Modern WisdomThe Neuroscience Of Stress - Jim Poole | Modern Wisdom Podcast 342
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
145 min read · 29,057 words- 0:00 – 15:00
Your fear or your…
- JPJim Poole
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Welcome, friend. It's been a little while since we had this planned, and I finally got you here.
- JPJim Poole
Well, it takes a while. You're a busy man. Busy schedule, so I get it.
- CWChris Williamson
As are you.
- JPJim Poole
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
What are you an expert in?
- JPJim Poole
Ah, that's a great question. Hmm. 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.
- CWChris Williamson
What links all of those together? What's the common thread between all of that?
- JPJim Poole
(inhales deeply) Evolution. It's really quite fascinating to me. Um, we're kind of ... We're, we're ... We kinda 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 mid-brain 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. And then you have another structure in the brain called the reptilian side of the brain or the mid-brain, 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. Now, t- uh, that's hard to fathom. How much learning goes on in 40 million years of the structure of the brain is f- 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 and 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 kinda links what we do is the neuronal circuitry of the brain and (sighs) h- how important it is. It, 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 gonna happen on impulse. That craving started a couple days before you actually gave up and said, "I'm, I'm in." Right? Who's in control? 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's 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-
- CWChris Williamson
So-
- JPJim Poole
... the advanced circuitry of your brain.
- CWChris Williamson
Is it a constant battle between you and old Brain?
- JPJim Poole
Constant. Constant battle. I'll give you a good example. Your central nervous system and this area th- 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 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's Robin, and it says, "Hey, amygdala, you need to go do what you do and mobilize for a threat, 'cause something's gonna happen here that I don't like." That's kinda 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, 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.Okay? Shame's internal, guilt's external. Shame is harder to deal with 'cause it's internal. You're- it's your own battle. So your central nervous system's 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 'cause you don't wanna go to that party. But your central nervous system's memory bank says, "Hey! I remember when we did that." (laughs) And the person that emasculated me is gonna 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, 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've 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, a way to s- kick off a podcast? There's a lot of challenges being human. It's pretty complex.
- CWChris Williamson
It's difficult, man. I'm surprised that anyone makes it through alive. Well, actually...
- JPJim Poole
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JPJim Poole
Alive but, but not acting to their core and their- and the honor of who they wanna be.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, life... The, the only thing that we can guarantee is that none of us are gonna make it out alive. Unless David Sinclair manages to do his unlimited immortal NMN infusion bullshit before we, before we hit the end of the century. Yeah, man. I mean, I, I, I've been fascinated by this for a long time, the fact that we have a little bit of meta-cognition, 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? The fact that I could have done differently, or 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.
- JPJim Poole
You can. 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. A stress happens. Well, first and foremost, to the thought process, according to the most, we have a thousand thoughts an hour. That's a lot. Of those thousand thoughts, maybe 990 are externally derived. So that's kinda sucks.
- CWChris Williamson
What's that mean?
- JPJim Poole
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, it doesn't matter what it is. What, 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 and what's not. And it also has the memory of shame, guilt, and all your failures. Isn't that amazing? If you in- if you interrogated your central nervous system, you'd be like, "Wow. I had a lot more failures than I remember." (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JPJim Poole
It holds a lot of cards, man. I'm telling you. 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 mid-brain. And the amygdala is kind of the flight deck of the fight or flight response. And it's an almond-shaped piece in your mid-brain. That pings the HPA axis, which is the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal cortex. This axis drives the adrenal cortex to secrete adrenaline. 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 mid-brain 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, the breath, the musculature, your olfactory, your peripheral vision. And here's what's happening. 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 mid-brain 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. 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, (gasps) 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. 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 will 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 resource allocation leaves the frontal cortex entirely, and you're left in this fight or flight response. And you can ... 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," 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 persona and their character and their well-being 'cause there's no blood flow there. So that's the biggest challenge. And so there is semblances of control in 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? 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 your body and your mind, 'cause when your body and your mind are oxygenated, you're in a place of well-being. That's the key.
- CWChris Williamson
I have been in situations where my recovery and my balance between my autonomic
- 15:00 – 30:00
Yes. …
- CWChris Williamson
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. Uh, training was the same, diet was the same, but my experience, my conscious experience of the situation had changed and improved. So how would-
- JPJim Poole
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... that fit into the model that you've just given me there? Because that's ...
- JPJim Poole
Complete, complete left turn. And, uh, this is awesome. I love, I love these types of conversations 'cause you have no idea and expectation where it's gonna 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 f- ... 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 and 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. 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. Number two, finding shortcuts. So you're in this space from 23 to 28 and you're living this life. There ... Your circadian rhythm is compromised. Your stress level's high. Your nutrition's probably poor. Your sleep's 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, your sense of mortality doesn't exist yet. So you can do this.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm made of rubber and magic between the ages of 23 and 28, Jim. I was fine.
- JPJim Poole
It, (laughs) it's amazing, isn't it?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JPJim Poole
You're very malleable and it's, it is, it's amazing. I'm 52, so I have a three-day hangover now. I, I just don't like it and I don't tolerate it. (laughs) 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, of the evolutionary psychology of the challenge between the autonomic nervous system and the primordial midbrain and the central nervous system and your prefrontal cortex. 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's 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 gonna understand you, people aren't gonna like you at this party. You know that committee that kind of talks to us every day since we were, since we were 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. We got 15 billion plus enterprises on this planet occupying energy, right, and entropy. And this is incredibly fascinating, but there are ways for us to create a semblance in, 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 sets their mind to, they can adapt to it. It's because of the capability of the reticular activating 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.
- CWChris Williamson
How does someone... We're talking about going back to the autonomic nervous system and that balance and getting that right. 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?
- JPJim Poole
Yes. Yes, yes. So it's, it's a reserve.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- JPJim Poole
I look at it as, I look at it as a seesaw, right? Seesaw is 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, um, just intuitively, without you 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, and you may not even have been aware that you were doing that. So yeah, that's what, that's what's happening.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think more people should know about stress that they don't?
- JPJim Poole
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, and it's really quite unfortunate. Now, something interesting for your listeners. (laughs) Um, your brain and my brain are different than a female's brain. We know this intuitively.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JPJim Poole
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, 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 3:00 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. So personally, I think about that and say, "Wow, I feel really blessed to be a man 'cause I don't like to worry and I can't." (laughs) And 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 and 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 'cause, 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, 'cause when I gave it to her, it just created six more layers of problems. She just wanted to hear me. She just wanted me to listen, because they're not coming to you with a solution. They just wanna be heard. Fascinating.
- CWChris Williamson
This... So two stories recently that I've heard from, um, Adam Lane-Smith, who is a, uh, 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, uh, insane asylums, 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. He was talking about the male over-perception bias and the female under-perception bias of attraction. So-... men are hardwired to over-perceive the level of attraction that a female is giving to them. They, it, it-
- JPJim Poole
Like any, like a scrap, like a scrap. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Precisely. Well, yeah. They, they, they're to look at something and say, "Well, sh- her, 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 Jim guy again." Like, whatever it might be. But (laughs) , um, but men are wired to view every potential sexual opportunity as one.
- JPJim Poole
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
And conversely, women do the opposite and when they do s- uh, self-reporting, uh, speed dating, he's done it with tons and tons of different studies, um, women consistently report far less attraction from them to the man than the man reports, and the man reports far more attraction from the woman to the man than the female reports.
- JPJim Poole
Yes. Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
But this tells us, i- it explains so much around 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. Uh, 61% of the time men say the "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 a- these asymmetries? Because we are not the same, because we were not built-
- JPJim Poole
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... to be the same. And yet, it's a m-
- JPJim Poole
Aim close.
- CWChris Williamson
... it's an absolute. Given the fact that it's about a 50/50 split on the planet between men and women, uh, you know, of all of the different wars between countries and, and geographies and areas and belief structures, the fact that 50% and 50% of the world aren't just tearing each other apart because we're, we're quite different to each other is, I think we should be, we should be proud of that.
- JPJim Poole
There's a 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 r- it's fascinating, isn't it? (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Another one, uh, 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."
- JPJim Poole
Yes.
- 30:00 – 45:00
You're more entrenched. …
- JPJim Poole
turned off the news and you had a feeling of inner peace and calm and serenity? Uh, like never?" Never. So between the food, the media, this disconnect of humanity, I've got three girls, 19, 17, 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 the 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 p- 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, 19, 17, and 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.
- CWChris Williamson
You're more entrenched.
- JPJim Poole
And they have... I'm more entrenched, and they have 19, 17, and 14-year-old thinking. So it's been really quite fascinating to look at all this, but I'll give your, uh, audience one example of how COVID's gonna 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. This is the idea of a first impression. So I'm in Boston in August of last year, 2020, and it's... I'm in 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 look right, there's not a single soul out on the street. My brain can't process this. Uh, 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. 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.
- CWChris Williamson
It's just a novel environment. Everything is a novel environment.
- JPJim Poole
Every day. So it's just... And there's a lot of social anxiety. There's a lot of social, um, 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, 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. It's a big piece of our behavioral modification. So I think the s- I think the stress side is, is incredible. I, and I, um, 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 is, "Hey, enough is enough. There's 7.6 billion of you. You're egregious, you're wasteful, and you're ruining everything." Because from tw- from March 2020 to, like, December 2020, the animal kingdom was thriving. They were seeing schools of dolphins and whale pods, literally orca-type whales in areas of the count- 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 was an unplug. This was 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.
- CWChris 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 combine to make the to-do list completion th- one of the few things that you derive meaning from, and if you remove-
- JPJim Poole
That's a-
- CWChris Williamson
... most sources of happiness as well-
- JPJim Poole
That's a great point.
- CWChris Williamson
... hap- happiness and meaning are two different pathways. I learned this from Roy Baumeister. It's awesome. And, um, happiness is much more impulsive. It's in the here and now. Meaning is future-focused, it's purpose, it's a, a future event or state that lends structure to the moment, which is a really good definition for purpose. And, um, they're not the same thing. And I think-
- JPJim Poole
No.
- CWChris 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, m- work toward goal, complete goal, set next goal, work toward goal, complete goal. Um, 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. Uh, financial concerns-
- JPJim Poole
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... so on and so forth. And I'm... I think people have-
- JPJim Poole
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... perhaps used, uh, meaning as a replacement for it.
- JPJim Poole
Well, I think, um, 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 mid-brain occupying more of your resources than your frontal cortex. 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 wanna derive towards joy. You wanna f- under- 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 and a partner? Is it work? Is it purpose? That's the path to an enlightened life of wellness and well-being. And this pursuit of happiness or to-dos or this over-pursuit of success based on what? Monetary success? Uh, uh, uh, that, no. It 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, and worry. This is 40 million year evolved thinking. No. We want access to here. I want access to my personality, my, my ... 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.
- NANarrator
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?
- JPJim Poole
New Calm, baby. So 20 plus years ago, an exceptionally gifted neuroscientist, quantum physicist, naturopath, Dr. G. Blake Holloway, went on a quest, literally took him 20 years. That in and of itself is a, is incredible badge of honor. Who spends 20 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 talking 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 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, 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 w- 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 and able 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? 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, or 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. 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're, we don't think about balance. I- in, 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 wanna 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. It's logic.
- NANarrator
What do you mean when you say healing?
- JPJim Poole
To be able to ... You wanna 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 modulated. 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. 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 the autonomic nervous system on a regular basis?" It- it demands a complex solution, and that's in- 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, and 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. That's the 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 7 to 9% 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? 7 to 9% is not that good.
- CWChris Williamson
Is that the max?
- JPJim Poole
9%, I believe is about the max. Yeah. So, and you can megadose, but it doesn't matter 'cause you have to go through the whole metabolic process, you have to go through the liver, you have to go through the
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Do they not need-…
- JPJim Poole
bloodstream, you have to cross the blood-brain barrier. There's 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Do they not need-
- JPJim Poole
It's about-
- CWChris Williamson
... 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 f- 7% or the 9% which gets used?
- JPJim Poole
The- the- the resource in which 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 esophagus to my gut. My gut digests it, then it processes with my liver and it metabolizes and then it can up my bloodstream, and all it's doing is communicating a frequency of that nutrient. Human biology is resonance, frequency and vibration. It's fascinating to me. So when you drink orange juice, you're not drinking it 'cause there's a little vitamin C pellet that your cells say, "Hey, grab that vitamin C pellet and let's wrestle to the ground." No. There's a frequency and that frequency resonates so the cell gets the frequencies, "Oh, 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 supplementation. You can't impose your will on the human brain. Good luck. It's not gonna work. So when you take a step back and you understand the complexity of the brain, you have electrical signaling and chemical signaling. Dr. Holloway understood that to create a predictable outcome, I have to commandeer both channels. So NuCalm is a systematic approach. It is a systematic complex solution to a complex problem. And NuCalm 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 think faster and activate faster. NuCalm 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 with healing, cellular restoration and recovery. That's what he's doing. So NuCalm 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. 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? H- 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? So-Where we sit in America here, the company's 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 Star Trekian, and it is. The complexity's incredible. The science is absolutely incredible. You can study this science for decades and not get bored, because it's constantly evolving, 'cause 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 scale of a 41 hertz to 0.5 hertz continuum. Let's start at the lowest, 0.5 hertz. When your brain wave 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 is the healing zone, and it is the only time when your brain wave 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 brain wave function. Then you go up to alpha, 12 hertz to 8 hertz. When your brain wave 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 brain wave's 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 brain wave's at 12 hertz. That's alpha. Alpha's 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 cognitive 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 brain wave function. 39 to 41 hertz is commensurate with higher consciousness and mistake-free, high intense focus. It's kind of m- it's kinda 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 drive 41 hertz, mistake free, awesome focus intensity called Ignite Warrior Brain, or you can do Nu Calm, which is alpha and theta recovery cellular 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 Nu Calm provides me two hours of restorative sleep for every 20 minutes, so I'm gonna do Nu Calm right now and I'm gonna 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 Nu Calm. I get up from 45 minutes of Nu Calm and I feel like I slept great, even though I know I didn't. I feel like I did great. You know why? For that 45 minutes, we levitated your brain wave 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 you're breathing at the respiration rate of one breath every 10 seconds. So that's kinda 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 brain wave frequency. I don't need caffeine to increase my brain wave frequency. I don't need yoga and tai chi to slower, to lower my brain wave frequency. I'm going to use physics to manipulate the brain wave frequency so that you can have whatever state you want." That's incredible. That's what we do. So Nu Calm is our flagship product. It's been around for 11 years. We've sold almost $25 million of Nu Calm. 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's not really gonna 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, 'cause when we were selling a $6,000 clinical medical device, we weren't doing a lot of podcasts, 'cause it's kinda like, "Yeah, and you can get this for 6,000 bucks." No. That's not gonna 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 three medical device of four components to an easier to use three component system that's actually better.Who does that? What do you mean? Y- you're no longer a regulated class three medical device. You're simpler, and you're better, and in addition, we lowered the price 99.15%. You can get NuCalm 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, I've got 7.6 billion people to liberate from stress just with NuCalm. It's a lot of work. I feel great about it. Someone says, "Wow, that's a commercial in and of 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? 'Cause 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. 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 few, four or five minutes, your brainwave's 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 NuCalm. That's what we've done. So at 52, Chris, I've got the immune health of a 37-year-old. I've got the schedule of a carny, except I don't have small hands and smell like cabbage. 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 NuCalm every day. That's been my key to longevity, focus, high performance. I was on the phone with the CEO about a month ago, and he interrupted me halfway through a monologue, and he says, "Mr. Pullor, 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, a basket of goods in the form of physics and neuroscience where I can dictate what state I wanna be in. If I wanna 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 wanna be focused and look at legal paperwork, I'll put Focus on. If I wanna sleep, I'll put on Delta Track." I manage my life through physics understanding how to manage my brain wave. Boom. What do you think of that, Mr. Chris?
- CWChris Williamson
Talk me through the clinical studies. What did you learn from that? What was found out?
- JPJim Poole
Ah, that's a great question. Um, 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, and statistical biophysicists. And what we did was 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, all that stuff. It's con- it's... They're compromised in convenience for medical grade sensitivity, accuracy. They're not accurate at HRV, but you get an idea of what it means. What is it? Heart rate 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-lead ECG device, and we measured NuCalm, so five minutes before, during NuCalm, 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-lead ECG device. They'd attach it to their chest. It would capture 250 data points a second, 15,000 a minute, and all that data, five minutes before, during NuCalm, five minutes after, we would get all that data. We'd 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 defense man for the Chicago Blackhawks. It didn't matter if you had stage four metastatic brain cancer. NuCalm simply put the brakes on the stress response within five minutes and raised the parasympathetic to an equal ratio or greater. So what we see any time you do NuCalm is that we will immediately put the
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Five hours of sleep…
- JPJim Poole
brakes on your stress response and raise the rest-and-digest response. Your body and my body and everybody listening to this podcast 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. NuCalm 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 gonna take you to this place that I know is commensurate with healing, and I'm gonna allow you to spend time in that coveted place and give you the restoration your body needs." And the more you use this product, the more cumulative benefit, because it eventually is gonna balance your autonomic nervous system. And you're gonna live in your lifestyle, working clubs at night, thinking like a monk, living like a capitalist, because you're gonna 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 mid-brain. 11 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. It 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 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 Nu 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Five hours of sleep a night on average?
- JPJim Poole
Yeah, I got the stupid Oura Ring, so yes. I can tell you exactly. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) There's no cheating the Oura Ring or the Whoop, sadly.
- JPJim Poole
There's no, you know-
- CWChris Williamson
But I mean, it's all about-
- JPJim Poole
... the HRV is not accurate, but I think the sleep is accurate.
- CWChris Williamson
Would you be able to not sleep and just do an hour of Nu Calm a day?
- JPJim Poole
I w- 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 n- 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 Nu Calm isn't effective, 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 Nu Calm kind of mimics sleep architecture, but it doesn't do it fully. 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, um, just being in the 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. And I, I got five hours last night. (laughs) I woke up at 5:00 and I was like, "Uh," but I had to go to New York City, so I didn't really have time. And yesterday, at 6:00, I Nu 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. (laughs) I would like more sleep, but as you get older and everybody who's listening to this podcast who's older or has kids or whatever, once the sunlight hits your eyes, man, hello. So you have to sleep in a dungeon if you wanna sleep in. So sleeping in is not really an opportunity and I find myself if I Nu Calm and then I exercise or whatever, I find myself getting that second wind at 8:00 or 9:00, and I like to catch up or do whatever. So yeah, five hours a night.
- CWChris Williamson
Can you explain how the music sounds and the disc w- work? What's the relationship there?
- JPJim Poole
Awesome. There is none, so that's a great question. Um, the disc by itself is a, an incredible invention and it's incredibly c- complex. It looks simple, it looks just like a sticker in a Sesame Street comic book, right? Um, 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, uh, 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 tryptophan hydrolysate, and L-theanine. Those were the elements, kind of this cornucopia of what's called an inhibitory neurotransmitter, puts the brakes on stress. 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 Zukovsky, the Russian medicine doctor doing electro medicine in the 1930s. Technologically, it's been around for 100 years, it still isn't understood and still isn't 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 EMS. So the disc is simply signaling your brain like a tuning fork to activate what's called the gabaergic system, and the disc is important because it's like having a glass of wine or two. It negates your ability to resist Nu Calm because of your adrenaline.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- JPJim Poole
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 g- the gabaergic system and say, "Hey, we're gonna take you for a joy ride 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 Nu Calm. Then the eye mask simply negates visual stimulation. Then most of the work, 75%, m- maybe 80, sometimes 60% is in the neuroacoustic software underneath music. You're gonna hear beautifully architected music. The music is really avant-garde and kind of, you've never heard it before because we use the solfeggio ancient music scale and we build this stuff in 528 hertz or 432 hertz, really complex geometry. Fine, but underneath it is $6 million of the most sophisticated patented software ever created.Huh? What do you mean? A typical song is about five megabytes. NuCalm 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 is we're using all this complex physics and math to simply pace your brain like a NASCAR-paced car. We take you to 12 hertz and then we cycle you in this s- kind of space of 12 hertz to four hertz, mostly in theta. So the experience is really unique and fun because you're just listening to music. You can't hear it. 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 (mimics music) . 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 and we've been working with professional athletes. We didn't want them to think they were listening to just music. We want them to understand there's $6 million of patented physics underneath this music driving your brain wave function up to 39, 40 and 41 hertz. And-
- CWChris Williamson
Weren't you telling me that there was 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?
- JPJim Poole
Yes. Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
That's the, the coolest advert for a product that I can imagine.
- JPJim Poole
It's, um, it's pretty-
- CWChris Williamson
Or some Call of Duty shit.
- JPJim Poole
It, 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 our training lies. The stress to a military operative is their home life and their spouse or the kids are paying the bills, whatever. It's, it's odd to me. So we do a lot of work in the military. I'm really, uh, 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, liberties and freedom of us. And furthermore, they're 18 to 35 years old and they're giving Modafinil and uppers to get into their mission. They're given 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 three or 400 of the world's top athletes. And so they have-
- CWChris Williamson
Have you done-
- JPJim Poole
... they have their own recipe. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Have you done any clinical studies into the effects of Warrior Brain yet?
- JPJim Poole
Yeah. Well, well, we always look at dopamine for that and really just a brainwave function. So we'll look at an EEG to make sure that when we say your brain at 12 minutes is at 39 hertz, 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 psych- psychiatric world around PTSD, comorbid with addiction and the ability of NuCalm 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Busy. Busy, one way to put it.
- JPJim Poole
A- it's awesome, man. It's a, it's an awesome place to be. It's an awe- it's awesome to wake up every day knowing you're solving people's problems, changing people's lives. The amount of, 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, a dad or a mom and you take care of their children, it's incredible. And what's cool about NuCalm 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 the purpose he's on is amazing and admirable and he's exceptionally gifted, but he's one to many. NuCalm is one to 7.6 billion people. We just have to get in your hands. We have to create awareness, education and understanding. You know I look at the sleep industry, like I said earlier, it's $585 billion. Who thinks that buying a bed is gonna 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 my brain. So we know so little about sleep that there's people out there selling garbage to people that is not a solution. That's a problem. We need to solve that problem.
- CWChris 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?
- JPJim Poole
You're not gonna see it in probably till the first quarter of next year. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
And that's precisely why.
- JPJim Poole
Here's, here, here's what you're gonna see next, and this is crazy exciting to me. We have an isochronic waveform. So when we-
- CWChris Williamson
What's... Speak English, Jim.
- 1:15:00 – 1:20:49
So it's able to…
- JPJim Poole
This isn't about the complexity of neuroscience. I don't care and 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 that 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 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. Its 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, 5-0. 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, um, 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 NuCalm, and we have a lot of people that use it. Great. We've simplified it. We've dropped the price 99% and we're welcoming 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 gonna go back to the well and work with our creative agency to create an umbrella brand. And that brand is gonna be the portfolio of what we do, 'cause what we do is not NuCalm, 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 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 NuCalm's doing. I like the idea of tuning up, tuning in, tuning out. I don't know if that's gonna resonate or how we're gonna do this, but we're gonna have an umbrella brand. And then under that umbrella brand, we're gonna have NuCalm, Ignite, Focus, and Sleep. Those are the four elements to the whole range of 41 hertz to 0.5 hertz. The whole human experience we own at your fingertips. And then we built the voice and speech recognition in the, uh, NuCalm stress and fatigue assessment tool. That, we deployed with the FBI. The FBI uses that every day to show readiness of their operators for their missions. So you-
- CWChris Williamson
So it's able to verbally detect the patterns in someone's voice-
- JPJim Poole
It's incredible. Yeah. It's-
- CWChris Williamson
... and then give them a read out of how stressed they are?
- JPJim Poole
Yep. It's patterns, it's cadence, it's word choice. It's amazing. So you speak extemporaneously, that 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. It, that to me is like, okay, quantitatively I wanna see the impact NuCalm's having. So yeah, so that's what we're doing. So this summer's gonna be a blast 'cause we get to kinda 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 NuCalm, Ignite, and Sleep."
- CWChris Williamson
This is proper Tony Stark stuff, man.
- JPJim Poole
(laughs) It really is. Um, what's fascinating for me is that we're, we play kind of in left brain allopathic medicine and we also play in Eastern medicine, and we also play in physics and things that are not u- 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. Um, thankfully, I was raised with good parents, so there's no nefarious genes in my DNA, 'cause we can do some really weird stuff if we wanted to. We can implant words in your midbrain. We can do...
- CWChris Williamson
Through the software?
- JPJim Poole
Yeah. We can do a lot of, uh, interesting stuff for good and for bad. And so we choose good and we choose to do really cool things.
- CWChris 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?
- JPJim Poole
NuCalm, N-U-C-A-L-M, .com and you can get started and join the family there. And from there you can then, uh, 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. Um, 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 NuCalm. Go in your bed, get on a good recovery, get up, feel amazing, and go take on your day.
- CWChris Williamson
I love it, man. Thanks so much for your day.
- JPJim Poole
Pleasure. Take care of yourselves. COVID is over. Now we're the, we're the calm after the storm. Let's go.
- CWChris Williamson
(instrumental music) Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few months, and don't forget to subscribe. It makes me very happy indeed. Peace.
Episode duration: 1:20:50
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