.

• 1:06:10Speaker 06

  So I would never, ever tell people to do that. Now hopefully. They would get to a place where they augment their sleep debt. But everybody has a biorhythm. Interesting enough for me, I'm just being in this space I am and kind of perpetually inquisitive. I've noticed for me that if I sleep even hours, I wake up and I'm ready to crush it. If I sleep odd hours, I wake up and I'm lethargic. I got five hours last night. I woke up at five o'clock and I was like, uh. But I had to go to New York City, so I didn't really have time. And yesterday at six o'clock, I new calmed for 40 minutes in preparation for knowing I wasn't getting to bed before midnight. And I was only getting five hours of sleep. I would like more sleep, but as you get older and everybody who's listening to this podcast is older or has kids or whatever.

• 1:06:55Speaker 06

  Once the sunlight hits your eyes, man, hello. So you have to sleep in a dungeon if you want to sleep in. So sleeping in is not really an opportunity. And I find myself if I new calm and then I exercise or whatever, I find myself getting that second wind at eight or nine. And I like to catch up or do whatever. So yeah, five hours a night.

• 1:07:13Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain how the music sounds and the disc wo- work? What's the relationship there?

• 1:07:20Speaker 06

  Awesome. There is none. So that's a great question. The disc by itself is an incredible invention and it's incredibly complex. It looks simple. It looks just like a sticker in a Sesame Street comic book, right? The disc actually has a signature of frequencies. It has a recipe on it. Frequencies that used to be in a cream. Well, Dr. Holloway in his inventive path and of absolute perpetual awesomeness of literally intellectual horsepower. I think second to none. I've never met anybody like him. He located and found the frequencies to GABA A, GABA B, L, tyrosine, casein, chipped hydralissate and L-theanine. Those were the elements, kind of this cornucopia of what's called an inhibitory neurotransmitter. Puts the brakes on stress.

• 1:08:05Speaker 06

  He took the frequencies and built a software. That disc is, has a nice design and it looks cool and it's circular and it's metallic. It's actually a six-layer multi-wave oscillator. Holds a biostatic charge invented by George Akoski, the Russian medicine doctor doing electro medicine in 1930s. Technologically, it's been around for a hundred years. It still isn't understood and still deployed well. So, the signature of frequencies is then imprinted in a Tesla coil onto that disc, and that disc is held in a Faraday bag. The Faraday bag is a physics bag, anti-static bag. The disc is really powerful, but taken into the environment, it's very vulnerable to EMFs. So, the disc is simply signaling your brain like a tuning fork to activate

• 1:08:50Speaker 06

  what's called the gabberdic system. And the disc is important because it's like having a glass of wine or two. It negates your ability to resist new calm because of your adrenaline. It shuts down your adrenal cortex. So, literally, this disc uses the body's natural amino acids in a very unique, very advanced form to simply turn on the gabberdic system and say, "Hey, we're gonna take you for a joyride into theta, and you're not gonna resist what we're about to do." So, that's what the disc does. That's the chemical messaging of new calm. Then, the IMAS simply negates visual stimulation. Then, most of the work, seventy-five percent, maybe eighty, sometimes sixty percent, is in the neuroacoustic software underneath

• 1:09:32Speaker 06

  music. You're gonna hear beautifully architected music. The music is really avant-garde and kinda, you've never heard it before because we use the sulphagenium ancient music scale, and we build this stuff in 528 Hz or 432 Hz. Really complex geometry, fine. But underneath it is six million dollars of the most sophisticated patented software ever created. Huh? What do you mean? A typical song is about five megabytes. New Calm Rescue 70 is 1.49 gigabytes. When you download the track, it's 1.5 gigabytes of mathematics we're using to trick the most sophisticated organ in the history of the planet, your brain. And what we're doing

• 1:10:16Speaker 06

  is we're using all this complex physics and math to simply pace your brain like a NASCAR pace car. We take you to 12 Hz, and then we cycle you in this kind of space of 12 Hz to 4 Hz, mostly in theta. So the experience is really unique and fun because you're just listening to music. You can't hear, it's inaudible to the human ear, but we're pacing you into 12 hertz. Ignite, on the other hand, the Ignite Warrior Brain, we raise the decibels of the physics so that you can feel that thundering pulse low end, it's like, that's the physics. That's all the math and all the stuff. We wanted, we put that in there because we've been working with special forces in the US military, we've been working with professional athletes. We didn't want them to think they were listening to just music. We wanted to

• 1:11:01Speaker 06

  understand, there's $6 million of patented physics underneath this music, driving your brainwave function up to 39, 40, and 41 hertz.

• 1:11:10Chris Williamson?

  When you tell me that those special ops soldiers sat in the choppers on the way out to do operations and they've all got it on as they're flying out?

• 1:11:19Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:11:21Chris Williamson?

  That's the coolest advert for a product that I can imagine. It's some Call of Duty shit.

• 1:11:27Speaker 06

  It is Call of Duty shit, and it's pretty amazing because when you are in mistake-free, high-intense focus, that's where you need to be for a mission. And for me, I'm a layperson, I'm a civilian, I've never been in the military. It seems stressful to me to go on a mission, but it's not. That's where all the training lies. The stress to a military operative is their home life, and their spouse, or their kids, or paying the bills, whatever. It's odd to me. So we do a lot of work in the military. I'm really pleased and impressed by their capability, their sacrifice, what they do. And at first, when we first started working with them, I felt almost an ethical battle. I was like, I'm relaxing warriors so they can kill people better? And I thought to myself, no, that's not the way to look at it. I'm taking care of soldiers who are sacrificing their life for the protection,

• 1:12:10Speaker 06

  liberties, and freedom of us. And furthermore, they're 18 to 35 years old, and they're giving modafinol and uppers to get into their mission, they're giving Ambien when they get back from their mission. No, I'm gonna solve that problem. So yeah, we do a lot of work with the military, mostly special forces, do a lot of work with the FBI, and then we do a lot of work with probably 300 or 400 of the world's top athletes. And so they have their own recipe, yeah.

• 1:12:34Chris Williamson?

  Have you done any clinical studies into the effects of Warrior Brain yet?

• 1:12:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, we always look at dopamine for that and really just the brainwave function. So we'll look at an EEG to make sure that when we say your brain at 12 minutes is at 39 Hz, that's what we're looking at. We've never done any output stuff and we won't do a lot of work like that. We're doing research right now with the United States Air Force Special Operations Command on fatigue, pilot fatigue and surgeon fatigue. That's pretty cool because, you know, fatigue creates errors and errors create death. All right, fine. We're also doing work in psychiatric world around PTSD, comorbid with addiction and the ability of New Calm to resolve the autonomic nervous system, stress response and allow you to heal. And we're also doing research with the former medical director of the NFL on concussions.

• 1:13:24Chris Williamson?

  Busy, busy, one way to put it.

• 1:13:28Speaker 06

  It's awesome, man. It's a, it's an awesome place to be. It's an awesome, it's awesome to wake up every day knowing you're solving people's problems, changing people's lives. The amount of goodwill and the amount of great stories we get, when you liberate a human from stress, you change their life, period. And when you do that for a dad or a mom and you take care of their children, it's incredible. And what's cool about New Calm is I don't have to be there. It's a technology. Tony Robbins is a dear friend and I love Tony and the mission he's on and

• 1:14:08Speaker 06

  the purpose he's on is amazing and admirable and he's exceptionally gifted, but he's one to many. New Calm is one to 7.6 billion people. We just have to get in your hands. We need to create awareness, education, understanding. You know, I look at the sleep industry, like I said earlier, it's $585 billion. Who thinks that buying a bed is going to improve my sleep? That's how little you understand about sleep. It's not an external issue. Sleep is not external. Changing my sheets and changing my bed is not going to help with the nutritional deficiency, the nutrients, the physiology, the cortisol, the melatonin, the L-theanine, the GABA in

• 1:14:50Speaker 06

  my brain. So we know so little about sleep that there's people out there selling garbage to people that it's not a solution. That's a problem. We need to solve that problem.

• 1:15:02Chris Williamson?

  What are you doing next? What are you working on next? You've got Warrior Brain to get people jacked up. You've mentioned the focus thing, but I've not seen that on the app. Is that not released yet?

• 1:15:11Speaker 06

  You're not gonna see it, probably till the first quarter of next year.

• 1:15:15Chris Williamson?

  That's precisely why.

• 1:15:17Speaker 06

  Here's what you're gonna see next. And this is crazy exciting to me. We have an isochronic waveform.

• 1:15:24Chris Williamson?

  What's in? Speak English, Jim.

• 1:15:26Speaker 06

  I will. So when we work on New Calm and Ignite, you have to use headphones. There's binaural signal processing. We're using some physics and some trickery and some compensation of the brain to present it with a pattern. You need headphones. Isochronic waveform is a physics platform and a waveform that can pace your brain without headphones. So it's not as powerful. Like if I listen to Ignite through my computer, I get jacked. If I listen to it with headphones, I wanna freaking tear the face off my grandma, right? So the headphones create a greater experience. We built a sleep track that accelerates you into delta, 0.5 Hz, isochronically. So there's no headphone.

• 1:16:10Speaker 06

  You just put it, you know, you have an iPad or whatever you have in your bedroom and you play the track. It's 50 minutes. You play it one time through, you ain't staying awake. It's incredible. So I know intuitively, within a year, the sleep side of what we do and what we deliver to humans will be the number one thing our business is built around. We came to the world with New Calm with a specific intent of liberating people from stress. But as we've evolved and as we've learned and as we've seen life as we know it, sleep is the biggest issue. Now, we know, and the neuroscience and physiology side, stress is a normal catalyst to poor sleep. But let's just go right to the problem. So I think the sleep neuroacoustic software is gonna change the world.

• 1:16:55Speaker 06

  And I think it's gonna change the landscape. You can't stay awake. So in the event that you have onset of sleep problems, mostly that's GABA deficiency and neurotransmitter imbalance. You're gonna listen to this, it's gonna put you out. In the event that you wake up at three in the morning, because your liver has to create adrenaline to enzymatically break down your toxins, your liver has a biorhythm. People are like, "Yeah, I woke up at two or three," and I don't know why. "Hey asshole, your liver has a biorhythm. It's called it wakes up and does its job between two and three. So it's not coincidence you wake up every night at two to three. That's the body's biorhythm. But when you do, and you sit there and you perseverate on things you can't solve at three o'clock in the morning, you put the track on again. Bye-bye. Good night."

• 1:17:39Speaker 06

  So that's coming next, and that's coming in the fall. We're gonna have three master tracks. Each track takes months and months to create. So people don't understand the complexity, and I don't want them to. This isn't about the complexity of neuroscience. I don't care, nor do I want to know how a microwave works. I just know it heats up my food. I don't want people to care or know how NuCalm works. It's far more complicated than microwaves. I just want you to know it's gonna put you in control of your life, your emotional stability, give you energy, clarity, and liberate you from stress and allow you to be the best you can be. That's what I want people to know. But in the event that people are curious, the neuroacoustic software takes months to build a single track because it's not music just based on masking.

• 1:18:24Speaker 06

  It's music based on every second of every minute has to go in congruence with the physics and the math. There's a mathematical matrix that our composers have to follow. It's literally like brain surgery. So when we launch Sleep, we're working on it now, we're gonna have three master tracks. All of them will be 50 minutes, five zero. You listen to it once. One will be like pink noise and brown noise combined. One will be environmental sounds like NuCalm, and then one will be melodic sounds like NuCalm. So that's Sleep, that's coming next. So what we're doing right now, Chris, is really fun. We have created a business and a brand in New Calm and we have a lot of people that use it. Great. We've simplified it. We've dropped the pace 99% and we're welcoming

• 1:19:09Speaker 06

  thousands of people a month. That's great. We have Ignite. We've teased it twice. People are starting to adopt it and starting to understand it. No one knew that we even had it besides people that signed a confidential agreement with the US military and professional athletes. We have that out there. Sleep is coming, but what we're doing right now is we're going to go back to the well and work with a creative agency to create an umbrella brand. And that brand is going to be the portfolio of what we do because what we do is not New Calm and it's not Ignite and it's not Sleep and it's not Focus. What we do is allow you as a human being to dictate what state change you want and for you to manage your state using our clinically proven patented physics and mathematics and biochemistry

• 1:19:50Speaker 06

  and electrical signaling on demand. So to do that, we need an umbrella brand. I like the concept of tuning. I've always liked the tuning. Blake used to say, hey, this is, it's like, we're like fine tuning a musical instrument. That's what New Calm is doing. I like the idea of tuning up, tuning in, tuning out. I don't know if that's going to resonate and how we're going to do this, but we're going to have an umbrella brand. And then under that umbrella brand, we're going to have New Calm, Ignite, Focus and Sleep. Those are the four elements to the whole range of 41 Hz to 0.5 Hz. The whole human experience we own at your fingertips. And then we built the voice and speech recognition in the New Calm Stress and Fatigue Assessment Tool. That we deployed with the FBI. The FBI

• 1:20:35Speaker 06

  uses that every day to show readiness of their operators for their missions.

• 1:20:39Chris Williamson?

  So it's able to verbally detect the patterns of someone's voice and then give them a readout of how stressed they are?

• 1:20:46Speaker 06

  Yep. It's patterns, it's cadence, it's word choice. It's amazing. So you speak extemporaneously, you see a picture, you speak into your phone for 20 seconds, it captures 10 million data points and uses regressive analysis to spit out your stress response now in the moment. It's wild, man. That to me is like, okay, quantitatively, I want to see the impact New Calm is having. So yeah, so that's what we're doing. So this summer is going to be a blast because we get to kind of build the spaceship and say, hey, guess what? We're coming in September with a whole new look and feel and a whole new offering that includes New Calm, Ignite and Sleep.

• 1:21:21Chris Williamson?

  This is proper Tony Stark stuff, man.

• 1:21:26Speaker 06

  It really is. What's fascinating for me is that we're, we play kind of in left brain, allopathic medicine. We also play in eastern medicine. We also play in physics and things that are not understood. We play in resonance and vibration and frequency. And there's some really fascinating stuff, but it's for us, it's all built around wanting to help and wanting to serve. And so it feels really good. Thankfully, I was raised with good parents. There's no nefarious genes in my DNA because we can do some really weird stuff if we wanted to. We can implant words in your midbrain. We can do.

• 1:22:04Chris Williamson?

  Through the software?

• 1:22:06Speaker 06

  Yeah. We can do a lot of interesting stuff for good and for bad. And so we choose good and we choose to do really cool things.

• 1:22:16Chris Williamson?

  That's sick, man. Jim Poole, ladies and gentlemen, everyone that's listening that thinks, I want a bit of this, where should they go?

• 1:22:23Speaker 06

  Newcall, N U C A L M dot com. And you can get started and join the family there. And from there you can then learn about Ignite. And there's several different ways to get started. There's a monthly subscription. There's an annual subscription. There's a lifetime subscription. Most people, you know, we're a domestic US company. We do sell around the globe. Most people who buy internationally buy the annual, just because shipping expenses are silly. But yeah, come join the family and come take a technology that's been around for 20 years and that will liberate you and become your best friend. No judgment, no shame, no guilt, just hey, it's time for me to go new calm. Go in your bed, get on a good recovery,

• 1:23:07Speaker 06

  get up, feel amazing and go take on your day.

• 1:23:11Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. Thanks so much for today.

• 1:23:14Speaker 06

  Pleasure. Take care of yourselves. Covid's over. Now we're the, we're the calm after the storm. Let's go.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

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  On October 2nd.

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  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

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  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess.

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  And Digger's gonna dig us out.

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  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what.

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  With great power comes great deniability.

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  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.