April 23, 2020

From Podcast: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/biohacking-podcasts/biohacking-sleep/

[00:00:00] Introduction

[00:01:12] Podcast Sponsors

[00:04:01] About this Podcast

[00:08:06] Guest Introduction

[00:09:12] A Quick Overview Of The NuCalm Device

[00:12:21] New Advances In The NuCalm Technology

[00:25:54] Why The NuCalm Listening App Is More Efficacious Than Other Focus Music Apps

[00:29:18] Podcast Sponsors

[00:32:41]  Why The NuCalm Listening App Is More Efficacious

[00:34:30] How The NuCalm Is Different From A Sleep-Cycle Simulation Device

[00:37:19] How The NuCalm Has Performed Compared To Sleep Studies

[00:41:44] Times To Avoid Using The NuCalm

[00:49:28] How To Stack The NuCalm With Your Favorite Biohacks

[00:55:32] About The “Ignite” Feature On The NuCalm

[01:02:43] An Affordable Way To Purchase The NuCalm System

[01:09:48] Closing the Podcast

[01:12:45] End of Podcast

Ben:  On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Jim:  The level of uncertainty, anxiety, fear, stress is unprecedented. We've never been here before because the reticular activating system's primary function is pattern recognition. It is literally commanding all the resources of your brain to try to figure it out and it can't. And the last three minutes of the track is pure warrior brain. And so you wonder, “Well, how can you jack me up through the high-stress zone and I don't create an anxious response?”

Ben:  Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show.

Yow, what's up? It's Ben. Today's episode is really based on what I consider to be one of the most powerful tools in my own personal arsenal for sleeps, for naps, for anxiety, for stress. It goes with me everywhere on the planet and you guys get to find out what that is on today's show. I'll keep you waiting with bated breath. This podcast is brought to you by Kion, my playground for creating amazing formulations of supplements, functional foods, antioxidant-rich coffee, everything that comes out of my crazy brain that I want to make. And I'm traveling around the world finding ingredients and different berries, and plants, and twigs, and roots.

And also, when I'm researching and looking into all these different articles on novel compounds that can enhance physiology, or immunity, or gut health, or joint recovery, or anything like that, we go to the drawing table at Kion and we make it for you using all research-backed formulations, and our goal really is to make your life better one step at a time with our entire suite of products. You get 10% off of anything, anything at Kion. And you just use code BEN10 at getkion.com. I personally stand behind everything at that site. In particular, the aminos are absolutely amazing. Somebody texted me the other day and said they felt like they were on steroids using these things, and they're not steroids, it's just pure, pure amino acids. And there's plenty else over there as well, our creatine fish oil, you name it. You got it at Kion, getkion.com and use code BEN10.

One thing you cannot get at Kion, however, is beef jerky. We don't have beef jerky there, but our other sponsor for today's show has really, really good beef jerky. They ferment their beef jerky. So, it creates naturally occurring probiotics in the meat, which make it great for gut health. It's kind of like an old-school method of preserving beef, but then they do not use conventional spices, which are often sprayed with pesticides or natural flavors. They source all their beef from small domestic farms in the U.S. Everything, of course, is 100% grass-fed, grass-finished, not finished on grains like many folks do, but finished on grass.

And these are the folks at Paleovalley, who have made this for you. They're 100% grass-fed, grass-finished Paleovalley beef sticks that are, like I mentioned, fermented. Great source of omega-3 fatty acids, glutathione, conjugated linoleic acid, just a wonderful snack. My kids have a whole pantry full of these things and they just munch on them throughout the day, and I'm just fine with that, obviously, because they're super healthy, unlike a lot of beef jerky. So, paleovalley.com/ben. It gets you 15% off of anything at Paleovalley. So, enjoy your beef sticks and let's go talk to Jim Poole.

Hey, folks, I decided that I actually wanted to take the podcast episode the interview that you're about to hear and really, really push it forward on the timeline a little bit just because of the times that we're in. As a matter of fact, by the time I'm recording this, we're going through the current coronavirus pandemic, the shelter-in-place order. There's a lot of stress, a lot of people dealing with insomnia, with anxiety, with tiredness, with big changes to their lives and their daily routines, their sleep cycles, and the list goes on.

Now, I have said many times before that the most powerful thing that we have within each and every one of us to control stress is our breath, which is free, our prana, our life force that we can implement to lower cortisol using things like 4-7-8 breathing, or nasal breathing, or box breathing. And that all being said, despite–for me personally, having a really rigorous breathwork practice that I tap into and have been tapping into with the increasing frequency, there is one other stress reduction and sleep-enhancing tool that for me right now on a daily basis is a non-negotiable.

Now, I was using it for like six months before this pandemic even struck, but it's been so, so helpful for me going through these times that I had to do a podcast on it, another podcast on it, just because again, it's one of those things that is constantly at my side, in my bag. When I go into the hyperbaric chamber, it's in there with me. When I'm sleeping, it's in there. I had it on this morning when as I have been doing, I woke up at 4:00 a.m. and just had to blow myself basically back through a simulated sleep cycle. So, this is definitely a biohack, what we're about to talk about is technology and it's pretty advanced technology. And I'd say if you're not interested in things that you can purchase to enhance sleep, you should probably just hit stop right now and stop listening because this definitely falls into the category of a very powerful tool, but I would say that if you are remiss to just like purchase something to enhance your sleep, your naps, your anxiety, I'd stop listening. But if you're game to learn a little bit more, this is definitely going to be something that again I use every day, and I don't say that about a lot of things.

So, what I'm talking about is something that I did a podcast on, again about six months ago. That podcast was called “How to Simulate a Full Sleep Cycle in 20 Minutes,” the best stress biohack that exists and vagus nerve stimulation. And essentially, as the title implies, what I got into was this device that does all of what I just described. We'll take a full 90 minutes sleep cycle and simulate that in 20 minutes. We'll just literally melt away stress almost immediately, and also serve as a way to increase your vagal nerve tone in the same way that yoga, and meditation, and chanting, and humming, and singing, and cold baths do.

And the device that I talked with the designer about in that episode is called a NuCalm, N-UCalm, a NuCalm. Now, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/nucalmpodcast, that's N-UCalm podcast, you can listen to that initial episode. Now, the shownotes for this podcast are just at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/nucalmpodcast2, as in N-UCalm podcast the number 2, BenGreenfieldFitness.com/nucalmpodcast2. And I'll link to also that previous episode in these shownotes as well in addition to everything that I talked about with the designer of this impressive thing.

His name is Jim Poole. Like I mentioned, Jim joined me for like an hour and a half a few months ago to go into some of the hardcore science behind this thing. So, you may want to even download that episode. I would recommend that you do in addition to listening to this one. And he's the president of something called Solace Lifesciences. They make the NuCalm device. He's been involved in neuroscience for many years and has launched a lot of other products in the realm of human enhancement, but this NuCalm thing is just basically his baby right now. And Jim is texting me almost every day about new things they're working on and I'm trying out different things that he sends me. And they've developed some new protocols. They've released some new technologies built up around this NuCalm that I have found to not only upgrade the experience, but simplify it dramatically. So, I wanted to get Jim on the show to talk about that stuff as well. So, Jim Poole, welcome back to the show, man.

Jim:  Ben, thanks for having me. Welcome, everybody. A couple things that are profound in our advancement since our last discussion.

Ben:  Well, actually, you know what, I'm going to stop you right there not to be rude, but before we even talk about kind of like what's evolved for people who may not have the time right now to hit stop and go back and listen to our previous podcast, can you give us the 40,000-foot overview of what the NuCalm is?

Jim:  Absolutely. I'll start with the company. We're 18-year-old company. We're a neuroscience company and we're focused on developing solutions for stress management, recovery, sleep, performance. Using biochemistry and physics in the form of neuroacoustic software, we put people into whatever zone we want, commensurate with the outcome. Healing recovery is alpha-theta, performance is gamma brainwave function. If you think about how we impact physiological outcomes, it's all a system approach. There's not one thing in the NuCalm technology that is going to drive everything.

So, everything's a system approach. NuCalm was born out of the need to help people cope with post-traumatic stress disorder, comorbid with addiction. For those of you who are aware of the anxiety spectrum in the DSM-5, there are seven diagnosable anxiety disorders of PTSD falls on the furthest continuum. So, this is the hardest profile of the human experience to manage their anxiety, stress, hypervigilance, fight-or-flight is constantly active and it's a really tough profile. This technology was designed to take care of that person.

So, 11 years ago when I got involved and took over the company, I knew because of my background, well, if this can take care of the worst profile of anxiety, stress, hypervigilance, fight-or-flight, it can help all of us. And so that's exactly what it does. The technology, and we'll get into the science about it, but we have the only patent in the world for systems and methods to balance and maintain the health of the human autonomic nervous system, what Ben alluded to earlier, with the breathing practices, a hyperbaric chamber. All of this is designed to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. This technology or biohack has the only patent in the world for it.

Ben:  And really, as I know we'll talk about later some kind of new things that pretty drastically upregulate the sympathetic nervous system that I've been messing around with pre-workout. That's a whole different ballpark, but we'll get into that. Anyways though, when I first interviewed you, we talked about this device and it looked very similar to almost like a vagal nerve stimulator that I've messed around with in the past, like electrodes that attach to either side of the head with some cream. In your guys' case, you had developed a cream that contained things like GABA and theanine that got driven even more deeply into tissue when combined with this electrical muscle stimulation device. And then you play these very–it's hard to describe, but there are these crazy audio tracks that I'll let you get into the science behind those tracks. But unlike anything I've tried before, like Brain.fm or SleepStream or Pzizz, I've messed around with all these different audio apps and I still can't wrap my head around why this NuCalm one works so much differently.

But walk me through what has happened since that initial interview where we're talking about the cream and the electrical stimulation to now the use of these disks that again have vastly simplified it for me because all I got to do is slap one of these disks on instead of using the stimulator and the cream. But just walk me through that whole evolution.

Jim:  So, timing is everything. In the course of our 10 years of serving the world with NuCalm, we've had three monumental advancements. And the disk that you're alluding to was launched in late summer last year. It's really a Herculean effort in technology advancement and it really challenges the user to suspend your disbelief because when you look at a disk that goes on your wrist and see that that replaces a cream with stimulation device and neural patches, it's unbelievable.

Ben:  Well, it seems–I mean, not to interrupt too much, but it seemed hokey at first. I thought you guys were like cutting corners and trying to save money by figuring out how to send out a little sticker instead of the device and the cream. Then I started to use it and it did the same thing to me. Like I'm a total skeptic. As a physiologist and biomechanist, I really take into account science quite a bit and still have yet to wrap my head around how you were able to replace actual electrical stimulation and an actual physical cream with this disk. But I was actually very, very skeptical when you told me you were doing this and you sent me the disk. I was like, “Ah, here we go. There's a money grab.” But it's shockingly effective. So, walk me through these disks.

Jim:  Okay. Let's talk first about the cream and the stint. What were we trying to accomplish with that element of the NuCalm system? It's really simple. We were trying to present the brain with a cornucopia of inhibitory neurotransmitters. Really designed to interrupt the HPA axis and slow down the secretion of adrenaline. Kind of like having a glass of wine or two, but we didn't want any cognitive impairment. GABA, GABAA and GABAB are the body's primary inhibitory neurotransmitters designed to put the brakes on the stress response.

But getting GABA to the brain is exceptionally difficult, whether you're trying to cross the blood-brain barrier, whether you're creating an analog of GABA that the brain recognizes. It's a huge challenge. There's a lot of people that take GABA supplementation. You'd be holding on the press to see that the yield that actually affects your brain is about 7% of what you ingest. So, we were trying to get GABA to the brain. There was also L-theanine in those. You mentioned there's a casein tryptic hydrolysate, there's L-tyrosine. So, it was a group of inhibitory neurotransmitters.

Ben:  Alright, transdermal delivery cream, basically.

Jim:  Exactly, a transdermal cream. The neck is about nine times more absorbent than the rest of the skin on your body, so it was a good place to absorb the cream. And then we use that stimulation device, which you're right, it's a vagal stimulator. It's cranial electrotherapy stimulation developed and designed in Saint Petersburg, Russia about 70 years ago. We use that, if you recall, as an electrophoresis of the cell wall membrane to open up the receptor sites to GABA. So, it was a catalyst to ensure that the cream actually reached its intended destination, kind of like a garage door open.

Ben:  Right. And that was–I've known about that ever since I've done at the Ironman Sports Medicine Conference one year. A physician there presented on the use of electrical stimulation to deliver topical anti-inflammatories into the skin more effectively. He was working with a lot of Tour de France teams and using topicals like traumeel, magnesium, CBD creams, et cetera, but then combining that with electrical muscle stimulation to drive it more deeply into the tissue. So, I was relatively familiar with the concept from an injury recovery standpoint. And you guys replicated that from a relaxation standpoint.

Jim:  We did. And what we found, Ben, is when you give humans the opportunity to make an excuse to take care of themselves, they find it. So, it was interesting to us. We'd have a lot of habitual users and then after about six months, they say, “I don't use it that much anymore because the stimulation device is kind of a pain in the butt, we have to recharge the batteries, you have to have neural patches.” So, that was one of the reasons behind the impetus —

Ben:  Got to get strange looks on the airplane?

Jim:  Yeah. Well, absolutely. Well, that was kind of cool. It was always a good conversation starter. And by the end of every trip that I was on, everybody next to me was NuCalm. Okay. So, what are we doing? It took Dr. Holloway four years to invent this bio signal processing disk. And this is going to be absolutely fascinating. I'll speak to it in simple enough terms that everybody understands what we're doing because this is a leap of faith. What Dr. Holloway did was determined and figured out through alchemy a series of lipid formations in creating a frequency and a signature frequency and recipe of the cream, literally, GABAA, GABAB, L-theanine, casein tryptic hydrolysate, L-tyrosine. He worked it down into the frequency.

Now, as you know, cell biology is all frequency. There's a resonance to it, there's electrical component to it, but it's all bioinformatics. Cells have a job to do. Cells have information to share. When we ingest a supplement or we use a transdermal cream, the body has to go through all this mechanistic approach and digestion and metabolic piece to deliver. All you're trying to do is break down that element to the message that's in that cell. Well, Dr. Holloway with the disk has circumvented all of that craziness. We don't need to do that. He used a German database as a point of reference that has frequencies of thousands and thousands of elements and figured out what the frequency for GABAA is, GABAB, L-theanine, casein tryptic hydrolysate, L-tyrosine, and it is literally in a recipe in a software.

Ben:  Now, this would largely be–it would fall under the category of like energy medicine, right? I mean, I know it's also often referred to as quantum medicine. And because of that, it's likely to end up on any number of popular skeptic's websites, this idea that you can actually affect something like physiology or immunology or anything else via the use of specific frequencies to influence the cell voltage potential. But then when you read a book like Jerry Tennant's “Healing is Voltage” or Robert Becker's “The Body Electric,” you actually can pretty well wrap your head around how the human body's a battery, and not only the cell membranes operate on certain electrochemical gradients–in an ideal situation, a negative voltage potential on the interior and a positive voltage potential on the exterior. But then we also know that the cells themselves vibrate at specific frequencies. So, what you guys were trying to do, if I understand properly, is take all these things like theanine, GABA, et cetera, figure out what frequency they were using to vibrate a cell, and essentially, you're trying to replicate that in some type of a form or something you'd wear?

Jim:  That's exactly what we've done. And if you look at Becker, even predating Becker, you've got Nikola Tesla and you've got George Lakhovsky. Those are the originators of electric medicine, right?

Ben:  Right.

Jim:  So, that's exactly what Dr. Holloway has done. So, we found a frequency. Now, we have to deliver this frequency to the brain. So, you have this disk. On that disk, not by coincidence, you have the Lakhovsky multi-wave oscillator. That design on there is a multi-wave oscillator designed to push the frequency and the energy to the meridian point. This disk is taken off this piece of paper and taken out of an anti-static Faraday bag. It is activated on your Gauss field, your electromagnetism of your skin. Three-finger lengths from your left wrist joint is the pericardium 6 acupressure point.

Ben:  Yeah. I wanted to ask you about that. Why do I need to put it on that point?

Jim:  Well, acupressure, as you know, is basically a direct line of communication, like a fiber-optic cable to different areas of the body. Well, the pericardium 6 has a direct line of communication to the pericardial sac. The pericardial sac is the sac that protects the heart. And inside the pericardial sac, it's rich with autonomic nerve fibers, both stress and rest response nerve fibers that communicate directly to the brain. So, we want a fast access point. We want to use what you normally would create. The acupressure point of pericardium 6 is designed to create relaxation. So, it has to go on that point. There's another point in the upper left scapula of your back that could be used as well, but the pericardium 6 acupuncture–

Ben:  It's a little tougher to access though on your own.

Jim:  It is. It is tougher to access. So, you'll notice if you were to place it anywhere else in your body, having used NuCalm as much as you have, you'll notice that it's not as profound, which is fascinating. You'll also notice, Ben, this is fascinating to me as well, sometimes the disk is harder to get off your wrist when you're done with NuCalm. I think that's that.

Ben:  Yeah. Particularly when I'm more tired, I have to freaking rip that thing off after I've napped or done one of my sleep cycles. Why is that?

Jim:  Your body at that point of exhaustion was so deprived of GABA. It is sucking the life out of that disk. It's absolutely fascinating.

Ben:  I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. Again, it's one of those things where when we're talking about energies, and frequencies, and vibration, and cell voltage, when you can't actually slap on cream and feel the electrical stimulation, again you raise an eyebrow at it but the results are speaking for themselves for me. So, this disk that is placed on the skin, that can be indeed a lot harder to remove if you're more tired. You said it came in a bag, like a Faraday type bag. Is that the black bag?

Jim:  No. So, the black bag is fine. That's just a travel bag. It's that plastic bag with the Ziploc seal. That bag that has a metallic feel to it, that is a Faraday anti-static bag. That's protecting that disk from EMFs because the frequency, because the software lies on top of that disk, it's prone to the element of EMF. So, if you were to put that disk onto a laptop, you will eviscerate the frequency and the recipe on that disk.

Ben:  I did not–so I need to be keeping these disks inside that bag no matter what?

Jim:  You absolutely need to. And furthermore, here's what a lot of people do as well. They have accelerometers and all these kind of things on their left wrist, Apple watch.

Ben:  Right.

Jim:  No, no, no. Some people are using the Apple watch to keep the disk in place. I said, “No. You're literally erasing the disk, the energies on the disk by the accelerometer.” So, have nothing on your left wrist and make sure you keep those disks in that bag because they will be rendered useless.

Ben:  That's very good. I've done a pretty good job keeping it in the bag, but in between uses, sometimes I've just toss in a little bag I keep my noise-blocking headphones in. So, that's actually very good to know and I think for anybody who owns these disks, they might not realize that. Okay. So, we've got this disk. We've put it on the acupressure point, and obviously–so I don't know if you found this, but before I use the actual technology that I know we'll get into in a second, the actual sounds that you play through, what I've found to be most effective noise-blocking headphones. When I've put on this disk even in the absence of the audios, I think I texted you about this last week, I've been putting it on just before I hit the sac at night and go to sleep, without headphones or anything in, just putting it on. It seems to work, not as well as when you use the audio, but it seems to induce a state of relaxation even without playing the audios. Is that something you've experienced?

Jim:  A couple weeks ago, I was in a board room I got in Annapolis, Maryland. And the gentleman next to me–it was [00:24:06] _____ our meeting. And throughout the fourth hour of the meeting, he took a disturbing business call and he was highly agitated after the call. And there were five of us in the room, and he was sitting to my left. And his leg was moving and you could see visibly he was filled with anxiety. We've put the disk on him, and the people across the table about 15 seconds later says, “Holy cow, your leg has stopped moving and you looked completely relaxed.” He said, “Yeah, I am.”

We've noticed that significantly, you can absolutely wear the disk–again, you'll probably notice, it's like having a glass of wine or two with no cognitive impairment because the GABAA receptor site is anxiolytically related to anything that relaxes the brain chemistry is GABAA receptor site derived. Remember, on our prior podcast, all alcohol binds with the GABAA receptor cycle. That's what creates relaxation. All barbiturates bind to the GABAA receptor site. All benzodiazepines bind to the GABAA receptor site. So, that disk, basically, you're binding GABAA to the GABAA receptor site. So, anytime you feel like you just need your shoulders to reduce a little bit or take the edge off, you can put that disk on.

Ben:  It's going to save me a lot of money on wine, dude.

Jim:  It's going to put a lot of wine [00:25:17] _____ out of business.

Ben:  Now, I like to have my wine and put my NuCalm disk on, but that's just me. I use my wine not only for relaxation, but also as a palate cleanser in between bites of steak. So, this disk, regardless of the fact that I know–and I even realized some people are probably going to jump in the comments and make fun of this just because it is quantum medicine, it's energy medicine, it's frequency-based and voltage medicine. Nonetheless, just for me personally, I don't argue with results. And when I put the thing on, it works the same as the cream with the electrical stimulation.

So, I was pretty stoked at the simplicity with that. I mean, not having to drag around the electrical stimulation anymore or the cream anymore, but in terms of the actual software that's on my phone, what you call I think the neuroacoustic software, walk me through that because I'm still trying to wrap my head around why it actually works so much better than any of these other audio apps that, again like Brain.fm or any of these others that I've talked about in the past.

Jim:  Alright, when you look at what else is out there–so you've got thousands of 99-cent binaural beat apps, you've got the Monroe Institute, Holosync, you've got BrainTap, Brain.fm. What you'll find is that the first time you use it, Ben, it has a very good effect. The second time you use it, it has a good effect. The third time you use it, a mediocre effect. About the fourth time you use it, there's almost no effect at all. It's simply because the lack of complexity in the mathematics and the algorithms inside of what they're doing, the brain figures it out.

So, we're using binaural signal processing. A lot of people use binaural signal processing. It was discovered by a German scientist in 1839. It's basically physics to trick the brain and the caudate nucleus of the midbrain into presenting your brain with a beat that is inaudible to the human ear. We can only hear at the low-end about 20 Hertz. Alpha and theta is below 20 Hertz. So, we're using binaural signal processing as a carrier to present the beat. But here's where it gets fascinating. A typical song is about five megabytes. The Recovery 2 track that you listen to is 789 megabytes of information were forcing your brain to process.

So, in there, we have a pitch in frequency mathematical matrix, we have binaural signal processing, but the key and why NuCalm not only has the only patent in the world but the method and the physics used to create those neuroacoustic tracks is also patented, is a nonlinear oscillating algorithm. So, the reticular activating system of our brain manages all stimulation that comes to your brain, visual, auditory, everything. And the RAS, reticular activating system, has two primary functions, pattern recognition and finding shortcuts. When you present your brain with a pattern that's simple, it'll be tricked the first time, second time, third time. After that, it won't.

That's why where you live, I guarantee, there are homes in your neighborhood you still don't even know are there. It's amazing because we can't take in all the stimulation that comes from all our senses. We have to have some filter system. So, our brain knows, “Hey, I need that information. I don't need that information.” So, the key for NuCalm is this nonlinear oscillating algorithm that is constantly in perpetual motion and constantly tricking your brain. So, there's two things that happen. One, your brain will never figure it out. Number two, and you notice this in the strength of the Power Nap 2 track. Because the reticular activating system's primary function is pattern recognition, it is literally commanding all the resources of your brain to try to figure it out and it can't. So, we have further strengthened the neuroacoustic software and the algorithms and the math underneath the music, and you notice that, and the Power Nap 2 is the strongest track we've ever released.

Ben:  Hey, I want to interrupt today's show to tell you about light therapy. Now, I've been talking a lot lately about this concept of human photosynthesis, how we can in response to certain wave spectrums of light, particularly sunlight, but also red light, infrared light, near-infrared light, we can create electrons that help to allow the mitochondria to produce ATP even if we're not, say like, eating steaks and sweet potato fries, and yogurt, and ice cream, and everything else we'd normally eat for calories to generate electrons. Well, yes, I recommend everybody goes out in the sunshine. But if you want to do things like simulate sunrise because your ass can't get out of bed super early in the morning, or sunset in your office or in your bedroom, or you want to bathe yourself in all these healing spectrums of light using this so-called photobiomodulation concept, which you can literally find thousands of research studies on PubMed, then you use one of these photobiomodulation panels.

And I think the best one out there in terms of it having the greatest amount of power, the lowest necessity for long treatment times, the biggest versatility in terms of the size of the light panels that you can use is Joovv. So, Joovv has the light panel that I use up in my bathroom to shine on my face when I'm doing things like a clay mask. I've got two of their units in my office that I sandwich my body in in the morning. So, it's like hugging a warm teddy bear of sunlight. That's the best way I can describe it. And I've even got a mini that my kids use in their bedroom. So, Joovv makes the best red light panels that you can get. And you get a free copy of my book, “Boundless” if you grab a Joovv panel. So, you just go to joovv.com/ben. It's J-O-O-V-V.com/ben and use discount code BEN. That'll automatically get you all the goodies along with your Joovv panel, the mini, the big Elite one I have in my office, the little Go one I have up in my bathroom that travels with me, really, really great stuff they put out. So, joovv.com/ben.

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However, the Comrad folks have amazing styles that actually look good that are fashion statements that can go all the way up to your knees if you want to be that knee on, knee high compression sock wearing fool. And I have a bunch of Comrad Socks. I wear them all the time now. So, you can say goodbye to tired legs and swollen feet with Comrad Socks. You get a 20% discount on Comrad Socks. You go to comradsocks.com/kion. That's C-O-M-R-A-D, comradsocks.com/kion and use discount code BEN20 at checkout to get 20% off of Comrad Socks.

Ben:  The Power Nap 2 is by far my favorite. It's a 20-minute track and it knocks me flat on my ass within about four minutes. And that's interesting that you say that about the complexity because I was complaining to you when you first sent me the app to download because I'm a big fan of music and I'm always trying to just like pay attention to the notes and the tracks. And I was talking to you on the phone and I told you, “Look, man. Do you have any tracks that don't have actual music on them?” Because I know this is going to distract me, like I'm going to be listening to the music and enjoying the music and paying attention to the scales and the notes.

And then once I started using it, my brain couldn't actually figure out the note, like I couldn't predict what was coming next. And I've probably done Power Nap now, like 80 times, and my brain still can't figure out what's coming next. Same thing for the other two I've been using a lot of, especially for early morning awakenings, like when I wake up at 4:00 a.m., I've put these on the 50-minute. What I do is because your app allows you to just kind of like DJ and put together whatever you want, so I've been playing Recovery 2, Recovery 3, and Power Nap. And sometimes I'll just lay in bed 'til like 6:00 a.m. because Recovery 2 and 3 are about 50 minutes long and Power Nap is 20 minutes, and I feel amazing when I get up, just full of energy, like I've meditated for hours, but my brain can't figure out what's coming next. You'd think I'd have memorized like, “Okay. So, the guitar is going to kick in here, the piano is going to kick in here,” and I still can't figure it out.

Jim:  No, it's amazing. I've listened to NuCalm for 11 years and there was–we were listening to it ambiently at our music producer's home in January and I was like, “What is this song?” And Dan says, “It's Recovery 2. I've listened to that a thousand times.” I was like, “I've never heard this. It's crazy.”

Ben:  Yeah. It's really nuts. And that's actually what I wanted to ask you about was this idea of even though I'm not asleep, it's–and we covered this a little bit in the last podcast, it feels like I'm slipping into a state like conscious, unconscious, conscious, unconscious. It's very similar like a deep, deep state of meditation, something I might get during something like yoga nidra or meditating for longer than an hour with some pretty intensive breathwork, but I'm just laying there listening to the music. And I'm curious when it comes to what's going on, as far as the difference between this and an actual sleep cycle or the simulation of a sleep cycle, can you get into that, any research you guys have done on this and like delta or theta waves or anything else that would be shown in a sleep cycle to determine what exactly is happening on a neurological level?

Jim:  So, the NuCalm complex algorithms are designed to present your brain with a pattern of alpha and theta. The first 16 minutes on Recovery 2 and Recovery 3 is a dance. We're preparing your central nervous system to relinquish control. And it's not until you get to the environmental sounds on Recovery 2 that you start to slip into theta. And then you're in theta for 30 straight minutes. Theta is the kind of lucid dreaming in and out of sleep. We don't take you into delta. Delta is a dreamless state where your body is restoring, but your mind is not. This is all about cycling you into theta. So, when you think about the autonomic nervous system, we have to think about the parasympathetic side, which people don't really understand, but this is the key to healing and recovery and rebuilding the body.

So, when we are in parasympathetic dominance, we're stimulating and enhancing digestion, and overall, gastrointestinal health, immune function, circulation, functioning of the liver, stomach, pancreas, intestines. This is the healing property and the healing zone for humans. It's also the only time in the sleep architecture and the only time in a human everyday life that your cells are doing cellular maintenance, cleaning their toxins, restoring your mitochondria, allowing for ATP to be created, mitigating oxidative stress. This is literally the healing zone. So, when you are in Recovery 2 for 50 minutes and you're in Recovery 3 for 50 minutes, you're getting 60 minutes of theta brainwave function. You wouldn't get that in a month's worth of sleep if you weren't using NuCalm.

So, that's what's happening, and you can't–you can try to articulate the experience to a human, but it's really difficult because we don't have anything in our vernacular that discusses the Twilight zone of your brainwave function kind of just skipping off the sleep. But you also know this, Ben, your mind is kind of wandering, it's in and out of lucid dreaming, then it goes dark, but your body is literally stuck to the earth.

Ben:  Now, have you guys actually done any–I believe they're called plethysmography study. What's the sleep study called, plethysmography? Studies like in a sleep lab to compare this to actual sleep?

Jim:  We have. And what Dr. Chung-Kang Peng in Harvard Medical School determined is 20 minutes of NuCalm is equivalent to two hours of restorative sleep. So, the fact that you can get up at 4:00, do NuCalm for two hours, you're getting a significant amount of restorative sleep. That's why when you wake up —

Ben:  Wait, say it again, how many minutes is equal to how many minutes of restorative sleep?

Jim:  Twenty minutes of NuCalm is equivalent to two hours of restorative sleep because, and this should be really simple for your audience to understand, when your brain is present and focused in theta brainwave function, your body is in the maximum healing property. And it does this similar to what you do with deep meditation, you're synchronizing your heart and your lungs, you're activating the vagus nerve, you're creating parasympathetic dominance, but really what you're doing is you're oxygenating the entire body.

So, oxygen-rich red blood cells are flowing through your entire body and your head. So, when you wake up in the morning after two hours of NuCalm, you feel very present, little things that would agitate you don't, and you also feel very focused because oxygen-rich red blood cells have not only gone through the amygdala and the HPA axis and the primordial midbrain, but they've also gone through the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and frontal cortex, which is our thinking and emotional stability. Today more than ever, the world needs NuCalm. We are completely out of balance and our central nervous system needs familiarity and security. We don't feel secure. We're threatened, our health is threatened, our lives are threatened by this virus, and now the economy is threatening people's ability to sustain, to feed their families. So, the level of uncertainty, anxiety, fear, stress is unprecedented. We've never been here before.

Ben:  Okay. So, let's back up a second. How does the oxygenation piece work? Like, how am I oxygenating any more than I would just under the state of normal sleep?

Jim:  It's because of the breath. So, if you notice, and sometimes you may be lucid enough to notice this, when you're doing NuCalm and we measure this looking at heart rate variability or respiratory sinus arrhythmia, we're slowing down your respiration rate to one breath every 10 seconds. The optimal breathing for a human being is six breaths a minute.

Ben:  You just answered a question that I was going to ask you, and that is that this thing seems to shove me into this really weird breathing pattern. So, there's going to be a little out there, but I don't know if anyone's ever smoked fire [00:40:03] ______ DMT or been on a plant medicine journey, but you get into these certain states where you feel–sometimes you feel this way during like holotropic breathwork as well where you feel like literally, one breath is taken 20 seconds in and 20 seconds out and you can just hold your breath forever. There's a guy named Patrick McKeown who wrote a book called “The Oxygen Advantage” about light nasal breathing.

I feel like I can do extremely light, slow nasal breathing. And when I'm laying there in bed, when the 20-minute power nap is going, when I'm kind of shifting in and out of the conscious, subconscious state, when I'm in that conscious state, I've paid attention to my breath and I think based on my rough calculations, I'm taking about two breaths a minute when Power Nap 2–and I might be different than other people, but it's literally like a 30-second inspiration, expiration cycle when I've got that specific track going.

Jim:  That's absolute. So, that's the key. NuCalm seems like the be-all-end-all. It's simply because it's a facilitator to allow the body to get into homeostasis. So, your breathing is unique because of your teaching and your practice of breathing. But yes, we are literally forcing this pattern and the synchronization of the heart and the lungs to most people who had no breathwork history, who have high stress, whether you have stage 4 cancer or you're going through the coronavirus, or whatever it is. We're literally imposing our will on their visceral organs and say, “We're going to synchronize your heart and your lungs, and we're going to slow down your respiration rate to one breath every 10 seconds so that you can get the most volumetric oxygen possible so that your body can heal.”

Ben:  Now, what about if I wake up at, let's say, 1:00 a.m. and I want to run like a 20-minute power nap cycle or use the NuCalm, would that be a bad idea because then I'm going to wake at 3:00 a.m. so refresh that I get out of bed? Like, should I avoid doing it at certain times?

Jim:  No. You know, it's not a bad idea. Everybody's biorhythm is unique. Historically, we would say, “You know what, it's probably not a great idea because of the potential of you waking up to energize.” But that's not what we've seen. So, what we share with people is give yourself a 15-minute rule. You wake up in the middle of the night, you can't get back to sleep, your monkey mind starts to kick in and you start getting agitated, get on NuCalm. We have not heard anecdotally of–I know hundreds and hundreds, and probably thousands of people do that. We have not heard anybody say, “Hey, it kicked me up at 4:00 in the morning, I couldn't go back to sleep.” What we hear is, “It drove me into la-la land and I was gone for four to five hours.” So, absolutely, you could do that.

So, the 15-minute rule, if you wake up and you can't get back to sleep after 15 minutes, I would go with Recovery 2 and to Recovery 3 because the power nap has a unique physics to it. So, the power nap, Ben, is unique, period. Remember, the 50-minute master NuCalm track, which is the most powerful, Recovery 2 and Recovery 3 are the most powerful tracks we've ever created. Our challenge to our neuroscientist after the Consumer Electronics Show, so we won the best of CES in 2017 and we NuCalmed 1,847 people in Vegas over three days, and we had a huge banner at our place and it said, “Get two hours of restorative sleep in 20 minutes.”

Well, people were in there for like 40, 45 minutes. And I said, “Dr. Holloway, this doesn't make sense. Marketing 101, we're telling people they're going to get two hours of restorative sleep in 20 minutes and they're in there for 47 minutes. Can you make us a 20-minute track?” You said, “No. You can't take the brain from beta or high beta down into theta without creating what's called relaxation induced anxiety. You'll literally create an anxious response.” And I said, “That's not good enough. I know you can do it.”

So, about a year of R&D, they came to us with a master track. The 20-minute power nap, Ben, is literally concentrated orange juice. Recovery 2 and Recovery 3 are fresh-squeezed, but you'll notice in Power Nap 2, you're right, four minutes is the down ramp. So, you're right, you are into theta in four minutes, then you're down there for about 14 minutes, and then we have a two-minute uptick. That two-minute uptick, we're bringing you up to 13 Hertz. So, we're almost waking you out of that coma like state.

Ben:  But then if I've got two power nap, because I've done this before, like run two power nap sessions in a row, it seems to like–as you just described, it lulls you from stress into relaxation, then back up into wakefulness. But what I've found is when I have them stacked back-to-back, I dip back down into the sleep state. Have you experimented with stacking two power naps in a row?

Jim:  I did that this morning. I did Power Nap 1 first, and then Power Nap 2 second. We have a lot of people that do that. We have a lot of people that stack that. They like the fast access point. Some people don't like ruminating in their monkey mind for those first few minutes of Recovery 2 and Recovery 3.

Ben:  Yeah. In that Recovery 2 and Recovery 3, did those also same thing push you out of the stress state into relax, then pull you back out? Because I have noticed towards the end that there are some sounds that seem to sort of shift me back into a wakefulness state. And if that is the case, have you ever considered making an audio that does not end by pulling you back out? Like, let's say somebody did wake at 2:00 a.m. and wanted to lull themselves back to sleep, but not have it pull them back out at 2:50 into a brief state of wakening. Have you ever thought about like ending the track with just pure relaxation so that someone then, as the music turns off, just stays asleep?

Jim:  We have. We're working on actually sleep specific tracks. Those would be the only ones that we are designing to have no uptick. Every other track will have a two to four-minute uptick.

Ben:  Yeah.

Jim:  So, it'll be kind of blanketed, but yes, we're working on a delta track. It's completely different. There's two different waveforms we can use for entrainment. And entrainment for the audience here is really just presenting your brain with a pattern and creating a harmonic oscillation. Okay? So, it's a vibrational pattern, and your brain is going to follow that vibrational pattern. For NuCalm, it's alpha, theta. And so we're constantly working on how to create greater entrainment. We will create this sleep track, but it will not be binaural. You will not need a headphone to use the NuCalm sleep track. It'll be what's called an isochronic waveform. And isochronic waveform is played ambiently in your room and has entrainment properties similar to binaural, it's just not as strong. So, when we launch a sleep track in the future, you will listen to it in the comfort of your room on an iPad or any kind of stereo system and it will present your brain with delta pattern. And we do not have an uptick on those master tracks we're building.

Ben:  That's great because then you don't have to sleep with the headphones on at night, which irritates a lot of people. There's one called sleep phones. It's like soft headphones that you can wear even if you're a side sleeper. But what you're saying is with this delta track that you could play the entire night, almost like a white noise device, you wouldn't have to wear any headphones at all.

Jim:  Exactly. In fact, you'd only probably play it once through the 50-minute track. What you don't want to have happen is the entrainment properties are so strong. What's interesting, Ben, about the Power Nap 2, you can't get out of it. It's taking you down. It literally feels like it's coming out of the pavement grabbing you by the shoulders and throwing you into the ground.

Ben:  No. It's again, not to overuse this analogy, but it's like plant medicine. You're just literally just laid out.

Jim:  We had a German Le Mans race driver, who's not prone to artistic descriptions or something. I said, “Here's what it feels like when I use the Power Nap 2, it feels like I'm lying on the pavement and people come and they put me in cement. I'm literally stuck there.” So, that entrainment property is really strong, and the point is this. If you listen to the sleep track, which focuses you in delta, it's 0.5 Hertz to 1 Hertz, you can't listen to that all night because then you're not getting the sleep architecture of theta. So, you're going to listen to it just once through. And it's in testing right now of our Medical Advisory Board. We've had several people who are in their 70s. And when they wake up in the night, they're using it again for the second time. So, you'd use it in that kind of property.

Ben:  Wait, wait, wait. You're talking about the new track that you're developing that plays once, but then doesn't shift you back into a wake state. You're saying you wouldn't want to put that one on loop?

Jim:  Correct.

Ben:  Okay.

Jim:  Because then your brain is literally stuck in that coma-like state of delta.

Ben:  Okay. Got it. That makes sense.

Jim:  Now, another thing that you're noticing about the Power Nap 2 is we moved our Solfeggio music scale from the 528 Hertz miracle tone down to the 432 healing tone.

Ben:  Mm-hmm.

Jim:  So, what's cool is we have something that was incredible, and unique, and patented, and this was done in 2015. But Dr. Holloway and our scientific team are constantly evaluating all the advances in neuroscience. And mostly, what we're adding to the recipe is more vibrational elements. So, for example, the tambura instrument is a vibrational instrument out of India. We added the tambura subliminally to the Power Nap 2 to further grip you in that entrainment property, and we are constantly making those tweaks. So, from now on moving forward, every track that we develop will be stronger, better, faster acting.

Ben:  So, another question here is related to stacking this with other modalities. So, I've been using–well, it kind of depends how much time I have. I've either been doing the back-to-back Power Nap 2s or a single Power Nap 2 while I'm in a hyperbaric chamber, which is amazing, by the way. I mean, because you're getting some of the sensory deprivation along with the enhanced hacks oxygen delivery of the hyperbaric along with the relaxation from the NuCalm. And then sometimes I'll play Recovery 2 or Recovery 3, which are 50-minute tracks if I have a little bit more time.

You might get a kick out of this. I actually have another track that I downloaded off YouTube that's on my phone. That's a DMT breathwork track. It's a really quick DMT 10-minute track. And sometimes I'll finish up my NuCalm session and then go straight in that 10-minute track to just like hypercharge my body and get super oxygenated, and it's kind of a cool little stack. And so I'll use it with the hyperbaric, but I'm curious if there are any other supplements or biohacks that you've personally combined this with or that you've heard others have been combining them with.

Jim:  You bring up a great point. You can pretty much combine this with almost anything. So, we started in medical, we started in surgeries, we started in oncology, we started in dentistry, we started in implants, maxillofacial surgery. What we noticed is that when you slow down the stress response and raise the parasympathetic nervous system, the body is more permeable to anything you give to it. Meaning, like if you went in for general anesthesia, you need a lot less because your body didn't metabolize it because the fight-or-flight was negated. Same holds true for anything. So, if you want to do some circulatory work, you could do NuCalm on the beamer. If you want to do, like at recovery, they use NuCalm with the compression boots, this is a great facilitator for any stacking of biohacking and supplementation as well.

So, the body, your body, my body, everybody's body is really, really smart and it knows it doesn't want to be invaded, it doesn't want to be invaded by a surgical procedure, doesn't want to be invaded by any type of gimmick, it just doesn't. It has a high threshold and a high resistance factor. That's all adrenaline. NuCalm negates all of that and allows your body to be more permeable to anything. We do this in dialysis, we do this with oncology, and chemotherapy. You need less because the body is more permeable to anything you bring to it when you negate the factors of the fight-or-flight mechanism.

Ben:  Now, what if I have another meditation track. I've got some tracks from a guy named The Renegade Pharmacist, who has some tracks on abundance, and peace, and love, and joy, I've got some Joe Dispenza meditation tracks, I've got a couple by Emily Fletcher, et cetera. Could you, and I don't even know if this would work from a technical standpoint because I haven't tried it, could you play meditation tracks at the same time as you're doing NuCalm to be in a state of subconscious meditation at the same time you're doing the NuCalm?

Jim:  Of course you could. Okay. So, you're a biohacker and you're bright and you're determined to completely optimize everything. So, here's what you're going to do. You're going to get bone induction headphones and you're going to play NuCalm. Then over your ears, you're going to do this Dispenza meditation and you're going to hit levels of meditation you never thought possible.

Ben:  I actually have those bone induction headphones because I'm for swimming. There's a company called–I forget. I'll find it and put in the shownotes. So, I could put the bone induction headphones on, and then have the noise-blocking headphones playing the NuCalm and beginning the meditation and the NuCalm at the same time?

Jim:  Correct.

Ben:  That's pretty cool. I'm going to have to try this out.

Jim:  That came to us through an audio file, kind of a techno genius out of the military, and he said, “This is what I want to do,” because when we're in an operation, I can't have my ears covered listening to Ignite. So, I have bone induction headphones, listening to Ignite, but I have my Comms headset in so I can hear what's going on.

Ben:  What about for ketamine or MDMA or plant medicines that seem to pair quite well with tracks? And I haven't done this yet, but every time I listen to the NuCalm, I think, boy, this would be very interesting to combine with plant medicine. Have you talked to anybody who has done something like that?

Jim:  We have and with exceptional results. So, there's a lot of elements here. First and foremost, before you were to engage in plant medicine and that kind of journey, you'd want to do NuCalm first knowing that you're going to need a lot less of whatever medicament you're taking, because your body is more permeable, number one. Number two, during that adventure, absolutely, I would go through the whole gamut. I would listen to Recovery 2 or Recovery 3. You may even hear things you've never heard before, but it will definitely have an entrainment property now. You can do a lot of things to that. If you don't use the disk, you're not negating the body's adrenaline. If you don't cover your eyes, you're not negating visual stimulation from the visual cortex. So, there's a lot of things you can do to play with that. We've heard very good things about it. The one thing I have heard is that if you're on any type of medicament, any type of a plant journey, or even if it's just marijuana, if you NuCalm, it completely eradicates your buzz. It's the great equalizer. So, you don't want a NuCalm after you're taking it unless you want to stop your journey.

Ben:  So, it would literally, like let's say you use something like intranasal ketamine, or you were using MDMA or something like that. It would negate the effects of anything you had in your system, is that what you're saying?

Jim:  Yes.

Ben:  Okay. That's good to know because that's what I was thinking is if you had something in your system, it would be interesting who combined with NuCalm, but you're saying don't do that, use the NuCalm before or after?

Jim:  Use a NuCalm before, and then use a NuCalm after, after you want to come back from your journey.

Ben:  Okay.

Jim:  Don't do it during. So, say like you did psilocybin mushrooms. Don't do NuCalm because it literally will–it's the great buzz killer. It will kill your buzz.

Ben:  Okay. Got it. That's very good to know. Okay. So, the next thing I want to ask you is actually shifting gear here a little bit, and I want to talk about sympathetic stimulation, like bringing yourself into a state of excitability because I know you're experimenting with a little bit of technology to take all the things we just talked about, but reverse the effect and actually amp you up. And I messed around with a few of the tracks you sent me. They're like 12 minutes long. And I've been messing around with them in the morning. Now, as a crazy biohacker is prone to do, I have this thing called the BioCharger. That's in my basement. And I go and stand on that BioCharger or next to the BioCharger and I'll do a lot of kind of like twisting and shaking and vibrating, or even jumping up and down on this mini trampoline I have next to the BioCharger. But I'm playing these tracks and I feel like I've had about eight shots of espresso after I play this thing. So, walk me through, I think you called it the Ignite, walk me through the Ignite and what that is and what it does.

Jim:  Okay. Ignite is incredible, first and foremost. You've already experienced it. You know what I'm talking about. In 2015, we had a Premier League Soccer Club come to us, “Hey, Mr. Poole, we love NuCalm. Our players are healing better. They're making it through the season better. They're focused better. They're just performing better, but can you make something that excites our players and gets them ready to get on the pitch?” And I said, “Of course, we can do anything.” So, I spoke to Dr. Holloway and about a year goes by and we created the master neuroacoustic physics for what's called Ignite Warrior Brain.

So, using the same entrainment properties, remember, instead of five megabytes, the one NuCalm tracks 789 megabytes of information, mathematics, algorithms, physics. Same properties we used except we're not taking you to alpha, we're not taking it down into theta, we're taking you up through beta brainwave function right through the highest levels of stress and anxiety into gamma brainwave function, which are neural oscillations that are between 39 and 41 Hertz. It's the tightest band in the brainwave function of a human.

So, what this does and what you notice is this will upregulate the motor strip output. So, your pre-motor strip and your motor strip, it has a pan brain effect, literally will create laterality bouncing dexterity. It elicits dopamine. It will increase your muscle output, upregulate all your five senses. You'll notice your peripheral vision is better, your old factory is more tuned. And then there's a fine-tuning in the cerebellum that increases your motor skills balance and muscle memory. So, you're doing this as a prep for whatever. I would highly recommend during competition, or during a run, or during a bike, or during anything, use the Ignite and see your endurance and your strength just blow your mind.

Ben:  Yeah. It's pretty nuts. Actually, I used it–before my Russian kettlebell certification, I played the track before I did my snatch test, which is 100 snatches in five minutes. I published it to Instagram and I wound up doing 115 snatches in five minutes. And I don't know how much of that was the Ignite track versus the actual training that I did. I'm in no way saying that they shouldn't do adequate training, but this type of thing as a supplement to that is pretty amazing. Now, is that in full development? Is that something that comes with the NuCalm? Is Ignite a totally separate thing people purchase, or how does that work exactly?

Jim:  So, Ignite is quite fascinating. We first brought this to market in March of 2016. So, it's been on Earth for four years. It was originally designed for elite operators in United States Military Special Forces and our professional athletes, [00:59:09] _____ few people we've provided access to. We have never commercialized it. It is on a separate app. Early on, we thought, “Hey, let's just put this into the NuCalm app.” And then we thought, “Wait a second, there's doctor teams and hospital teams that are preparing people for surgery. If anybody makes a mistake and you put the disk on the eye mask and then you hit Ignite, we will create a big problem in an operation.”

Ben:  Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.

Jim:  So, we can't do that. So, what we do today is, and for your listeners, we'll get into NuCalm and how to get it, but for your listeners, we will provide after a week or two of use and creating some habituation of NuCalm, we will provide access, but it is confidential and it is a beta app. I think in the future, Ben, probably early Q1 of next year, we will launch it in its entirety. But something I think that's cool to note, this literally jacks you up. And the last three minutes of the track is pure warrior brain. It is literally 39 Hertz, okay?

And so you wonder, “Well, how can you jack me up through the high-stress zone and I don't create an anxious response?” There is a modulator in there and we have a constant 14 Hertz, which is basically your sensory-motor rhythm, and this helps keep the listeners balanced, and it helps you not have an anxious response. So, you just get jacked. I listen to it in the car. I was driving home from a New York trip.

Ben:  Speeding ticket.

Jim:  It was crazy. So, I was listening to one of our tracks that's not released. Basically, we put the physics underneath [01:00:40] _____, and I was driving, and I was talking on the phone and I looked down, I was going 117 miles an hour on the Jersey Turnpike. And I said, “Oh, my god, I cannot listen to this. I'm going to kill myself.” But as you know, you literally just get in the zone. So, what happens is we've created this pattern. We didn't create it. Our military and our professional athletes have and it kind of works like this. People get up, they do NuCalm first. If they have time, they'll do Recovery 2 and Recovery 3, the strongest track, and it really negates any sleep that they created the night before and get some good and balance. Then they'll get up and use Ignite.

A lot of people stopped drinking coffee just using Ignite, and we caution them. You can listen to as many times as you like, but if you start feeling agitated like you're overcaffeinated, stop listening to it. And then they will go perform, do whatever. If it's a professional athlete, after their game and it's late and they've done their media and they've done their shower, they'll do NuCalm again to restore, or a lot of teams on the way to the arena or in between periods, they're listening to Ignite. So, we've been working with professional athletes since 2011 and the only time I hear from these athletes is every 90 days, our Ignite track kind of goes offline for a day, and that's the only time I hear from these guys.

Ben:  You should develop a disk for Ignite, like a disk that vibrates more at the frequencies of like epinephrine, adrenaline, et cetera.

Jim:  We are.

Ben:  Dang it. I was going to ask for royalty on that idea.

Jim:  Well, we're looking at hydrogenized water and we're looking at B12. We're looking at some ways to augment that side of the equation. So, here's something that we will always do. We will never come to market in a commercial enterprise and have just an app because we're not a software company. We're a total solution and there's biochemistry associated with everything. So, even with the sleep architecture we're working on and the delta, neuroacoustic software, it will have a disk. That disk, as you can presume, probably will have some kind of melatonin in it, some type of upregulation of GABA and maybe casein, or probably 5-HTP, which is a precursor to serotonin. Everything we'll release in the future will always have a systematic approach and a disk associated with it.

Ben:  Cool. I dig it. I love what you guys are doing. Now, like I mentioned in the beginning of this show, this thing is not cheap. It's a few thousand bucks to get one of these NuCalm devices with the audio, with the disks, everything else. But you emailed me like three days ago and told me you guys, because you knew this was something that for a lot of people might be a little bit financially difficult to get their hands on, you guys have some kind of a new program you're rolling out. So, fill me in on that because I think that happened. The last time we podcast, a lot of people really wanted it, but thought it was pretty prohibitively expensive to get the full NuCalm system. So, walk me through what you guys are doing.

Jim:  It was and it is. And just for people's edification, you're not paying for the cost of goods, you're not paying to get access to a headphone or an app, you're paying for 18 years and $22 million of research development that goes into creating the only product of its kind. And we do know it's cost-prohibitive. When we first launched in 2010, it was mostly to the medical community and it was $5,995. As we progressed from 2016, start becoming more consumer-focused, it was still a highly regulated Class 3 medical device, FDA, Health Canada, and all that stuff. And that was $4,695. But you're right, we will never help the masses and that's our goal is to help people with the price that high.

– – – Note: The following promotion has expired – – –

So, in January of this year, we put together after about six months of research what's called the Mastermind Project. And we launched it in February. The Mastermind does two things. One, it provides to our customers a $2,700 discount, which is 58% off the retail price of NuCalm. And all you have to do is you have to use NuCalm. Well, why would you get it if you're not going to use it? And you have to participate in a survey once a week and maybe a conference call every other week. What we're doing here is we're trying to collect real-time voice of the customer research and data so that we can build an app and future products that address your specific needs and people just like you.

So, this is kind of a win-win. We really just launched it through a four-email campaign in the last two weeks and we've had a couple hundred people join just through the internet and just through survey instruments that way. So, it's $1,995, which is still not inexpensive. We get that. It gives you all the bells and whistles of the NuCalm product. It sells for $4,695, including lifetime access to the NuCalm app. One of the nice things that everyone likes about it is the thousands of people that currently have NuCalm have lifetime access to what we do and all of our future developments in NuCalm. So, the Mastermind, you get it, you're welcome to it, you fill out a survey once or twice a week, might be two or three minutes. There's also this voice recognition auditory physics we're working on, which we're going to be able to do medical grade HRV for before and after on our app. And we're asking our Mastermind participants to help us build out the data set.

Ben:  How are you going to measure HRV?

Jim:  This is absolutely fascinating. In fact, we just interviewed the CEO of this company, who's a physicist, and we said, “Hey, so why would we do this instead of [01:05:51] _____ skin response? Or why would we do this instead of some of the complicated HRV that we have?” And he says, “Well, heart rate is fine, but it's immediate. Cortisol is fine, but you have to test in the morning.” There's so much information in voice and you can determine so much from voice that they currently have an FDA product. They evaluate the efficacy of drugs that come to market. They can also determine through your voice things if you have Alzheimer's or not.

So, I don't know. The complexity is incredible to me, but what we're doing right now is we're capturing 1,000 data points, and the person has to read a couple sentences and it captures their voice. And there's just millions of data points inside that couple paragraphs of voice capture, and then they're going to take all of this data and determine benchmarks. And we're going to measure HRV and a medical grade sensitive and accurate measurement to showcase to you, “Hey, right now before your NuCalm, your stress level is at a seven out of ten, and yesterday you had a five.” And then you're going to NuCalm and you're going to read a piece again from this canary speech and you're going to see what NuCalm did to you.

Ben:  Wow.

Jim:  So, this biophysical measure is really important in the future for us. In our last podcast, I shared with you all the work we did with the NASA algorithms and Dr. Chung-Kang Peng. It was very sophisticated, very complicated, very medical-grade. We can't bring that to the consumer. We can't ask you to put a single-lead ECG device on your chest and then download data and send it to our mathematicians at Harvard and spit out a report you don't understand. So, we've been working behind the scenes for the last year to find a partner and we did and we're very pleased with bringing this present to market.

So, the Mastermind, it's $1,995, 58% discount off of today's NuCalm. And all you have to do is use it and participate in surveys once a week and maybe a conference call. We're also doing video conferences and we're doing a lot of educational series with monks and with some of the top doctors in the world, the professional athletes. We're building a community for them to help us.

Ben:  Okay. So, basically, you're getting significant settings on the device, but in trade, you're doing surveys and you're doing those HRV check-ins with the speech recognition technology and basically committing to being a little bit more involved with the data collection piece. But because of that, instead of getting the whole package for like 5,000 bucks, it's like a touch under 2,000?

Jim:  Correct. And guess what, people are loving it, especially in today's climate where people need it.

Ben:  Now, if people go to the shownotes and they get a NuCalm, I know that in the last time we podcast, you gave people $500 off the NuCalm. The code was BEN500. Now, with the Mastermind Project, can they use that same link or that same code, or how do people access the Mastermind Project if they want to get this thing without paying the $5,000?

Jim:  So, we will also develop a landing page and we'll work with your team so that when they click through and say, “Hey, I'm interested,” they'll have two paths. They can go $500 off the $4,695 NuCalm, or they will get $100 off the $1,995 Mastermind. Okay?

Ben:  Okay.

Jim:  Inside the Mastermind, we're doing two more things for you. Number one, we're upgrading everybody from the NuCalm disk to NuCalm Pro Discs. And number two, after a couple weeks of use, we're unveiling Ignite.

Ben:  That's actually what I wanted to ask you. People who already own the NuCalm, are they already getting the disks anyways?

Jim:  Yes.

Ben:  Okay. Alright, so if somebody already owns a NuCalm, they probably already know that you launched the disks, you've been sending those out?

Jim:  Yes. Yeah. No, the disk currently is about 30% of our business. So, it's a true razor, razor blade model. And as you notice, the ease of use, we wouldn't be working with the United States Military Special Forces if we still had the CES device and neural patches and batteries. That ease of use has changed everything for our business.

Ben:  Okay. Cool. I dig it. Man, this is awesome. So, what I'll do is when you get with my team and you get together a link for all my listeners to go try the Mastermind Project, I'll put that in the shownotes. And then if people just want to get the full meal deal without messing around with the data collection, the surveys and stuff like that, and you just want to buy this thing outright, I'll also put a link in the shownotes for that. Or honestly, you can just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/nucalm, and the code is BEN500. That's N-UCalm, and the code is BEN500.

But then everything else that we talked about, what I'll do is I'll wind up linking to your guys' link to get to this Mastermind Project. You go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/nucalmpodcast2, like N-UCalm Podcast, the number two, and I'll put all of that in there. And again, for all of you listening in, I don't necessarily do a lot of almost–I feel like this podcast was–it kind of sounded like maybe a commercial or something like that because I was waxing so positive about this thing, but again, I'm not BS-ing you. I use this thing every day and often multiple times a day and it has been a life-changer for me, conferences, airplanes, long-haul travel, at home, napping, anxiety, stress, you name it, this thing has been a lifesaver.

Now, the disk is out and I don't have to carry around the clunky stimulator or put on the messy cream or anything like that. It's even better. And now they've got this Ignite track coming out. I mean, I totally dig it. And like I told you guys, like I'm texting Jim every few days asking him questions about Recovery 2 versus Recovery 3 and back-to-back power naps and where to put the disks, and he's been incredibly helpful, and it has made this thing just a complete non-negotiable for me. It works. So, anyways, I'll put links to everything again to the shownotes at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/nucalmpodcast. And Jim, I want to thank you, not only for saving my ass and developing this thing, but also for coming on the show yet again and sharing your information with us.

Jim:  You're awesome. You're crazy. We love it and we love to–this is all about awareness. You can say, “Hey, it sounds like a commercial.” Marketing is called telling people what you do, and that's what we're doing, telling people what we do.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah. I dig it. Alright. Well, folks, leave your comments, leave your questions, leave your feedbacks. For you, trolls out there who don't believe in energy medicine, go ahead, hop on, make fun, but I'm telling you, don't knock it 'til you've tried it because the thing freaking works. So, BenGreenfieldFitness.com/nucalmpodcast2. That's N-UCalm Podcast, the number two. You can get this device if you wanted at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/nucalm, $500 off, use code BEN500 and that's it. So, thanks for listening in. And Jim, have an amazing day, man.

Jim:  Be safe. Be well, everybody. Thank you.

Ben:  Alright, later, everybody.

Ben:  Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the shownotes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful “Ben Recommends” page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormone, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please, also, know that all the links, all the promo codes, that I mentioned during this and every episode, helped to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. When you listen in, be sure to use the links in the shownotes, use the promo codes that I generate, because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.

 

 

 

I'm constantly playing and experimenting with new devices for biohacking sleep and cognition. One of my favorites of late is a very handy device called the NuCalm, which I've been using to simulate an entire 120-minute sleep cycle with just a 20-minute daily power nap—and also (especially during these troubling times) to get myself a quick extra sleep cycle when I wake up early in the morning (4 am-ish) with thoughts racing through my head.

There aren't many items I own that I consider to be so-called “non-negotiable” biohacks in my daily routine, but the NuCalm is undoubtedly one of them (you can get a NuCalm here and save $500 with code BEN500). This thing lets me get in an intense period of relaxation even when I can’t nap, and I’m now ducking away and using it nearly every day, particularly during travel and on airplanes. It’s spendy, but in my opinion, well worth it. 

My guest on this show is Jim Poole, chairman, president, and CEO of Solace Lifesciences, Inc., the maker of NuCalm. Jim is an accomplished business executive with extensive experience in the healthcare, biotechnology, dental, market research, and IT industries. He manages the strategic direction and ongoing operations of Solace Lifesciences, Inc., a neuroscience company focused on personalized wellness and performance. In 2015, Solace Lifesciences was granted the world’s sole patent for “Systems and Methods for Balancing and Maintaining the Health of the Human Autonomic Nervous System.”

Jim has successfully launched global products, managed growth strategies, and effectively optimized business operations for large and small organizations alike. Prior to joining Solace Lifesciences, Jim co-founded Focused Evolution, a premier global management strategy-consulting firm. As a managing partner, he managed mergers and acquisitions, due diligence, and growth strategies for venture capital and private equity firms. Under Jim’s leadership, Focused Evolution grew into a multi-million dollar consulting firm, serving a global client portfolio of 49 companies, across a broad range of industries.

Jim serves on the board of directors of several medical device firms around the world. He is a recognized business leader, public speaker, an accomplished author, and has published numerous articles in industry trade journals and lectures all over the world globally on topics including stress, recovery, performance, and business strategy. Jim has published over 30 articles in industry trade journals. A New York state native, he earned a BA in psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an MBA in international business & marketing from Babson College.

In my first episode with Jim, entitled “How To Simulate A Full Sleep Cycle In 20 Minutes, The Best Stress Biohack That Exists, Vagus Nerve Stimulation & Much More!,” we go over the history of NuCalm, how exactly it was designed, and how it works—I highly recommend you also listen to that episode! But NuCalm has developed some new protocols and released new technology that I've found to upgrade and simplify the experience even more, so I've got Jim back on today's show.

During this discussion, you'll discover:

-A quick overview of the NuCalm device…9:26

• Solace LifeSciences focuses on stress management, recovery, sleep, etc.
• The “zone” a client enters is commensurate with the desired outcome
• Founded to help people with PTSD, addiction, anxiety disorders
• They possess the only patent in the world for technology of its kind

-New advances in the NuCalm technology since Jim's last appearance on the podcast…12:21

• “When you give people an excuse not to take care of themselves, they find it.”
• Trying to present the brain with a variety of stimulants; like a glass of wine minus the buzz
• Cranial electrical stimulation
• GABA A and B are the body's primary inhibitory neurotransmitters; putting the brakes on the stress response
• Getting GABA to the brain is very difficult
• Biosignal processing disc that replaces the cream and stint is 4 years of R&D
  • Creates a signature frequency of the GABA, L-theanine, etc. that was in the cream
  • Circumvents the extensive process by which the body transmits the cream and signals to the brain
  • Frequency combinations are stored in a piece of software
• Book: Healing is Voltageby Jerry Tennant
• Book: The Body Electricby Robert Becker
• Nikola Tesla and Georges Lakhovsky are the originators of “electric medicine”
• Disc contains the Lakhovsky multi-wave oscillator
• Activated by magnetism of the skin; on a specific point of the skin
• Pericardial 6 (on the wrist) is a direct line to the pericardial sac
• You're literally sucking life out of the disc when you're at the point of exhaustion
• Faraday static bag protects the disc from EMFs; wrist devices will render the disc useless
• The disc induces a state of relaxation without the audios
  • GABA A receptor site is anxiolytically related to anything that relaxes the brain (alcohol binds to GABA A)

-Why the NuCalm listening app is more efficacious than other focus music apps…26:10

• The efficacy of other apps goes down due to the lack of complexity in algorithms; the brain figures it out
• Physics to trick the brain into hearing a beat that's not audible to the ear
• Typical song is ~5 mb; one song in the NuCalm is over 700 mb
• Non-linear oscillating algorithm is the key
• Reticular activating system (RAS) has two functions: pattern recognition and finding

-How the NuCalm is different from a sleep-cycle simulation device…34:30

• Algorithms are designed to give the brain a pattern of Alpha and Theta waves
• Theta is the lucid dreaming state
• Understand the parasympathetic system
  • Healing zone for humans
  • Only time cells do maintenance, cleanup, etc.

-How the NuCalm has performed compared to sleep studies…37:19

• 20 minutes on the NuCalm is equivalent to 2 hours of restorative sleep
• When your brain is focused in theta brain wave function, the body is in full recovery mode
• Oxygenating the entire body
  • This is due to the breath (6 breaths per minute)
  • Allows the body to get into homeostasis
• Book: The Oxygen Advantageby Patrick McKeown

-Times to avoid using the NuCalm…41:43

• Tendency to wake up “too energized”; not what research has shown however
• 15-minute rule: if you can't sleep after 15 minutes, use the NuCalm
• You can't move the brain from Beta into Theta without creating “relaxation-induced anxiety”
• People can “stack” the tracks (ex. Recovery 1 and 2)
• Sleep specific tracks are in the works
• Entrainment: creating a vibrational pattern in the brain

-How to stack the NuCalm with your favorite biohacks…49:28

• NuCalm began in the medical field; slowed stress response increases the body's permeability
• Compression bootsfor recovery
• Great facilitator for other biohacks
• Negates stress related to medical procedures
• Can use in tandem with meditation apps
• Get bone conduction headphonesfor meditation app; noise-canceling headphones for NuCalm
• Used with plant medicine with exceptional results
  • Use NuCalm first; you'll need less plant medicine
  • It will interrupt the journey if you use it during the session

-About the “Ignite” feature on the NuCalm…55:34

• Ignite Warrior Brain
• Upregulates the pre-motor strip; elicits dopamine
• Five senses, peripheral vision is enhanced
• Designed for elite military and athletes; recently commercialized
• Last 3 minutes of the track is pure warrior brain
• Modulator in it to keep the listener balanced

-An affordable way to purchase the NuCalm system…1:02:47

• Mastermind Project is $1995 (get $100 off with code BEN100)
• Upgrade to the Pro Discs
• Tracking stress levels through speech

-And much more…

Resources from this episode:

– NuCalm: You can get it here and save $500 with code BEN500 OR click here to try the Mastermind Project Ben & Jim talk about and save $100 with code BEN100.

– Compression boots

– Bone conduction headphones

– Noise-canceling headphones

– Podcast: How To Simulate A Full Sleep Cycle In 20 Minutes, The Best Stress Biohack That Exists, Vagus Nerve Stimulation & Much More!

– PDFs:

• Meet NuCalm: From Now On, Stress Is A Choice.
• NuCalm: Performance Overview
• Take The Stress Out Of Healing With NuCalm
• NuCalm And Jetlag
• NuCalm For Veterans
• Improving Athletic Performance With NuCalm – A Case Study

– Books:

• Healing is Voltage
• The Body Electric
• The Oxygen Advantage 

Episode sponsors:

–Kion: My personal playground for new supplement formulations, Kion blends ancestral wisdom with modern science. Ben Greenfield Fitness listeners, receive a 10% discount off your entire order when you use discount code BEN10.

–Paleo Valley Beef Sticks: 100% grass-fed AND grass-finished. Keto friendly and higher levels of Omega 3 Fatty Acids. Receive a 15% discount off your order when you go to paleovalley.com/ben.

–JOOVV: After using the Joovv for close to 2 years, it's the only light therapy device I'd ever recommend. Give it a try: you won't be disappointed. Order using my link and receive my brand new book, Boundless absolutely free!

–Comrad Socks: Seriously comfortable compression socks designed to support your every move. Receive 20% off your Comrad purchase when you use discount code BEN20