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with Joel Totoro and Wes Barnett. Welcome to
the BehindTheShield podcast. As always, my name
is James Gearing, and this week I bring you something
that I truly believe will be life -changing for
so many of you listening. As you know, I started
this podcast seven years ago and have since interviewed
over 800 people. Each of those has brought incredible
solutions to some of our problems. But when it
comes to wellness and recovery -specific solutions
that I use and shout from the rooftops about,
I can count those on one hand. And I can tell
you hand on heart that this is going to join
that list. You will hear Jim Pool lead you through
the genesis of New Calm. And the origin involves
one of the greatest minds that America has ever
seen. Now for many of you, you wear or wore a
uniform for a profession. And everyone else,
you are a human being experiencing life in 2023.
What they have created, the ability to down -regulate
the nervous system passively, completely out
of our control, where all we have to do is put
on a pair of headphones, has truly blown my mind.
I myself went through 14 years as a firefighter
paramedic, worked as a stuntman, a martial artist,
a lifeguard. So a lot of high stress physical
occupations. And on the back end of that, I'll
be completely honest, I was physically broken
and mentally broken. Now I have found many, many
tools to address some of that trauma. And that
is what gave me such a unique perspective. I
was already doing a lot and it was working somewhat.
But when I started using NuCalm and it's literally
only been a week as I record this, it has been
absolutely mind -blowing. The progress and the
clarity and the diminishing of my brain fog that
I have seen. Now they have the down regulation
elements, the rescue, the power nap, and the
deep sleep. Then they have the up regulation
where you're working on focus and energy. So
all I ask is that you spend two short hours and
listen to this interview. Hear Jim tell the story,
hear my testimony in parallel, and I hope it
leads you to just try this. I promise you this
will be one of the most incredibly life -changing
things that you have ever done. So with that
being said, I introduce to you the CEO of NuCalm,
Jim Poole. Every single person I interview, but
for reasons people will hear in a little while,
I'm extremely excited to talk to you and bring
your product to this audience, having tried it
myself and been blown away. So first, I want
to say thank you to Ken Grigliano for connecting
us. And secondly, I want to say welcome to the
Behind the Shield podcast today. Thanks for having
me. James, you'll be an easy name for me to remember.
because I'm a James too, even though I go by
Jim or Lord or Master. I tried that. My wife
wouldn't say it. So we're going to get to New
Calm and obviously all the different things that
it's doing. However, I'd still love to paint
the picture and start the story at the beginning.
So before we do the origin story of the technology
that led to New Calm, let's talk about your kind
of timeline. So tell me where you were born and
tell me a little bit about your family dynamic,
what your parents did, how many siblings. I have
one identical twin brother who's four minutes
my junior, which makes me the alpha male and
the elder statesman. I'm 54 years old and I was
born in New Jersey. We stayed in New Jersey for
about 25 minutes and started our first 11 years
of our life in Connecticut. My parents are both
psychotherapists and they divorced when we were
two. So I grew up under the auspices of a very
powerful, determined, protective mother bear
who really socialized us to care for others before
ourselves. So it was a really positive upbringing,
a lot of enlightenment as a child. You know,
listen, when you're raised in a dysfunctional
family, And along that journey, my mom married
a couple more times. So we had stepfamilies enter
our life from a spaceship. And then when it doesn't
work out, they exit our life from that same spaceship.
So along the journey, yeah, I mean, I love the
love that I received, the insights. When you're
raised by two psychotherapists, you don't get
in trouble being an identical twin boy. We were
we were like the devil. We didn't get in trouble
in the manner that other kids got in trouble.
Spanked, scolded, grounded. We got this. You've
really disappointed me, son. You're passive aggressive.
I'd so much rather have the alternative. Just
get it over with and let me just move on. So
we spent. a decade in new york and then i spent
a lot of my formative years after high school
in massachusetts uh 20 years there on the career
side i followed the path of my parents um probably
from socialization and we had i mean we just
had a lot of fun uh we loved music my parents
were both psychotherapists but they were meditators
so you know we were indoctrinated to the maharishi
and had mantras when we were like 10. I still
can't meditate. So early adopters doesn't mean
anything for meditation. And I followed the footsteps
of my parents. I got into counseling and was
a mental health counselor and doing psychotherapy
for severely mentally ill people in the state
mental health institutions of Massachusetts.
And then Governor Weld came in and said, hey,
this is costing a lot of tax dollars to keep
these hospitals in order. That was the advent
of homelessness. He closed the hospitals and
didn't have a catchment for these people to go.
So we did some really progressive work. I was
organized and leading a couple homes that actually
tried to acclimatize people out of the hospital
into affluent areas of Boston. So in doing this,
James, the challenge in psychotherapy is, It's
never black and white. There's never right or
wrong. And I used to think when I was a kid and
growing up under this great environment of psychotherapy
and solving problems that I could change the
world. I literally left college with an undergraduate
in psychology that I could change the world.
Go work with a house full of schizophrenics for
a week. You're quickly humbled to realize I may
not be able to even take care of myself here
and change myself. So in that process, I'm in
my early 20s, and I'm responsible for 10, 20,
30 people's lives. In our society, we don't value
people that choose a career path of taking care
of others. The fact that you would put a 21,
22 -year -old in control of people's lives that
are being moved out of a state mental health
hospital and put into a community home, that's
insane to me. Underpaid, undervalued, overworked.
It was a crazy experience. It was great. From
there, in parallel, because it wasn't good enough
for me, I enlisted in this program. It's a post
-baccalaureate Harvard Medical School sponsorship
program, and I applied for an MD, PhD in neuropsychopathology.
What the hell does that mean? I wanted to get
to the black and white of how mental illness
starts. How does this all come to be? I got accepted
into the program, started it, and said, I don't
really want to go to school for eight more years.
Life is getting in the way. Married. it's time
to have kids so in boston we have the opportunity
for just a wealth of intellectual capital and
intellectual opportunity for school so i ended
up going to babson for my mba and then worked
in various industries so one thing i like about
a master's in business is it doesn't ground you
in any vertical business is the same just like
people are the same The only difference is the
variables, the competitive landscape, your value
proposition, price sensitivity, marketing. Those
are the only differences. So it's like a chessboard.
So the business thing gave me the opportunity
to really. get my hands into a lot of different
verticals. And I became associated with a lot
of Wall Street banks, private equity and venture
capital, and built a strategic consulting firm
that did the entire value chain of mergers and
acquisitions. So say a large bank would call
me and say, hey, we have a target. We would do
the due diligence. We'd build up the business
plan, write the pro forma, the growth strategy,
all that good stuff. Then we'd go on the roadshow.
We'd visit with the banks. We'd secure the funding.
And then post acquisition, I'd be a part of the
leadership. Sometimes I ran the company entirely.
Sometimes I was just part of the leadership.
So I did that until 2008. In January of 2008,
we consummated the largest private equity acquisition
in the history of the dental industry. Dentistry
has about 100 ,000 dental practices, about 160
,000 dentists, and about 1 ,400 manufacturers.
This is one of the largest ones in California.
I ran that company until April of 2009, and things
were getting tough. The market was crashing.
Mergers and acquisitions weren't happening. It
was more like triage management and portfolio
management and trying to keep your portfolio
of companies from going into bankruptcy. And
as life would have it, James, as we've all lived
and were present and cool things that happened,
the neuroscientist, quantum physicist, and miracle
worker in the form of Dr. G. Blake Holloway contacted
our consulting firm. And with a nice Southern
drawl, he said, Jim, I've invented a technology
that quickly and predictably relaxes the mind
and body within minutes with no side effects.
That caught my attention. The immediacy of my
mind, I thought, well, maybe that sounds like
marijuana, right? And then I thought, well, I
think when you smoke, your eyes get glossed over,
you get cotton mouth, your lips stay up your
teeth, you get the munchies, you lose sense of
time, you laugh at stupid shit. I was like, okay,
those are side effects. What is this? And then
he explained it to me. And I said, okay, what
is this? And that began a journey so profound,
so rewarding. So intellectually captivating.
For the past 14 years, I have spent my last 14
years studying the human brain, the anatomy of
physiology, the human stress response, applied
neuropsychobiology, evolutionary psychology,
social psychology, quantum physics. It's amazing.
But more amazing than that, because that's more
what's important to me and how I inspire myself
to continue to learn. What's more important than
that? Having a technology that you can hand to
somebody and change their life, save their life,
liberate them. They don't even know. We'll talk
about this. The human being is so capable of
normalizing dysfunction, and we can normalize
things that aren't healthy for a lot of reasons,
and we'll talk about it. So I feel like one of
the luckiest men in the world. I feel blessed.
I'm 54 years old. I probably look like I'm 40.
And it's not because I take good care of my skin
and go to spas every day. By virtue of the product
that we bring to the world, I haven't felt stress
in over a decade. I haven't wasted a single mental
calorie on anxiety in over a decade. I haven't
worried. So when you take all of that out and
I drink a lot of water. That combination, I look
like a baby, I have the soul of a thousand -year
-old man, and the temperament of a ten -year
-old boy. Well, before we go down the New Calm
journey, I just want to go back to something
you said. So you have this psychiatric facility
that basically dumps all the patients out, and
now that is adding to homelessness. An irony
to a lot of the conversations I hear from people
that spend certain days of the week in holy buildings
that have such disdain towards the homeless and
are more than happy to drive them into the next
jurisdiction. Through your eyes, talk to me about
homelessness and the mental health element of
why these men and women are usually living under
a bridge or somewhere else. It's a terrible,
terrible human problem. will have no self -resolution.
Homelessness and the advent of it is primarily
derived from the closure of state mental health
hospitals. That's how it all happened. You can
look at the etiology of all homelessness in every
city and you can locate with great specificity
when they started closing mental health facilities
and when homelessness started. So in Boston,
it was easy for us to see in the Boston Commons
and some of the public areas, homelessness starting
in the 1990, 91, 92, 93, 94 and proliferating.
Mental illness is awful. Significant mental illness,
schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar,
multiple personality disorder, et cetera. Significant
challenges. If not medicated, not put in a place
of familiarity and security and safety, it's
a mess. And so when you're left to the primal
instinct of mankind and you're mentally ill,
so you'd really, you know, let me start with,
we don't understand mental illness. We think
that someone that we know is diagnosed with schizophrenia,
they're always crazy. No, they're not. Schizophrenia
is normal as we are until they're not. So you
can have dialogue with any schizophrenic, and
then they take a left turn down some multidimensional
space that you're like, wait a second, where
did logic stop and craziness start? So there's
a lot of elements to the mental ill person that's
the same as we are. It's a continual. mental
health and depression and anxiety and fear and
stress and schizoaffective disorder. It's a continuum.
For us to shame them, turn our backs on them,
displace them, that doesn't help us. Displacing
our problem in one city to another city has no
help for anybody. These people are sons and daughters
of parents. These people are parents of kids.
These people deserve love, not judgment, support,
but they need to be in a facility to begin to
rehab their mind. If you're on the street, you're
in survival mode. If you're on the street, you
are full amygdala in primal survival. And if
you're on the street, you're self -soothing through
the only manner known to mankind for centuries,
and that's drugs and alcohol. Drugs and alcohol
are very skilled at taking you out of psychic
pain with a very predictable speed. I can have
a bad day and one sip of alcohol, wow, my problems
rolled right down my shoulder. So it's tragic.
It's sad. I saw recently that California spent
billions of dollars addressing the homeless.
And any of you who frequent California know.
It hasn't gotten better. It hasn't plateaued.
It has gotten significantly worse. So I think
in humanity and how our brains think and process
information, it's very easy for us to judge those
who look different, act different, feel different.
It's easy for us to look at people with disdain.
They're human like we are. And they're cursed
with a dysfunction in their brain that's biological.
And then it's exacerbated. by social distance,
social shame. You know, if you think of Maslow's
hierarchy of needs, what do we need? We need
food. We need water. We need shelter. We need
intimacy. And we need social connection. Take
social connection away and you exacerbate the
common theme of the mental illness anyway. The
whole thing is disturbing to me. If you said,
hey, a lot of things, when you think of social
dynamics, there's an easy fix, or it seems to
be. There's no easy fix to this. But keeping
them on the street and shaming them or killing
them or moving them and displacing them, no.
And you know what's interesting, James? When
you travel around the world, you don't see the
homelessness that we see in America. So how can
one of the most affluent, most advanced cultures
in the world have one of the most significant
problems i think it's japan where they have zero
homelessness if i'm not mistaken you know there's
a lot of other places that the scandinavian countries
always come up over and over again but um yeah
i think that you know looking at that person
who has been through trauma Like a lot of us
have, but for whatever reason, they weren't able
to address it the same way. And putting that
human back into the addict, the homeless person,
the sex worker, whatever it is, none of them
dreamed when they were in preschool of becoming
this version of themselves. And I think apart
from anomalies, most people weren't genetically...
predisposition to end up in that way from what
i've seen over and over again and please correct
me if it was different in in your eyes in the
facility but more often than not there were elements
of childhood trauma combined with an absence
of positive mentors that sent a lot of these
people into despair um you bring up some great
points number one when you're born into a family
of addiction or born into a family of abuse you
have reactive attachment disorder Humans are
amazing. We're gifted and we're incredible. We're
the only ones who can kind of use our brain.
Now, we can't fly and we can't lift things. We
can't swim underwater. You know, we're not fish,
but our brain is amazing. But think about how
weak we are and vulnerable as a species. So a
wildebeest gives birth. That baby wildebeest
has about seven seconds to get to its feet. Or
hello, there's a lioness over there who's looking
at your little skinny legs between the hurt and
is going to take you. But a human stays in the
family for 18 years. What? So we have an implicit
need to attach. And we have an implicit need
to attach to our mom and our dad. Whether you're
a mom or dad or good people, narcissists, drug
addicts, schizophrenic, doesn't matter. It's
ingrained in our... But the other thing that's
interesting is that most of us genealogically
in our history have alcoholism and mental illness
in our family tree. That's just part of it. What
I could see from evaluating the folks that I
worked with and who I love dearly, and they were
just plagued. They just were dealt a bad deck.
Each of them had a catalyst of some type of trauma
that exacerbated and activated their mental illness.
In mental illness, it usually starts to surface
post -puberty, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. For
females, you'll see anxiety disorders really
reach their pinnacle between 16 and 22. So we
all kind of have that. Again, it's a continuum.
Now, if it's exacerbated by some kind of trauma,
mostly it's domestic abuse inside the family
unit. And people think it's always the dad to
the children. No, a lot of times it's the mom
to the children. Right. So there's a lot of dynamics
that we're not aware of. But that catalyst and
then not having the support. So as a child, if
you're born into a family of abuse and dysfunction
and trauma, as a child, you're not socialized
enough to be able to compartmentalize and you
develop all these skill sets. That's a lot of
the ideology of multiple personality disorder.
But if we had access to support, it helps us
resolve that trauma. But again, some people are
gifted to resolve things. Some people are gifted
to compartmentalize things. Some people can make
it. through the same trauma that other people
can't. One thing I did realize and I found fascinating
is 1991, 92, 93, a new drug called Risperidol
came to the schizophrenic market. It was very
powerful. This power started creating suicidality.
Okay, what's going on here? When you have mental
illness, one of the ruses that the mental illness
creates upon you is that you don't know you have
mental illness. Everybody else is wrong. You're
right. So this drug came and it puts you face
to face with your reality. And that reality,
I can't identify and I can't handle this. So
that was an interesting aspect too. But, you
know, I think the biggest takeaway for me as
a human in this existence today, let's be less
critical of ourselves and certainly less judgmental
of others. If you apply an ear and listen more,
things just are easier. Absolutely. Well, I want
to get to the kind of origin story of the technology
that we're going to talk about. And I know it
goes back pretty much 40 years. So let's start
at the very beginning as far as the neuroscience
vibrations and that research that was happening
back then. Sure. Dr. Blake Holloway was an interesting
character. He was raised in East Coast oil wealth,
and he was probably an alien life form of intellect.
And, you know, we all kind of grew up with people
that were crazy, crazy smart and really had difficulty
identifying with socialization. And he had Asperger's.
So that further kind of distanced him from an
ability to kind of play well with others. So
his intellect and his path brought him to a space
where he was. became a clinician as a neuroscientist,
as a quantum physicist, as a naturopath. He had
a huge heart for helping people resolve trauma
without falling into addiction. And even if you
did fall into the addiction, let me address the
biological aspect of addiction and then help
you resolve the trauma. So in 1990, probably
the beginning of the true trial and error invention
and discovery path of what he was trying to accomplish.
So when you think about what am I trying to accomplish?
Well, you have to have a target. You have to
have a hypothesis or a null hypothesis, and you
have to be identifying something. His goal was
to find an all -natural way to downregulate the
human stress response. Okay. How am I going to
do that? There's mindfulness practices. China
invented meditation 3 ,500 years ago. Deep breathing,
yoga, tai chi. There are practices that have
evolved through generations of humanity designed
to help you self -regulate and down -regulate.
The problem is the traumatic brain doesn't allow
you that opportunity. So the traumatic brain.
Let's start. with a little evolutionary psychology
how is our brain wired and why do we do what
we do well in our temporal region of our brain
lies this almond -shaped piece of our brain called
the amygdala many of us are aware of the amygdala
and many of us are slaves to our amygdala and
we don't even know about the amygdala so the
amygdala and all the neuronal circuitry and wiring
of that aspect of our brain is millions of years
in evolution. That aspect of the human brain
is millions of years of circuitry. It is a perfected
system. The amygdala is the Star Trek Enterprise
flight deck of your autonomic nervous system.
Fight, flight, freeze, fear, stress, anxiety,
depression, and worry. Those sound pretty familiar
to most of humans because we live in that every
day. So the amygdala in the reptile brain is
in the temporal region of our brain, cross -section
right here. There's two sides of it, and it's
an almond -shaped piece. So you could argue that
most humans are governed by an almond. It's true.
People call it the reptile brain, primordial
midbrain. That part of our brain is millions
of years of evolution and is a perfect mousetrap.
And unfortunately, the evolution of the human
brain hasn't superseded the need for the caveman
brain. So most people will tell you today, hey,
we're still operating with the caveman part of
our brain being dominant to our frontal and prefrontal
cortex, and we're still living like we're in
high fear. This part of our brain, our forehead,
our prefrontal and frontal cortex, this is what
separates us from primates. This area of our
brain separates us from primates. This is our
logic, our executive functioning, our decision
-making, our patience, our presence, our emotion,
our character, our personality. This is what
separates you, James, from an ape. Separates
me from a donkey. Okay. So this part of our brain,
prefrontal frontal cortex, is who we are. This
part of our brain is reptile. How the brain operates.
is resource allocation everybody on this call
understands resource allocation you're called
to an incident how many resources can you deploy
to that incident resource allocation every minute
of every hour of every day we're battling a resource
allocation in our brain and the tool is oxygen
-rich red blood the currency of the brain is
oxygen -rich red blood and the element that's
pivotal to our healing and our survival is oxygen.
So when we think of the physiology of that, okay,
you're right. When I'm stressed or distracted
or anxious, I'm shallow of breath. Yeah, you're
right. So when we are in a state of fear or stress,
we're not getting the oxygen -rich red blood
here. So in human evolution, there's several
nervous systems, but let's focus on the central
nervous system and the autonomic nervous system.
The central nervous system has one Primal goal,
self -preservation. Keep me alive. Supersedes
everything else. I mean, if I'm not alive, who
cares? What does it have at its disposal? It
has your five senses and it has your intuition.
Now, of your five senses, your olfactory has
a lot of memory areas, but your visual cortex
is 80 % of your cerebral cortex. We get so much
information from our eyes. Now, the central nervous
system, and this is fascinating, Primary goal
is self -preservation. It is constantly evaluating
you on a nanosecond basis for familiarity and
security. All it cares about is, am I safe? Even
in our sleep. That's fascinating to me. Even
in our sleep, we're awake. How so? Say you're
listening to music and it shuts off. You wake
up. Your central nervous system says, wait a
second. That's not familiar. i love this there's
no such thing as a second first impression now
why would that be how can i go to a restaurant
with my wife have the most delicious delicate
meal that's just like dissolving on my tongue
making me like almost feel erotic in my mouth
and i'm in love with this meal i love everything
about it after the meal i'm still in love with
it the next day i'm reminiscing about it And
for the next two weeks, it's become the most
nostalgic, incredible experience of my life.
And then I think, you know what, I'll do something
romantic and I'll book a return visit to that
same restaurant with my wife and I'll surprise
her. But it's never the same. Why? Because that
first impression going somewhere new activates
everything your central nervous system has at
its disposal to evaluate every aspect of everything
you're doing that's new. You travel somewhere
new. You live in the Midwest and you go to New
York City for the first time. Holy cow. That
first night, man, you are exhausted. It's in
America. It's got pavement. It's got everything
else. Why am I so exhausted? Because your central
nervous system is gangbusters. Like, wait a second.
I don't know what to believe. I don't know what
to see. I've never seen buildings like this.
So we literally get exhausted. by the primordial
need for survival in the central nervous system,
looking at everything. Another aspect I think
that social psychology is fascinating to me is
we are all creatures of habit. If I said to you,
James, you're a creature of habit, people almost
feel like that's a judgment. No, it's not. It's
really just a euphemism saying you're human.
Why are we creatures of habit? Because your central
nervous system doesn't want to burn calories
learning new things. It would love for you to
stay at home for the rest of your life. That's
it. You know why? Because your central nervous
system in your brain is lazy, doesn't want to
burn calories ever. That's fascinating to me.
So we're all creatures of habit because I'm always
looking at how come humans have evolved so slowly?
How come it takes us so many generations to make
an incremental improvement? It seems rather pedestrian
to me because we're so smart. Are we as smart
as we think we are? No. We're a victim of the
wiring of our neuronal circuitry. If the primordial
reptile part of our brain is millions of years
evolved, and this is only a couple million years
evolved, we're battling a 36 million year head
start of a reptile over who we are. So let's
get back to the trauma. And this is where it
gets alarming and sad and really quite demonstrably
scary for humanity. When we are traumatized,
and every human on earth, 8 billion people today,
it's a continuum. Everybody's been traumatized.
It's the magnitude of the trauma, the frequency
of the trauma, and your ability to heal from
the trauma. But when you are traumatized, something
really nefarious happens. Your central nervous
system, which primary job is self -preservation
and survival, loses faith and trust in the universe.
Loses any sense of familiarity and security.
Furthermore, it loses faith and trust in you
to protect you from the universe. That is the
key to all the bad things that happen. Because
for the rest of that person's existence, they
will be in a state of hypervigilance, hyper alert,
hyper fearful, hyper agitated. They will never
get the rest they deserve. They will get stuck
in the cognitive pathways. They will be in their
sleep pattern, not sleeping well, because the
memory cycle will keep perseverating over the
trauma. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the toughest
profile of all seven diagnosable anxiety disorders.
There are seven disorders in the DSM -5, and
of the seven, the hardest one to live with is
trauma. And embrace my heart, because they become
their own worst enemy. And it's not because they
want to. Their brain has changed and their pathways
of oxygen -rich red blood flow and new neuronal
coherence doesn't exist. If you look at a PET
scan of a traumatized brain, you'll be alarmed
to see a significant reduction in blood flow
to the prefrontal and frontal cortex. Well, that's
my character, my personality, my logic, my executive
functioning, my ability to take decisions, emotional
stability. So now you're telling me I have less
blood flow there. The highway is closed down.
Furthermore, there's blood flow that's restricted
to the hippocampus, which is my memory center,
which means that I will be living for the rest
of my life plagued by the trauma and reliving
that not just in my brain. We all have memories,
but the brain elicits that amygdala that activates
the body's mobilization and puts me in that state
of hypervigilance all the time. We all know.
Listen. In police work, firework, and EMTs, you
see this every single day. You see trauma. Trauma
is easily identifiable. You can see it from perspiration.
You can see it from distraction. You can see
it by looking in the eyes of someone traumatized.
You're looking at a shark. There's nothing there
because they're cognitively dissociated because
their body has mobilized to protect itself from
a threat, whether the threat is real or perceived.
Phobias. Are the manifestation of the amygdala
taking control of your brain from a thought.
The human brain doesn't have a filter that says,
hey, James, that's just not real. That's just
in your head. The brain doesn't have a filter,
doesn't have a gateway to say, hey, real. Hey,
you're really in danger. Someone has a gun on
the other side of the street and they're going
to come across the street and rob you. versus,
hey, I'm scared of spiders and I think there
might be one underneath that box. The brain doesn't
have a filter. So guess what happens? All the
blood flow leaves your frontal cortex, activates
the amygdala, goes to the HPA axis. All your
blood flow goes to your visceral organs. You
mobilize to protect yourself and you're ready
to fight. But that cognitive dissociation you
guys see every day. So PTSD is the fundamental,
most difficult aspect of the human condition
and the most difficult. to live with blake holloway
spent his life finding a way to take care of
these people without drugs because today's conventional
therapy dictates that if i present myself with
trauma i'm given a narcotic -based pharmaceutical
that doesn't do for me but mask the symptom doesn't
help me what it does is it masks the symptom
and then because the brain is so incredible any
action will get a reaction and side effects will
start building upon itself so you haven't helped
me putting a band -aid on my brain and then asking
me to sit down in a room with a therapist and
talk about therapy is literally as blake would
tell you a recipe for suicide i'm condemning
every patient that sits across from me using
conventional therapy to the suicide not because
they're a coward they just get tired of living
like this they get tired of living in fear and
shame and vulnerable and scared they just want
to feel normal again and they never will in that
path that ladies and gentlemen took blake 19
years blake is the smartest human being i have
ever met I came out of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I came out of a really erudite area of high intellectual
horsepower. Our company has 52 medical advisors,
some of the best of the best, the leading statistical
biophysicists from Harvard Medical School, mathematicians
from NASA. Collectively, take 52 of our medical
advisors, put them in a room. Blake is smarter
than the entire group of them by himself. and
it took him 19 years to figure out how do i down
regulate the human brain and shut down your stress
response safely and reliably it's amazing so
i want to put something in before we talk about
you know how he did this um one thing that has
become very clear because i've heard so many
testimonies basically of near suicide and a couple
that actually went through with the attempt but
thank god survived is you have this wanting to
suffer you know the suffering to end like you
said but there also is a very very powerful you
know reoccurring theme of a sense of being a
burden And so when the healthy mind is on the
outside looking in and go, oh, what a coward.
How could they do that? It's so selfish. When
they think about their family, you hear these
people that were in crisis and their brain has
distorted, and I just want to get your opinion
on how, to where their reality now is, I am such
a burden, but I'm also from a profession where
I said I would die for a complete stranger if
it came to it. I'm such a burden to my family.
They truly would be better off without me. I'm
terrified of suicide, but I'm going to do it
for them. That is the other kind of the end of
suffering, but also that burden element that
never is really discussed in the kind of anti
-suicide conversations. From a physiology point
of view. you know what would be the the reasoning
behind what how physiologically what is miswiring
through sleep deprivation trauma organizational
stress all these compounding elements that get
people to crisis so let's go back to the resource
allocation and where the oxygen -rich red blood
cells define and stay in your brain area so there's
two battles the amygdala of the midbrain versus
the frontal cortex of this brain On the traumatized
side, again, you have a diminished amount of
blood flow to the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus.
So I'm kind of stuck in a memory pattern. We've
all been stuck, trauma or not. We've all been
kind of stuck in patterns and rituals and they
may be negative, but because the brain is such
a creature of habit, we normalize negativity.
You can normalize anything. That person starts
to build a narrative because all they do is live
every minute of every hour. in a state of depression,
anxiety, anticipatory anxiety, it becomes very
isolating. Listen, humans, we've all been through
the same thing. And we don't seem to understand
this because we're not given the education of
how our brain works. Every human stress response
is identical to every human's stress response.
It's amazing that we feel alone, isn't it? I
feel alone and my problems are unique to me.
Well, that's insane. Even thinking that's insane.
There's 8 billion people today on earth, and
there's probably 8 billion people that have passed.
There's 16 billion people, and you're telling
me that you're unique. That's not true. The human
stress response, central nervous system, five
senses, intuition, activates the amygdala, says,
hey, we're in danger. The amygdala fires to what's
called the HPA axis, accesses the adrenaline,
catecholamines, cortisol. Blood flow to the visceral
organs, peripheral vision increases, olfactory
increases. I'm prepared for battle. Okay. That's
identical to every human on earth. They live
in that and they start building a narrative that
builds upon itself. We've all been here. Every
single human on earth has gone to a place of
isolated, feeling low sense of self -worth, feeling
burdensome. Now, one of the challenges in the
world of helping others, helping others doesn't
come with helping myself. So some of the sociological
evolution of the caretaker is dangerous because
we're trying to tell them, hey, listen, there's
a reason that you have to take care of yourself
because you can't be there for the ones that
love you and need you the most. But we don't
think like that because we're caretakers. And
there's a whole psychological profile of that
type of person. So if I'm living from everyday
post -trauma, I'm building a narrative and I'm
stuck. And the narrative is building upon itself.
It's not one cut. You're not cutting me with
an ax. You're cutting me with a thousand cuts.
And it layers upon itself. Now, there's a couple
more elements here for us to think about. But
let me walk you through the degradation of the
body and the mind and the spirit when we don't
take care of ourselves and how we may get from
a traumatized brain of discomfort to taking our
life. It's cumulative. That's all it is. Every
day, we need to sleep. It'd be nice if we knew
a little bit more about sleep. Sleep's very complex.
The science of sleep is 40 years old. Did you
know that? The science of sleep is like 40 years
old. It's like, what were we thinking in science
the last century? Wouldn't you think that sleep,
maybe we want to investigate it? So we don't
know a ton about sleep, but what we do know about
sleep is in the sleep architecture, there are
certain areas that are called the healing zone.
And when we're in the healing zone, our cells
are doing two important things. One, they're
cleaning their toxins, cellular maintenance.
Can you imagine if you went to high school and
there was no maintenance crew? What it would
look like by the end of the year? Okay, it wouldn't
look good and it wouldn't smell good. The second
thing is your mitochondria. Mitochondria, for
those of you who remember high school biology,
is the energy source of your cells. So in sleep,
why sleep is so important is those two elements
occur. Now we get the rest and we get the relaxation
and the brain gets the rest and the body gets
the rest and we get to heal and hormonally get
regulated. But the key really is the healing
zone of cells cleaning their toxins and the mitochondria
being restored. Over time, from puberty on, we're
not getting the sleep we need. We're living in
a world today that's just, it's insane. We're
in a rush and a race, literally. If you take
a step and you think, you'll look and you say,
hey, the human race is in a race to erase the
human race. Think about it. Of course we are.
You can see it everywhere, every aspect of our
life, from our food supply not being food, to
5G and environmental toxins, to the media fear
-mongering, to it's insane. We're in this race.
We need to stop and slow down, breathe. We need
to sleep. Years ago, I don't know how old you
are, but about 10, 15 years ago, it was like
a badge of honor to not sleep. I remember I'd
be in rooms. Yeah, I sleep three hours a night.
I think to myself, that doesn't sound good. Well,
this audience, they don't get a choice, and this
is what we're going to get into as well. You've
got police, fire, EMS, the ER folk, and everyone
else in the hospital. They've signed up because,
as you said, they're the caregivers. we give
them, usually organizationally, the worst care
as well. So we are, again, literally killing
our first responders by not allowing them rest
and recovery between shifts. Okay. So let me
reinforce this. Why is sleep so important? Simple
math. If I were to live to be 100 years old,
I should sleep for 33 years. So intuitively,
we understand that. When we get a good night's
sleep, we feel better. We understand that. When
we don't get a good night's sleep, we struggle.
We fake it till we make it. We understand that.
But on the physiological side, according to the
research and the literature, over 95 % of every
disease known to mankind is created by stress.
How is that so? Because stress negatively impacts
sleep, your sleep architecture, the onset of
sleep, and the ability to get back to sleep when
you wake up. So every night, We're supposed to
sleep. Every night, your cells do their maintenance,
your toxins are cleaned out, and your mitochondria
energy source is restored. Human biology is communication
of one cell to another. Each cell has a job,
a function, a role, just like the team in a firehouse.
Each cell has a job. I'll use cancer as an example.
Everybody on Earth today has cancer in their
body. I have cancer in my body. You have cancer
in your body. But we also have something called
a killer cell. That sounds cool. Well, the killer
cell has a defined job. Go locate any cancerous
cells that are proliferating, beginning to have
a party, introduce yourself, and kill them. Okay.
Fine. Easily understood. My 10s, my 20s, my 20s
to my 30s, I stopped sleeping well. My 30s to
my 40s, I've got kids, I'm sleeping less. My
40s to my 50s, I'm sleeping even less. I'm developing
really bad habits. I'm normalizing stuff. I'm
living off of caffeine, monster energy drinks,
et cetera, eating preservative foods, whatever.
I'm literally killing myself and I can't feel
it because it's a thousand cuts. In my 50s, because
I haven't gotten enough rest over time, my killer
self forgets its function. having cleaned its
maintenance. It's filled with toxins. So the
killer cell goes out, locates the cancer cell,
says, oh, wow, is this a party? I've never been
to this party. Introduces itself, and it joins
the party. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the
human physiology of rest, recovery, and the need
for sleep. We only need sleep if we want to live.
We only need sleep if we want to be resilient.
We only need sleep if we want to repair, heal,
lower inflammation, and improve our immune strength.
We only need sleep if we want to live a good
life, okay? So with the traumatized brain, lack
of blood flow to this part, I don't have access
to my personality. I don't have access to a point
of reference. If I get a good night's sleep,
and people say sleep on it it's amazing the little
stupid i was worried about yesterday doesn't
seem so big that brain doesn't have access to
that some of the areas of its of the character
of that person are no longer available to them
So over time, not being able to have access to
sleep because of the trauma impacting their sleep
quality, it's getting shorter and shorter and
shorter. And my neuronal coherence in that part
of my brain is getting less and less and less
till finally I get back to the corner. I said,
I'm just looking for excuses to get out. That's
what happens when they're getting to the end
of the road. Do they really feel they're burdensome?
It's all of a shame cycle. But if you took a
step out and you'd say, wait a second, if my
friend was in that space, I would do anything
to help them. And I'd be really upset if they
didn't talk to me. That's because we're in a
place where we're patient and present. So the
cumulative negative consequence of not managing
stress, constantly being in a state of hyper
alertness and vigilance and not sleeping. puts
us to that precipice where we finally decide
to take our own life and we justify it in our
own negative narrative because we don't have
access to a lot a lot of our brain because of
the trauma it's absolutely devastating for people
to take their life because they're broken and
one of the crazy things about being human is
as smart as we are We are so grossly incapable
of understanding intangible. If I can't see it,
touch it, smell it, taste it, is it real? What
do you mean you have a broken brain? What are
you talking about? You went somewhere. You went
and took care of a fire. You saw something that
your brain couldn't process. What do you mean?
You're different. What do you mean, right? What
do you mean I mean? I wake up, I look in the
mirror. I'm no different. Well, what's going
on here? You literally would need a PET scan.
You're like, okay, wait a second. That's what's
going on. So it's really harmful for us to not
have access to that ability to understand the
intangible and then to isolate ourselves and
further not take care of ourselves and then not
seek help. It's not right. And it's so, so...
traumatizing for everybody, right? We all know
if you went away to war and came back and you're
different, who's judging you? Who would judge
that? They'd be like, wait a second, you went
and protected us. Whatever you saw, I'm pretty
sure your brain is not able to process. You're
not supposed to see your friend's head get taken
off his shoulders, right? You're not supposed
to see a child be blown up. You can't process
that. I'm not judging you. I want to help you.
Families don't say, hey, you're weird and you
came back broken. They just want dad back, but
they're there to help. And the sick part about
it is we feel so isolated and so like we don't
want to be burdened to someone. That burden is
exponentially greater when we don't seek help
and open up our mouth and use our words. Like
when you're raising a kid, use your words. Same
thing for an adult. Use your words. Words will
help express the struggle you're having, and
then we'll find a path to help you. Well, I mean,
thank you. It's a totally different explanation
than I've had, and I've had people from all different
disciplines, and each one is adding a layer to
this conversation. But the way that you've just
put it with the physiology especially, it just
underlines the foundational elements of health
and how important it is. you and i spoke uh the
thing was a week ago no please jump in jump in
i want everybody to know this you can't override
40 million years of neuronal circuitry you better
have the humility to understand that amygdala
and that reptile brain is designed for self -preservation
to keep you alive is it overused does it have
too much power in today's human evolution yes
it does but you can't override it so have the
humility to understand that, then it'll hopefully
give you the courage to ask for help. Because
you can't see the damage in your brain. You can't
see the lack of new cognition and new thought
patterns that are no longer existing in your
brain because of blood flow restriction from
trauma. Yeah, that's the biggest takeaway to
me as I look at human evolution across the world.
And I try to help people from all walks of life,
from sex traffic victims to police fire coming
out of traumatic situations to veterans. Doesn't
matter. Understand that the brain is built in
a perfect mousetrap. Another good example. COVID.
COVID, COVID, COVID. March of 2020. Literally,
New York City shuts down. They didn't fucking
know. They're like, we'll be open in nine days.
What? We'll be open in 12 days. We didn't know.
Think about your life in December of 2019. Think
about your life in December of 2020. COVID changed
the entire landscape of the human population.
I think, if you want to talk conspiracy, I think
the animal kingdom did it so that we would go
hibernate and go back to the environment. But
think about how much change occurred in your
life and how much adaptation you had to do because
everything that you thought was normal, everything
that you thought was familiar and secure was
no longer familiar and secure. Think about how
fatigued we were as a human race over the last
two years of literally taking the ground underneath
us and taking it away. Everything that I thought
I could count on, I no longer could. That means
I had to burn mental calories figuring out common
daily stuff. Toilet paper, what? Food, what?
Hand sanitizer, masks. What is going on here?
So think. with great humility, how much effort
and change that you did in your brain in two
years. Now multiply that by 40 million. You think
maybe the amygdala and the reptile brain has
its shit together? It is a perfectly architected
system designed to keep you alive. So when you
are struggling, understand this. You're not going
to win. You can't override this. You need to
find help and support. And when you do that,
things can happen. Whether it's nutrition, sleep,
sleep aids, music, meditation, friendships, outings,
nature. There's a whole mess of things for us
to do. But if you think you can just internalize
this and beat it in isolation, please. wake up
to the facts if you like facts and left brain
analysis the fact is you can't beat it by yourself
and you certainly can't beat it by keeping your
mouth shut and living in isolation because all
of that pain is not worth it and it doesn't win
and i think this is underlying as well we forget
that we're a tribal species too and there's so
much ceremony that kept us alive it kept stories
being told that you know allowed us to grow and
innovate And we, as you said, we're part of this
tribe in a fire station or, you know, I talk
about this in the book I wrote. You can literally
sit in an apartment in New York surrounded by
millions of people and have this like completely
debilitating feeling of being alone because we're
supposed to be connected with all these people,
which is the irony of modern society. And we,
you know, we beat our chests about how we're
so advanced. But up until recently, we didn't
need counselors. We didn't need new calm, you
know, the way that we were evolving at the rate
that we were supposed to. You know, I would imagine
that, you know, people were healthy until they
passed away. And, you know, a lot of trauma was
passed on through, you know, telling stories
when you came back from war and, you know, the
dance and the song and everything else. And we
just shut that all down. And like you said, whether
it's our food or entertainment, whatever it is,
everything became engineered rather than organic.
No, that's a great point. Today's world is different
from three generations ago. The family dynamic
and the family unit and the nuclear and extended
family is different. There's not a lot of extended
family in America anymore. The food supply hasn't
been food in over 50 years. The food companies,
and it all comes back to money. You know, if
you want to look at the etiology and the demand
and how things happen, just follow the money.
What does that mean? Food companies want to sell
you product. Well, years ago, they hired neuroscientists.
Now, why would a food company hire a neuroscientist?
Create neurotoxins and excitatory neurotransmitters,
mostly with glutamates, to create an addictive
taste to my food. We live in a world of preservatives.
You go anywhere else in the world, I feel so
good when I'm in Africa. What? I feel good when
I'm in Africa. Now, I always lose weight in Africa
because they don't eat as much as we do, right?
And the saying in Kenya is, Kenyans eat to survive.
Americans eat for sport. Okay. But what we eat
is not food. Just a sidebar. If I eat preservatives
all day long and I eat neurotoxins and excitatory
neurotransmitters, it creates addictive behavior
for me. And as I eat preservatives all day long,
it lines my stomach. It blocks my stomach from
doing what it normally can do, which is extract
nutrients from natural foods, colored foods that
come out of the earth. Then if I continue down
this path, I start to bring on too much candida,
H. pylori. My stomach becomes this amalgamation
of really bad things like yeast, right? In addition,
if I'm stressed all the time, my stomach always
has cortisol in it, acid. That's not good. Do
you think, James, that 50 years ago, there was
this proliferation of Crohn's disease, irritable
bowel syndrome? ulcerative colitis. Our species
is suffering so bad and we're in constant state
of survival mode, constant state of vigilance,
constant state of go, go, go, go, go. We're changing
our biochemistry. Every person on earth in America,
338 million Americans, I would venture to say
98 % of them have leaky gut today. What the hell
is leaky gut? It's a proliferation, your stomach
lining into your small intestine. And whatever
proliferates, say it's avocado. Why do you think
at 30 years old, you developed an allergy to
avocado? What? How the hell did that happen?
Leaky gut is the avocado you ate that perforated
to the small intestine. Wait a second. What is
that? That's an enemy. Go attack that with your
immune system. We all have leaky gut. When we
eat, we bloat. Well, when I'm in Africa. I was
just in Africa doing a keynote lecture tour to
Kenyans, police, hospitals, universities, and
day schools. And I was there for 14 days and
I felt amazing because I'm eating food. So part
of it is lack of family support and that interactivity
that we need as humans. The other part is our
food supply is literally pushing us towards metabolic
acidosis. We're all sick. We all have inflammation.
We all have all these things we shouldn't have.
It's not good. So that's one part. Another part,
and we don't know. I can't go back 100 years
and interview people. I suspect that their stress
was stress, same as ours. Amygdala, HPA axis,
same response. Their stressors may have been
less, but they didn't have all these things coming
at them. Fear -mongering by the news. Wow, I
can elicit a nano -response fear by just showing
you this over and over and over. I go to Paris.
I was in Paris a couple weeks ago. People were
like, are you okay there? I'm like, yeah, why?
Well, I saw the news. They're rioting. Yeah,
maybe on one block. Have you been to Paris? So
the media, technology, food, toxins, lack of
family, drugs, alcohol. Yeah, we're up against
it right now, James. Somebody has it out for
the human race. That's so funny. Your French
comment, I had that so many times. And the other
way around, too. Like, oh, God, we heard you
were all murdered by a hurricane. It's raining
outside. It's August in Florida. It happens every
fucking day. What about the heat wave? It's always
hot here. You know, and then vice versa. So,
yeah. It's weathermageddon. Oh, absolutely. I
live on the East Coast. And like a snowstorm
is coming. I'm like, listen, I grew up in upstate
New York through high school. It snowed 56 days
in a row. Snowmageddon, what? Come on, help me
out here. Let's stop pole vaulting over mouse
turds and let's be honest with what's really
happening in the world. I like that expression.
All right, well, let's get to vibrations and
frequency. So you, you know, I was fortunate
enough to get a... some information on this prior,
but let's educate everyone listening and reinforce
my own understanding of the different states
of the nervous system and how that actually has
a frequency. Cool. All right. So I've seen that
you have a lot of episodes of this podcast. So
congratulations on literally helping educate
your brothers and sisters who have chosen a life
of service. Thank you. You chose to be a firefighter
or a police officer or an EMT. You didn't know
the sacrifices beholden to you. You had no idea.
You may not have chosen it if you did, right?
So it just, to me, I have great appreciation
for you bringing people on to help. Help those
who help us. So I just want to take a second
break just because we're going to get into some
deep neuroscience. And we've already been talking
about some existential philosophy and some evolutionary
psychology. I don't want people to be hanging
themselves or falling asleep. So take a quick
break. I'm a Red Sox fan. I'm a Celtic fan. I'm
a Cowboy fan. I'm an Arsenal fan. Love sports.
Don't get to watch sports that much anymore.
At one point in the last couple of months, all
my sports teams were cresting. It was like, great.
Cowboys, they're not going to be good until Jerry
Jones is no longer owner. So I've kind of put
them on the shelf. But Arsenal was in first place
in the Premier League, hadn't done anything in
a decade or two decades. The Celtics were just
crushing it. And the Bruins were having the best
season in history hockey. Well, as life would
have it, none of them succeeded. Anyway, all
right. There's your little interlude break. I
got my popcorn and my Coke. Let's do it. Let's
talk brainwaves. Brainwaves are fascinating.
And they're not complicated. You know, when you
talk about math and physics, I like the fact
that it's black and white. There's a lot of black
and white to this. So the human brain oscillates
a frequency. vibration, a resonance. If you saw
a sound wave, you're like, hey, FM radio, or
you see a frequency or you see an EKG. Okay.
That's what it looks like. Fine. The human brain
oscillates in a frequency range of 41 Hertz,
41 Hertz. And in that range, there are five categories.
There's Delta, which many of us understand as
sleep. Delta is a certain frequency. It's the
slowest frequency and it's a long longitudinal
big wave. 0 .5 hertz to 4 hertz is delta. When
you are in delta, when your brain, your brain
or my brain, is oscillating at 1 hertz, it's
not up for debate. I know exactly what you're
doing. You're in dreamless -like deep sleep.
Delta is interesting. For all of us who have
kids, when you first fall asleep, we fall into
delta first, and the first sleep cycle is about
100 minutes. So that's why when your kid falls
asleep on the couch, you're like, wait a second.
My daughter only weighs 78 pounds. Why does she
feel like she's 236 pounds? It's crazy, isn't
it? That's gravity. That's 78 pounds multiplied
by 9 .2 meters per second squared, the force
of gravity, because that kid ain't waking up.
Why? Because they're in delta. Their brainwave
is the slowest waveform, and they are in dreamless
-like sleep. When you go a little faster, four
hertz to seven hertz is called theta, T -H -E
-T -A. Theta is the healing zone. The healing
zone. That sounds like that might be important.
Yeah, it is. That's really the coup de grace
and the health of your sleep. Theta, theta, theta.
Four hertz to seven hertz. It's hard to articulate
theta, but I will give it my best shot. It's
a lucid dream state where your body feels immobilized.
So it's a separation. of your mind which is wandering
through this lucid dream state you're kind of
on the doorstep of deep sleep but your body is
separated it's like almost being in a coma that's
that part of sleep alpha is 8 hertz to 12 hertz
many of us understand or hear about alpha it's
commensurate with relaxation creativity falling
into sleep and also being in the zone and Transcendental
Meditation. So Transcendental Meditators, if
you're good at it, and you kind of get to that
place of silence in your brain, that's Deep Alpha.
Then we have Beta, B -E -T -A. Beta is the longest
range, the broadest range, and has the most complexity,
and that's where we spend our daylight hours,
or if we're working night shifts, it's our night
shift hours. Beta, 12 hertz to 15 hertz, is low
level. You're awake, you're alive, you're walking,
but you're not really functioning at the level
you want. You're a little cloudy in your brain
and you're feeling slow. 15 to 20 hertz is the
learning zone, which is fascinating because I
suspect that most people have never even heard
of the learning zone. Yes, ladies and gentlemen,
there is a frequency associated with learning.
And it'd be nice if someone had taught us this
so we didn't waste years of our life trying to
learn stuff when we're not in a state to learn.
How often have we read and reread and reread
the same thing? Well, if your brain is oscillating
at a frequency above the learning zone, you're
not encoding it. That's life. Above the learning
zone is where most humans play every day. Fear,
stress. Anxiety, worry, anticipatory anxiety,
overwhelmed, expectations, insecurity, confusion,
isolation. That's 20 hertz to 25 hertz of faster
frequency. 25 to 30 is a higher level of fear
and stress and anxiety. We all know what that
feels like. We all know when we're hyper agitated,
hyper, like just on guard, ready to snap. It's
a brainwave frequency. It's going too fast. 30
to 38 is where a lot of the people who play in
the realm of helping people survive trauma, accidents,
chaos, calamities, fires. 30 to 38 is pure fight,
flight, or freeze. A full cognitive dissociation.
There's literally no oxygen -rich red blood in
your frontal cortex anymore. Your forehead is
devoid. and everything is in pure survival. You
lose sense of time. You know, it's survival.
We've all been in survival mode. We've all, I
suspect, 8 .2 billion people have had a near
-death experience. We know exactly what happens,
right? And we also have a lot of aphasia. We
don't remember some of the stuff that happened
because there's no cognition here. And then,
because the brain is filled with nuances and
amazement, is gamma. So wait a second. You're
telling me there's a range above the highest
level of stress out of my marbles? Yeah, there
is. Gamma is 39 to 41 hertz. It's the fastest
frequency range. It's the shortest frequency
range, right? It is commensurate with the PET
scans of monks in higher consciousness. And it
is also... high intensity, mistake -free focus.
Your mind is absolutely clearly focused on what
you need to do. There is no distraction. There
is no clutter. There's no fear, stress, anxiety,
depression, worry, insecurity, expectation, self
-doubt, nothing. You are literally completely
honed in and you have full access to your muscle
memory and your training. You also have elicited
dopamine, activated your gross motor cortex,
your sensory motor rhythm, your olfactory, your
peripheral vision. Anybody who's going into an
intense environment, police, fire, you want to
be in that zone. You want to be at 40 hertz because
you are not making a mistake ever. It's just
hard to get there. Period. One thing I like about
this is that in human life and in psychology
and interpersonal relationships, nothing's black
and white. Everything's gray. A woman says something
to me and I'm like, I don't know what that means.
I've got three girls. I've lived for 21 years
with three girls, and I am so overwhelmed and
humbled by the complexity of the female mind
and how amazing they are and how simple men are.
I'm so thankful to be a man. We don't worry.
We don't do any of the things that ladies do.
But in interpersonal relationships, if a woman
says something to you, you're not sure, is this
a trap? How am I supposed to answer this? In
life, right? We've all been conned. We've all
been taken time, money, energy, effort, things
by people that were manipulative. It's not black
and white. But in science and in physics and
in brainwaves, it is purely black and white.
So let me go through this again. When your brainwave
is oscillating in delta, it's not up for debate.
You're in dreamless like deep sleep. When you're
in theta, you are in a lucid dream state where
your body is completely immobilized and you are
in the healing zone. Your cells are cleaning
their toxins. Your mitochondria is being restored.
You're going to wake up feeling amazing. In alpha,
you're creative, you're relaxed, you're in the
zone, and it might be commensurate with low levels
of meditation. In beta. 12 to 15 hertz, it's
low functioning. 15 to 20 is learning. 20 to
25, stress. 25 to 30 is high stress. 30 to 38
is pure cognitive dissociation, fight, flight,
or freeze. 39 to 41 is high performance, mistake
-free focus. That is the landscape of humanity.
Now, personally, James, I would have appreciated
if someone had told me that. I would like to
know that this is all a manner of when I'm having
a bad day, if I'm feeling agitated, over -caffeinated,
whatever. that all i need to do is find a way
to down regulate my frequency just slow down
that's all i need to do challenge is if you say
hey you're stressed out what's my response f
you i'm not stressed out right when have you
ever said wow you're cranky today when has that
ever ended in a response that was positive never
it's like telling your wife just calm down doesn't
work that way so What Blake Holloway figured
out was I can use very advanced mathematics,
algorithms and physics, resonance and vibration,
frequencies to help a human downregulate your
frequency to theta to take care of you. Okay.
Theoretically, that sounds brilliant. How would
you do that? The brain. It's amazing, and it's
self -contained. The human brain and the body
is a self -contained closed -loop ecosystem.
It wants nothing to do with any external intervention.
Don't do anything to me, because whatever you
do, I'm going to compensate. And when you do
something to compensate for my compensation,
I'm compensating again. So Blake figured out,
if I used your ears to carry a signal to your
brain, If the signal is complicated enough, dynamic
enough, in perpetual motion, I can do this without
you having to do anything. I can allow you to
take care of you with you doing nothing but giving
me time. And I can do no harm because all I'm
doing is playing in the sandbox of the 41 hertz
frequency range of human brainwave function.
So in 2009, After 19 years of scientific discovery,
trial and error, moving to Russia, Blake Holloway
was a neuroscientist, quantum physicist, naturopath
with Asperger's who was so committed to figuring
this out, he moved to St. Petersburg, Russia
before Perestroika, when I'm pretty sure it wasn't
safe for Americans to live there, to study stimulation.
Huh? That's how determined he was. In 2009, I
was introduced to the company and we launched
a $6 ,000 FDA class three medical device, the
highest regulated medical device in the world.
Same as a heart stent. We did this because it's
brain science. And what we did was we put very
advanced neuroacoustic software into a music
platform. Music, ladies and gentlemen, cannot
change your mental state. It cannot take my brainwave
frequency from a stressed out 25 hertz and put
me at four hertz into a healing zone. It's not
capable of doing it. It's a physiological impossibility.
So anybody that tells you, hey, listen to this,
it's going to take you here. It's full of shit.
They either don't understand the complexity of
the brain or they're just lying to you. Because
it doesn't work that way. The brain is far too
complicated. The brain has too many mechanisms
that can understand patterns, recognize a pattern,
and find shortcuts. So in this music, we're using
it as a carrier. We want you to have a nice experience.
If you just listen to the physics, you would
hear this. And I'm pretty sure you wouldn't find
that relaxing. Like an MRI. Yes. So the physics
is doing all the work. We are using your ears
as a carrier to present your brain with a pattern.
And what we launched in 2009 was called Rescue.
Rescue is designed to take your brainwave function
from wherever it is, 38 hertz, 40 hertz, 28 hertz,
it doesn't matter. And in eight minutes, we gently,
safely, and predictably... take you to four hertz.
We say, guess what, Billy Bob? You're going on
a healing journey. You don't have to do anything.
You just have to find a safe place, lie down,
put an eye mask on, put a headphone on, and press
play. We'll do all the work for you because we
know that the more time you spend in theta, the
more your body heals on a restorative cellular
level, the more oxygen penetrates the frontal
cortex. the more patient and present and happy
and healthy you become. We can help you even
if you have no idea what we're doing or if you
even think you need help. But rest assured, ladies
and gentlemen, eight billion people i have traveled
the earth for 14 years i've done over 250 medical
lectures to the medical community neuroscientists
cardiovascular surgeons oncologists on applied
neuropsychobiology i have traveled to addictive
disease cancer kenya russia india china vietnam
Nobody that I've met in 14 years is effectively
managing stress. Not a single soul. Nine years
ago, we started working with monks. Why the hell
would we work with monks? Well, I didn't invent
New Calm. So I have no ego attachment to it.
I'm fascinated by it. I'm like, who can't we
help? It's obvious we can help someone with trauma.
It's obvious we can help someone with cancer.
Who can't we help? That's why it inspired me
to go work with monks. So I flew out to Los Angeles,
talked to them about it. They were kind. Ten
monks, ten systems. Two weeks later, I fly back
out, fully expecting them to say thanks, but
no thanks. So what do you guys think of New Calm?
Their response was, we love it. And I was like,
what? You're monks. And they're like, yeah, but
we're also human. We may have meditated for 100
,000 hours in our life of service, but every
time we go to meditate, Jim, we have to follow
a checklist. We have to go through all these
steps in our mind to get to that place of silence.
And what we like about your technology, which
we never even thought an external technology
could do this, is that you bring us to silence
with ease. You prepare us for the deepest levels
of meditation, and you're giving us access. to
like this advanced world of us becoming even
better at what we do. So I left that meeting
and I called my executive team and I said, guys,
we're effing relaxing monks. This is getting
crazy. The point of me sharing this with you
is for 13 and 14 years, we have worked with cancer
patients, people with multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's,
ALS, addiction, trauma, police, fire, Active
military, special forces, Navy SEALs, Air Force
Special Operations Command, BORTAC, BORSTAR,
the FBI, SWAT, the FBI hostage rescue team, pilots,
doctors, students, business people. We are all
in this together. Stress never takes a holiday.
If you look at your calendar right now, James,
it doesn't say August 13th to the 21st, stress
is taking a vacation. It doesn't. Now we have
our own internal stress, our own expectation,
our own ambition, our own ideas of what we want
to be in our world. But we have to face the battle
of everybody else's stress. So something like
this is so powerful and profound because it just
allows me at the touch of a button. I am so grossly
incapable of taking care of my stress response.
I love stress, man. I love fucking go, go, go.
And when I can't go anymore, have some coffee
and keep going, right? Before this world of New
Calm, I'm not proud of the person I was. I was
hyper, hyper ambitious, hyper critical of myself
and others, had no patience. And I just followed
a path of just, we're winning at all costs. That's
not healthy. The only person winning is anybody
who's not working with me, right? That's not
who I want to be. I was never going to take time
to go learn to meditate. I already shared with
you, I was a terrible meditator. I was introduced
to the Maharishi and all that good stuff and
meditation and mantras when I was 10. And then
I did martial arts for 20 years and you meditate
every day. And I was terrible at it. I'm never
doing it. I have a full shame cycle. I don't
even know what I'm supposed to feel, but I'm
pretty sure it's not a panic attack. I give up.
I'm not going to do yoga. I'm six feet, 220 pounds.
I love to fight. You're not going to see me in
yoga pants. I'm not going to do Tai Chi. I've
got a black belt in Goju and Taekwondo. If I
can't kick you in the face, I'm not interested.
So for me personally, this was a really limiting
factor to my ability to take care of myself.
This technology gives me the answer with ease
and predictability. What Blake did was on a path
to help trauma. That was his genesis. That was
his focus. That was his passion. What we learned
along the way in the last 14 years is once we
built the software to downregulate and slow your
brainwave down to four hertz, we came to the
realization, wait a second, if we can do that,
we can certainly take you to delta. If we can
do that, we can certainly take you to the learning
zone. If we can do that, we can certainly take
you to gamma. 32 years since the inception of
this enterprise, we fully mapped the entirety
of human brain wave function, all 41 hertz, and
we launched six channels on a mobile device that
allows you as a human to have a remote control
for your brain. On demand with no drugs, you
simply select what you want and physics and math
underneath music do the work for you. We, James,
two years ago successfully took a class three
FDA medical device that was only for military,
police, fire, PTSD, pilots, doctors, celebrities,
and professional athletes. We didn't serve anybody
else. We didn't serve the common person. We took
33 years of patented clinically proven neuroscience
out of a simple quest to make sure that we got
to the masses and we put it into a mobile device
because we learned it doesn't matter how smart
we are. James doesn't care how smart I am. How
can I help him? How can I help him help his wife?
How can I help him help his children? How do
you help me? Well, you don't do it by a 6 ,000
device that has four components and it looks
like you're going to the space station just to
get to a state of relaxation. So it was our job,
thankless as it is, to find a way to make this
easy. And now it is so but easy. Do you have
a mobile device? Yes, I do, sir. Do you have
access to a headphone? Yes, I do, sir. Well,
we have access to the future of taking care of
you without drugs. Boom, drop the mic. Well,
I'm going to slide my testimony in then because
I think it's important. We've heard an amazing,
you know, through line to where you're at now.
So Ken Crigliano, Air Force Ken, came on the
show. Anyone hasn't listened to that episode,
they need to. But Pliff Notes, one of the AI
boffins for the Air Force, one of the high achievers
when it comes to athleticism, I think especially
the obstacle racing. So not someone who I would
think would be buying into snake oil and, you
know, that kind of thing. So he talks to me about
this. You know, you and I connect. You're kind
enough to actually give me a trial of the NuCalm
app. Ironically, and this is after I tried it,
one of my friends had actually done one of the
original machines in the Football Hall of Fame.
who's just grieving losing his wife recently
and he's heartbroken. But he remembered trying
that years ago with a friend. He was like, dude,
I did a 20 -minute one and I felt like I just
had a full night's sleep. But anyway, back to
my story. So I want to preface this by saying
it couldn't have been a better time for me to
objectively try this technology. If I hadn't
worked out in a year and I tried Taibo or get
a Peloton or start jogging, All of those things,
I'm going to see results because I've gone from
zero to whatever. They say the best training
program is the one you stick to. But by the time
I tried NuCalm, I'd actually already taken a
deep dive into a lot of wellness things. So I
abstained from alcohol for multiple weeks, do
foundation training every day. I've been doing
the Headspace app almost every single day. So
I'd really cleaned up a lot of things in my life,
could drop down to just one cup of coffee a day.
So I was already in a beautiful place. So I didn't
have that kind of bias where listening to music
for 10 minutes would make a difference. Just
simply listen to music. So the first time I plugged
it in, I did the power nap. And I lay there.
And by the way, for someone who did shift work
for 14 years in very, very busy stations, I'm
just that guy that can't take a nap. So I could
never go to sleep. So that's a barrier. Like,
oh, just take a safety nap. Well, I physically
couldn't go to sleep. So I put the headphones
on and the eye mask and I'm lying there and I
can't even articulate how it feels. You have
to try it for yourself. But it was so different.
And I've meditated on all these other things.
So, so different. I felt my arms and legs tingling
after a while. And it was okay for my mind to
do a little bit of chatter because it was almost
like it. the conversation wouldn't last it wouldn't
become an intrusive thought it'd be like hey
here's an idea and oh it's gone it was it was
bizarre so tried that did the deep sleep app
playing at night and i gotta be honest my body
at first was like this is weird you know make
it stop but then you know again i kind of got
tuned into that the right volume where the speaker
should be but then the um the restore have i
got that right restore rescue excuse me the rescue
app now that's what i'm diving into now to actually
you know try and do the the deliberate repair
deregulate element so it's been i think it's
been a week now my wife tried it one day and
she's coming home tomorrow so i'm going to put
her on for two weeks because she's between med
school semesters but i've got to hold my hands
up this On my hand, my one hand, I can count
all the things that I shout from the rooftops
from. Foundation training for back health, CBD,
you know, Charlotte's Web is what I use now.
What else is there? Thorne supplements, amazing.
But this new calm is now joining that list because
I am blown away. And I'll get into where I think
the applications would be incredibly powerful
for this audience. But right off the bat, I...
There's no placebo because I'm not going into
these thinking, oh, this is going to work. It's
kind of the opposite. It's like CBD. You know,
I think it's a bias the other way. So firstly,
I want to just say thank you. And, you know,
I was blown away and I haven't even tried the
creative side yet. Next to me is the pin border
of my next book. And that's the next thing after
this weekend. I'm going to start playing it while
I'm writing as well and explore that flow focus
creative element. So you bring up a couple awesome
thoughts. One of the things that has always humbled
me about this technology, and we've pressed our
tests to death. We did 10 years of research with
the best scientists in the world. None of them
wanted this to work because it wasn't their idea.
Trust me, there's a lot of ego in academician
mindsets. But one thing that's fascinating is
it always works. But shift work and your inability
to take a nap had nothing to do with, do I want
to take a nap or not? Your locus of control was
too strong to allow you to downregulate. You
were never taking a nap, force or not. You can
put a gun to the back of your head and you're
going to die if you don't take a nap. You're
not napping. Your makeup and the neuronal circuits
in your brain has a strong locus of control.
You're not doing it. The first time you did it,
you're like, wait a second, what's going on here?
First time you did sleep, wait a second, what's
going on here? Why? Because something else is
coming to you externally and saying, hey, but
the reality is it's so safe. The first time some
of you try this, there may be a few minutes of
discomfort at the beginning because we're relinquishing
control from you. Now we understand this. And
when you do rescue, it takes us eight minutes
to take you to theta. Why? Because we can't just
come in and say, hey, we're going to go on an
elevator to the healing zone. You want to come?
Your locus of control and your central nervous
system is like, no, I ain't doing shit with you
because I don't know what you are. So rescue
has a cumulative benefit. Deep sleep has a cumulative
benefit. We are tapping into your vibration.
We are using vibration. We are using resonance.
Think about it like a tuning fork. What's cool
is that you can't see what we're doing. So it
really doesn't matter. It's not like, hey, I'm
going to choose to fight this. But we've worked
with every aspect of humanity. And the reality
is, because it's math and physics, we could have
you set up to QEEG, EEG, HRV. It doesn't matter
what we have you set up for. At minute nine,
you're at four hertz. Not for debate. It's mathematics.
At minute 23, you're at four hertz. All of the
tracks are built for a full experience. The rescue
tracks. It takes us eight minutes to take you
down. We call it the departure lounge. We're
going to prepare you. Then you get to theta.
You're skipping in and out of sleep. Most of
you. Shift work, firehouse work. You have no
idea the negative consequence of not having a
circadian rhythm is doing to your body. No idea.
Very, very detrimental to your health and your
longevity when you choose to leave firework.
Okay? You can't override it. I believe, and this
data is alarming, long -haul pilots have a life
expectancy of less than one year. They don't
have a life expectancy upon retirement. I travel
all the time. I'm in Denver right now. I was
just in France. I go home for a day and I'm in
Alaska. I rarely look in the cockpit anymore
because I see a man who's probably 48 who looks
like he's 70. Why? Because you can't override
the diurnal aspect of the human body. We need
to sleep and we need to sleep at night. So I
implore you, I'm not a beggar. Begging has never
worked. Ask my wife, right? Begging doesn't work.
I'm not begging you, but I implore you to enlist
a technology or any other way. You guys have
to find a way, guys and gals in fire, police
and EMTs. You have to find a way to help create
a regular pattern of sleep because circadian
rhythm, the operative word there, ladies and
gentlemen, is rhythm. You can figure out. what
sleep pattern you need but your body needs regularity
it needs to be able to predict something so new
calm is going to come to you and it's going to
be a gift that feels like it's from heaven it's
from angels why because it's a gift specifically
built for the career choice that you've chosen
you can't override the body's need to sleep at
night Melatonin, serotonin, neurotransmitters,
all this stuff is built for that reason. You
guys override that and you suffer the consequence.
That's just life, okay? For you, the pattern
is really simple. You're going in for 24 hours
or whatever your shit's going to be, and you're
going to bunk and maybe you get to sleep, maybe
not. But if you can establish a habit of rescue
every day, when we were doing the research with
Chung, Kang, Pang at Harvard and NASA on stage
four cancer, and Chicago Blackhawks, they came
to us in 2013 and said, did you know that 20
minutes of your product rescue is equivalent
to two hours of restorative sleep? And I said,
no, and I don't even know what that means. They
said, well, in sleep, stage two is typically
theta. And after puberty, we cruise through it
too quickly. We're not getting enough theta.
We're not getting enough cellular restoration.
If we got enough theta, we'd all live to 100
years old. Disease wouldn't take over because
your body would be so clean all the time. But
what you guys are doing by taking my brain and
holding me in theta is you're giving me this
concentrated access to sleep quality. It doesn't
replace sleep. There are some crazy people that
are dear friends of mine who use this as a sleep
replacement so they can work even harder. And
I say, Please don't do that. You're going to
die faster and it won't be a fun death. So this
doesn't replace sleep, but 20 minutes of new
calm is equivalent to two hours of restorative
sleep. So if you can build a daily habit of rescue,
we are not replacing the sleep. We're augmenting
the sleep debt that you are accumulating. Every
day you don't get a good night's sleep. You never
make it up. So the thousand cuts, 10, 20 years,
30 years in fire. A thousand cuts, you're breaking
down. Any of you listening to this who are in
your late 30s, 40s, and 50s know exactly what
I'm talking about. You wake up, inflammation's
in your body. You just sometimes don't know where
it's going to be feeling. You wake up and your
blood feels like ragu because you're just stiff,
right? That's the negative accumulation and consequence
of not getting restorative sleep. So Nucom isn't
a miracle. It's not going to change everything
in your life, but it's going to do two things
very predictably and really powerfully for your
health. It's going to downregulate your stress
response. It's going to oxygenate your brain,
and it's going to slow you down and give you
restorative sleep when you do sleep. So the recipe
is very simple. It is the same recipe, ladies
and gentlemen, as stage four metastatic cancer.
It's all the same. Rescue every day that down
-regulates your stress, literally cleans the
slate, oxygenates your whole body, your mind,
and prepares you for sleep. And then in bed,
you put on a speaker, deep sleep. Deep sleep
is the most sophisticated physics ever created.
It took our neuroscience company, the pioneering
neuroscience company with the best neuroacoustic
software in the world, the only patents, the
only FDA product ever created. It took us nine
years to figure out deep sleep because we didn't
want you to have to use a headphone. Hey, honey,
I'm going to bed. Yeah, like a, you know, CPAP.
Hey, honey, I'm going to look like an alien.
No, it's got to be easy or else you're not going
to use it. Deep sleep. literally trains your
brain to go into Delta. Now, I don't have that
difficulty of time falling asleep. Where my difficulty
lied at 54 years old is around two o 'clock,
I'd wake up. Raise your hand if you wake up around
two o 'clock. Well, guess what, ladies and gentlemen?
The biorhythm of the human liver activates at
two o 'clock and it creates adrenaline so it
can enzymatically break down the toxins that
you created during the day. So we all wake up
at 2 o 'clock. Hey, we're all the same. We're
human. So at 2 o 'clock when you wake up, it
was really difficult to fall back to sleep. That's
where I'm literally perseverating over shit I
can't solve in the middle of the night, but I'm
building cortisol, and I'm building anger because
I can't fall back to sleep, and I'm noodling
over stupid stuff, and I'm building cortisol.
Deep sleep helps me there. I have no issue falling
back asleep. In fact, there have been several
times where I will look in my bathroom in the
morning to see if it's yellow because I don't
remember getting up to pee. So that's how strong
this is. Rescue each day, deep sleep at night,
at the firehouse. Hey, we got you. Go take a
nap. Power nap and rescue. Give me two hours
of restorative sleep in 20 minutes and I'm going
to be a superhero. I'm going to be so mentally
alert when it comes that there is a fire. I'm
not making a mistake because I'm not sleep deprived.
I'm not malnourished. I'm not dehydrated. I'm
none of those things. I am on my game because
I have oxygen in my forehead where I can make
decisions. This is life -saving for a lot of
people. Since 2011, we've been working with elite
military operators. All right. Many of you in
police and fire come out of the military. You
don't go on a mission at two o 'clock in the
afternoon and tell your enemy, hey, we'll be
there at five. You do it in the middle of the
night. So if you're sleep deprived or you're
malnourished or you're having oxygen deprivation,
you're in the mountains of Afghanistan. If we
can put your brainwave at a state where you have
access to full training and no clutter in your
brain, you win because you don't make any mistakes.
Same thing in a fire. You get into a fire, mistakes
can happen, disorientation can happen, and your
mind can play tricks on you, but not when you've
had a power nap, a rescue, and you're at this
place of mental stability simply by anatomy and
physiology. So is this life -saving? Hell yes,
it is. But really, it's about your quality of
life and your ability to sustain a balanced life
so you can be there for the ones who love you
and need you the most, so you can be there and
be present with your wife, with your kids. You
can enjoy your life. You certainly deserve it.
You chose a career that puts you at risk every
day. You're reactionary. It's not like fires
are planned. Hey, James, on Tuesday at 2 o 'clock,
there's going to be a fire. It doesn't work that
way. So you're constantly having to... hit the
adrenal cortex but when your body is in balance
you win when your body's not in balance you're
faking it till you make it until you don't make
it so now obviously i'm not on shift at the moment
but i'm looking back at the value of this and
and you know i've got to sleep in my own bed
now for five years so you know I've had a lot
of the kind of repair and rest and recovery.
But when I think about the punctuation between
coming off shift and going home to be a father,
to be a husband or a wife. that's something that
a lot of people struggle with and there are some
tools like there'll be times where i'd just walk
around the station a few times we had a field
in the back and i'd do that or i'd row on the
the rowing machine for 15 minutes try and reset
a little bit and then my drive was always like
an hour and 15 anyway so i would uh um yeah just
kind of decompress down that way when i think
about this tool now for the last 14 years that
i was a firefighter to simply Once you do shift
change, once that next firefighter is sitting
in your seat and you're dismissed, to go into
that bunk room or even in your car in the parking
lot and just simply do either a 20 -minute power
nap or a 30 -minute restore session, that would
be such an incredible way of down -regulating
your actual nervous system. giving yourself a
little bit more of a reboot when it comes to
the sleep, but also the acuity for you driving
home. Because like I said, I would drive 70 miles
home after not sleeping for 24, 48 hours. So
I think this is on top of the actual, all the
other things we're going to talk about, you know,
the down regulation tools, the up regulation
tools, to simply use New Calm to go between the
end of your shift. and the beginning of your
time at home that alone if you just use it for
that would be invaluable on top of all the other
things that we're going to talk about it's so
important too um in fire and police there's such
a responsibility and there's there's an autonomy
to it and there's an isolation to it In leadership
roles, it's lonely. But we all feel ashamed when
we don't do our part at home. We all feel that
gap. And that shame, we don't need to live like
that. And the decompression from being on shift
for a couple of days and then driving home 70
miles, first of all, you're putting yourself
at risk for falling asleep at the wheel, right?
You're putting yourself at risk for not having
the reflexes that you need. on the road. You're
in Florida. Florida drivers are notoriously terrible.
It's like the Indy 500 across five, six, seven
lanes. Half the time, I'm like, what are you
in such a hurry for? If you're that much in a
hurry to die, we need to have that mental acuity.
It comes down to this, James. We're all human,
whether we believe it or not. We're all human,
whether as a kid, we have no sense of mortality.
As we get older, we see mortality. We see also
death. We see our friends die. We see our families,
you know, people die. So that becomes real, but
we still, in our own mind, don't think it's going
to happen to us. It's a riddle. It's a mystery,
but it's a joke. Of course it's going to happen
to you because you're human. You have the same
constitution that we do. You have cells. You
have neurons. You have fibers. You've got bone.
You've got breath. So at some point, we just
have to stop. Stop diving into things that aren't
healthy, right? We all find vices. We all find
things that soothe our psychic pain. But if we
don't find things that are healthy for us, we
don't win. We don't win on the job. We don't
win with our peers on the job. Do you think for
one second in a fire team that people don't know
the weak link? that people don't know when you're
suffering, that people don't know when you might
be partying too much, people don't know when
you've isolated. So think about what you want.
In theories of meditation and monk -like philosophy,
there are three times in a human's life when
we have a cathartic change. We always think about
the midlife crisis at 50. But the first one happens
in 20s, then 50s, and then the 80s. Most people
in fire aren't going to make it to the third
life decision -making tree because of the career
choice and the challenges that you've done in
trying to override the body's need for sleep.
So today, as you're heading to your 40s or 50s
and you're starting to contemplate what do you
want from the next part of your life, These are
hopefully the times you say, you know what, whatever
I'm doing is not good enough. And I have to come
to the conclusion that I am human and that I
do have vulnerabilities and I do have needs.
And there are things out there that can help
me. Period. I love what we do. I love the simplicity
of it. I love talking to people about it. I love
seeing people change. I love when a veteran.
A special forces operator veteran has a Zoom
call with me, and I can see the fear and the
shame and the lack of trust in his eyes, but
he's desperately calling for help. I can see
it. And I'll ask him, what have you tried? I've
tried everything, Mr. Poole. Nothing's worked.
And I can look at him and say, well, congratulations.
However the universe manifested this meeting,
you're finally in position to have something
that works. And not only does it work, it's going
to work every time. It'll never let you down.
Now, the journey may have some bumps. It may
bring up some memory patterns that are uncomfortable.
But as Winston Churchill once said, if you're
going through hell, keep going. But do you know
what it's like to have the confidence to look
across someone and know with great certainty
we're helping this person? And then a month later,
two months later, a Zoom call. He's in tears
and his wife is in tears. I have my husband back.
We're not a miracle. Newcomb isn't a miracle.
Your body's a miracle. But when you're traumatized
or you're living in this constant state of stress,
you lose aspect to your brain. All we're doing
is liberating that. We're allowing you to downregulate
things you don't understand. Just do it. And
over time, the cumulative benefit, James, you're
just at the beginning of an incredible journey.
It's incredible. It just gets better. And the
more you use it, the more in tune you get. I'm
at a place 14 years of dailies, new calm that
if I am beginning to fall asleep, I can tell
you what stage of sleep I'm in. I don't want
to have that level of specificity, but it's reaching
a level where I'm so in tune. Now in martial
arts and in wrestling, I was always in tune with
my surroundings. That's just a natural manifestation
of the art. But now I'm in tune with vibration
and energy kind of everywhere. feel it, and I'm
present. I live in a really unique way because
I travel about 250 to 300 days a year. It's not
a good lifestyle. No one would ever say, wow,
your life is amazing. No, it's not. Now, maybe
what I do is amazing, and the purpose and the
journey I'm on, I love, and I feel like the luckiest
man on earth. But I do have three children. I
do have a wife of 30 years. I would like to have
more balance in my life, but I don't have that
opportunity. Using this technology allows you
to simply be a healthier, better you. And it's
not soft. It's not wishy -washy. It's not hugging
and doing all this stuff. It's simply saying,
hey, we're going to just put you in a place that
allows you to be the best you. And we work with
the toughest of the tough, ladies and gentlemen.
I sit in front of your military operators, your
top assassins, your FBI hostage rescue team,
which is arguably the top police force in the
world. I sit in front of all these guys and I
say the same thing. I don't ask them about stress
because stress is judgmental to a man. If I looked
at you, James, and you're not managing stress
well, you're going to say, who the F are you?
You're not going to listen to me. All I have
to do is say, hey, who here has been through
a divorce? Who here has been through two? Who
here has a great relationship with their kids?
Who here is satisfied with the balance in your
life? Who here is sleeping well? That's all I
have to do. And say, okay, guys, as tough as
you are and amazing as you are, I applaud you
and I thank you. But now I'm going to help you.
And we're going to do this on a ritualistic basis.
We're going to do this every day. Now, in the
active military, it's a big investment by the
United States government to put a special forces
operator in the field. So they're going to use
it every day because we make them better and
we make them able to take care of themselves,
take care of their mission and take care of their
team. But to the VA community, these people are
starved. They're starved and they've been so
deprived of hope. James, you've tried a lot of
things. You're on a mission to help yourself.
You're like, listen, I did this for 14 years.
I don't like where I'm at today. The cumulative
negative consequence of my choice. which was
mine, I don't like. This isn't who I want to
be. So you've tried everything. You're bright.
You're intellectually curious. You're determined.
You're ambitious. You tried all these things.
Very few things work. That's just the way it
is. It's because it took us 32 years to map the
entirety of the human brain. It took the brightest
neuroscientists in the world, like a Nikola Tesla,
George Akosky, 19 years to figure this out. Nothing's
easy. So you look at your firefighters, you say,
hey, just do it. Just take care of yourself.
If you're not going to do it for yourself, do
it for your wife, do it for your kids. It doesn't
matter what the motivation is. Just do it. Because
the path you're on today is not the path of good
health and wellness. And when you end your career,
you're not going to like it. You're not going
to like where you're standing. It's like being
an NFL athlete. When I did the Hall of Fame.
There was some old veterans with such bad TBI.
After an introduction, four minutes later, they
introduced themselves again. I was like, uh -oh.
You're not even remotely close to being mentally
there. And then all the dudes, it looks like
you're in a convalescent home. These guys are
in their 40s and they can't walk. Well, it's
different for fire. You guys can walk. You're
physically fit. But mentally. You've been beaten
up. High cortisol, high stress, poor sleep. So
what was amazing is in, I didn't really say kind
of my observation, so it feels weird and everything.
I immediately found myself, you know, the nervous
system shifting to parasympathetic. I had some
of these visions, some of these traumas. I mean,
real traumas, like the loss of my dog kind of
play in my mind, which was interesting. And I
welcome because if it's something that wants
to come out, then beautiful. Let's go. But the
other thing that was interesting is I actually,
this has happened more than a few times now,
I got really hungry towards the end. And knowing
that parasympathetic is feed and breed, I'm like,
well, there we go. There's another kind of telltale
sign. So for me personally, not only does it
feel incredibly relaxing, and now I'd say this
hand on heart, foundation training, amazing for
your back, but you've got to, it's 12 minutes
of putting in the work. It doesn't sound like
very long, but you're in these positions. there's
zero effort to new calm so now i'm literally
looking forward to all right where can i do a
20 or 30 between this is my third episode third
interview today and i did one between one and
two i didn't have time between two and three
but i've been able to stay mentally clear for
three two hour conversations so that's again
that's the end of my testimony so yeah so now
if you want to talk about um you know the app
itself and the application Yes. So another thing
you're going to notice when you do rescue, when
you get up, you have to pee. So in parasympathetic
dominance, and it happens within five minutes,
we literally take your sympathetic nervous system,
which is your stress, and we put it almost to
nothing. We keep some sympathetic tones, your
heart keeps beating, but we raise your parasympathetic.
And in doing that, we're pushing through your
rest and digest and your growth hormones and
oxygen and health and healing. When I get up
from New Calm, I'm always... going to pee immediately.
It accelerates that whole process. So if you
are hungry or a little glucose deficient or,
you know, you're processing food, you're going
to wake up hungry because you're in balance.
Hey, great. I'm ready to go. So what I'd like
to talk about for a second is simply how would
we take 33 years of patented clinically proven
neuroscience? And, you know, I just want to share
this with you. I understand that Nucleome sounds
good to be true. It sounded like that way to
me in June of 2009. But I also understand that
you don't become an FDA -classified medical device,
Health Canada -approved, military -approved,
NSF -certified for sport, have the only patents
in the world, and work with the best scientists
from NASA and Harvard and the medical director
of the NFL, and work with the military, 56 professional
sports teams, do 2 million surgical procedures
replacing general anesthesia. Rescue has been
used in 2 million surgical procedures replacing
general anesthesia with people being cut open
listening to physics. This is the real deal.
Because you haven't heard of it means nothing.
We spent 32 years like an insular Willy Wonka
neuroscience company. We spent zero money on
marketing. Yet we sold $30 million of a complicated
class 3 $6 ,000 medical device because it simply
works. Now, how does it work? There are six channels.
The six channels manage all five categories of
your brain. We need from you a headphone. For
rescue, for power nap and flow state, we need
a safe place, a comfortable place, and an eye
mask. We're putting you in this weird, lucid
dream state where you're literally, your mind
wanders. that's because the physics has to be
complicated or your brain will figure out the
pattern. Your mind wandered because it's supposed
to, because the physics is like, hey, come think
about this. Hey, come think about that. But you
can't stay on a thought pattern, okay? And that
separation allows you to dissociate. When you
dissociate from time and space, you're truly
not controlling your body anymore. Your body's
allowed to heal. And when you felt your body
feel heavy, That is the first time you've probably
felt the force of gravity. That's 9 .2 meters
per second squared on your body. You literally,
there's times where I'll have an itch on my nose
and I don't even know if I have arms. I'm like,
I don't know where my arms are. And who cares?
It's bizarre. So rescue, power nap, and flow
state are an immersive experience. Find time
in your day. There's no excuse for you not to
find 1 48th of the day. to take care of yourself.
That's unacceptable. 1 48th of the day is 30
minutes. If that means getting up early before
your alarm and doing 30 minutes of new calm,
it seems counterintuitive. So Jim, you want me
to wake up 30 minutes before my alarm to get
up, go pee and get back in bed and do new calm?
Yes, I do. Because you remember the equation.
If you get five and a half hours of sleep, you
get up 30 minutes early and 20 minutes is two
hours of restored to sleep. You now got the value
of seven and a half hours of sleep. So if your
daytime doesn't allow for that opportunity, make
it in the morning. On a regular day, not shift
work, do not do rescue, power nap or flow state
after 7 or 8 p .m. or within three hours of bedtime.
When you do new call, we are taking all of your
stress away. We're putting the amygdala and reptile
brain in the corner. We're saying, hey, the kids.
Go to the kids' table. The adults want to talk,
okay? But in doing that, we're oxygenating all
of your brain. And that oxygen enthusiastically
energizes your mind. You will never get out of
new calm unless you're really fatigued, not feeling
great clarity, and just amazing endurance. Your
mental endurance is just, you're going to be
amazed. I can do 18, 19 -hour days in a foreign
country with security and interpreters, and I'm
just on my game. And I'm like, this is... This
is like insane. Well, it's not. It's oxygen to
the key areas of your brain. So you don't do
rescue, power nap and flow state too close to
bedtime. Because trust me, you'll have a really,
really creative, awesome night with no one to
share it with. And you won't be sleeping. On
the performance channels, we have focus. Focus
brings your brainwave between 15 and 20 hertz.
It literally, within minutes, without you doing
any work. with just headphones and our software.
You're at your computer. You're completely decluttered.
There's nothing in your brain but what you're
laser focused on. Your clarity, your comprehension,
your concentration are peaked. Your ability to
encode new information, process complex information,
and consolidate to memory is incredible. Literally,
we interviewed someone recently. They said, I
get like 10 hours of work in two hours. It's
freakish. So you become highly mentally efficient
and able to do things. The mind cannot stay in
that zone for more than 20 minutes. There's a
technique called the Pomodoro technique, 20 to
25 minutes, and then your brain reaches diminished
returns where you start having distractions.
Like, hey, what am I having for dinner? Hey,
what's going on with this or that and the other
thing? So focus is an action -oriented channel.
You use it with headphones, no eye mask, and
you can do anything. So you can go walk. You
can catch up on email. You can write. Ignite
is amazing. Who would have thought that by listening
to something, you could completely energize me
and focus me on a level that's freakish, where
you could increase my endurance and my strength,
my power and my output. All I'm doing is listening
to something. It doesn't make sense. In 2015,
Tony Robbins came to the Newcomb family and became
close friends with me. In 2015, a Premier League
soccer club said, Jim, our players love Newcomb.
They're healing faster. They feel better. The
jet lag's gone. It's amazing. But can you guys
make something that will energize our players
to get on the pitch? Well, I have Blake Holloway
in my corner, so I say, we can do anything. So,
six months later, we have an Ignite neuroacoustic
software track. It is 13 minutes to 14 minutes
long. It begins at 15 hertz. In the last three
minutes, we call pure warrior brain. 40 hertz.
Incredible. I call Tony. I say, Tony, we're testing
something out for professional athletes in the
military. Are you interested? Hell yeah. Send
it to me. Okay. I send it to him. 20 minutes
later. What the hell is this? I said, it's Ignite,
bitch, and it's amazing. So he's like, I've never
heard anything like this. I said, Tony, we have
the only patents in the world. You're never going
to hear anything like what we do. I said, what
do you want to do with it? He said, I don't know.
What do you want to do? I don't know. He said,
well, I'm friends with Ted Leonsis. He owns the
Washington Capitals. So in April of 2017, Tony
and I trained the Washington Capitals together.
We built a track. put his words, his NLP, his
training, the Washington Capitals, on top of
our physics to create the most powerful mind
control ever, designed to get you in the zone.
So on our app in Ignite, you'll see a track called
Certainty. That's Tony Robbins training the Washington
Capitals who won the Stanley Cup. The next year,
we had so much fun, we went and trained the Golden
State Warriors together, and we created Gratitude.
We trained them in a hotel in Oakland for five
hours. Okay? Ignite was used for seven years
confidentially to the United States military,
special forces, Navy SEALs, and 56 professional
sports teams. 998 people signed a confidentiality
agreement. We never commercialized it. Why? Because
we felt like people aren't taking care of themselves.
They really need rescue. If we give you adrenaline,
you'll go to adrenaline and you won't take care
of yourself. So in November of 2021, when we
went to a mobile app, we launched Deep Sleep.
and rescue. And we launched Ignite. We said,
we're done babysitting. People can take their
own decisions. So Ignite is headphones, full
action. I use Ignite when I'm working out, cardio,
Peloton. And you guys will see your endurance,
your power, your output, all significantly greater.
Okay. It's amazing. And when you're doing, breaking
your PRs and everything you're doing, you're
like, okay, this is freakish because our mind.
becomes our worst enemy. When you're biking,
within five to 10 minutes, lactic acid builds
up in your thighs. You're like, why am I doing
this? You start coming up with reasons why you
want to truncate your ride. When you're listening
to Ignite, you're like, I want to kill you. So
it's amazing. And it'll absolutely blow your
marbles. Deep Sleep's the last channel. It's
the top channel. It's the top used channel. Today,
We have over 1 ,250 ,000 minutes a day being
listened to of New Calm around the world. 1 ,250
,000 minutes a day. At the end of this month,
we're tracking to surpass 1 billion minutes of
New Calm since we launched in November of 2009.
Now, 1 billion is too many zeros for the human
brain to understand. So I love data. Well, 1
billion minutes, ladies and gentlemen, is 1 ,903
years. That's how much time we've helped people.
in the last 14 years. Deep sleep is the number
one track in the world, like 70 times greater
than the next track, which is rescue. We have
three eight -hour tracks. It doesn't mean it
puts you to sleep for eight hours. It just means
that if you are asleep for eight hours, we're
filling in all these gaps. You will notice faster
onset of sleep, deeper sleep, more REM, better
sleep efficiency. If you use a Whoop or a Garmin
or an Oura Ring, you'll see all the impact. quantitatively
on your sleep but more importantly when you wake
up you're excited for the day you're not wondering
how quickly you can get back to bed or crawling
to your shower it's amazing so deep sleep is
the simplest to use but the most complicated
physics you put a track on with a speaker in
your bedroom you press play off you go in your
hand in the palm of your hand you now have a
remote control for your brain you don't need
coffee you don't need monster energy drink You
don't need accelerants. You're dragging ass and
you're heading in for a shift. You're like, oh,
I need to pick up, put on Ignite, drive to the
firehouse. You're good to go, man. When you get
there, you're going to be lasered. You want to
catch up on emails. You want to hang out. You
want to read, whatever. Put on focus. You want
to take care of yourself. You want to get that
peace of mind, rest, restore, make up for a long
shift. Rescue, rescue. rescue. Every day you
do rescue is a day you're giving back to yourself.
Every day you do rescue is a day you're repairing
yourself. Every day you do rescue, you're preparing
yourself for a better life. That is a preparatory
work in the therapy for the sleep improvement.
People think because they want to cut corners
and they want to do anything that's easy. When
we lost deep sleep, we saw a drop in rescue.
We're like, hold the phone, ladies and gentlemen.
Deep sleep's a cherry on top. But if you don't
balance your stress response, you ain't sleeping.
So you got to do rescue and then deep sleep.
That combination will improve your sleep so dramatically
you have no idea. You have no idea what you're
missing because you've normalized where you are.
It's amazing. It seems like a miracle. It's not.
It's easy to use and it does wonders for you
when you want it, how you want it. It doesn't
discriminate. It doesn't care. It doesn't care
if you have any disease known to mankind. It
doesn't care if you're black, white, yellow,
purple. It doesn't care if you live in Africa
or Russia. It simply goes to your brain through
your ears and says, hey, let's take a break.
For those of you who'd like to learn more, in
2016, a book was published about New Calm, written
by the Dr. Michael Galitzer, who's an incredible
doctor in LA. And he's a doctor to many of the
stars. In fact, he's the one who introduced me
to Tony Robbins. Larry Trivieri co -wrote this
with him. Larry's written 35 books. This is a
fascinating book because it talks about the invention
path of very advanced neuroscience in terms that
are easily understood. And it also, because Blake
was one of the world's leading experts in the
biology of addiction, talks about addiction.
Then there's case studies in here of pilots and
cancer patients. So Michael wrote the book. I
called Tony. I said, hey, Tony, Michael's writing
a book. I'd like you to write the foreword. He
did. I was working with monks at the time. I
called Brother Craig Marshall, the Yogananda
monk that trained the Beatles on meditation.
I said, hey, Brother Craig, I'd like you to write
the preface. This is a book, ladies and gentlemen,
where the foreword is written by a nuclear reactor
of energy and the preface is written by a monk.
Both using the same tech to derive benefit. It's
fascinating. It's an easy read. I recommend you
check it out. Now, we've taken this complex neuroscience,
we've put it into an app. We're never going to
get anywhere if it's not easy to use and affordable.
It's no longer $6 ,000. It's as low as 50 cents
a day. Personally, I think most people are worth
50 cents a day. I know a cup of coffee, if you
go to Starbucks, it's $5 .65. That's not really
helping me. It's adding cortisol and acid to
my stomach and complicating a lot of things in
my body. So we have three ways you buy this.
There's a channel plan, 50 cents a day, any channel
you want. Deep sleep, rescue, power nap, flow
state, whatever. Then there's plans. People don't
like to decide and people don't like to try to
figure out what they don't know. So we built
plans. There's Core, which has the core therapies,
Rescue, PowerNap, and FlowState. There's SleepSuite,
which is our most popular today, and that's PowerNap,
Rescue, and DeepSleep. And then there's Edge.
Edge is $50 a month. $50 a month. It's an investment.
Well, it's a lot cheaper than $6 ,000, but $50
a month gets you everything. All you need is
a mobile device, a headphone, and an eye mask
for three of the channels. You download it. There's
tons of instructional materials. There's YouTube
videos. Our website is filled with information.
We're here to help. We're here to serve. We're
here to take complex science and just make it
easy. Because when you try this and you use Rescue
a couple days in a row, you quickly realize,
I like living like this. I'm a better me. I feel
more present. I'm actually listening to my wife
and my kids. That's the way it is. So we made
it easy. And we're here to serve. There's very
few companies that you'll ever see that have
raced to lower our price 99 % that have raced
to take things. We had it easy. I could be a
multimillionaire with ease and not really work
that hard serving a defined group at $6 ,000.
That's not our intention. When you find something
so powerful, so poignant, so profound that literally
can change. the evolution of mankind, and give
us the tool to help us downregulate the stress
and evolve faster. We should honor our privilege
and our responsibility to bring it to the world.
And that's what we do. That's how we've done
it. And what you do in police, fire, EMTs, is
courageous, incredible, honorable, integrous,
necessary. It's amazing the sacrifices that you've
made to take care of your communities. And you
deserve better. And this is a technology that
will help you get better. Well, again, I agree.
And I'm shouting from the rooftops, like I said.
Correct me if I'm wrong. I think my friend said
he tried it at the Hall of Fame. And I told him,
look, you need to try this thing. He's grieving
extremely hard at the moment. I know he's been
struggling. But he's also... open to a lot of
holistic stuff um he mentioned as well there
was a seven day trial there is yeah so so for
people that are like you know as we talked about
the money you've got 15 bucks for the single
one you've got uh 30 bucks for the suite and
then you've got 50 for the entire you know library
um people have seven days to actually try it
for free before they make the decision on where
they want to start correct so that's great that's
good insight the internet's amazing Our free
trial is in like beta testing. We've had 636
people go through it in the last month. You can't
really find it. But if you Google new call free
trial, you can sneak in the back door. So yes,
within a month, maybe when this goes live, it'll
be live and it'll be accentuated on the homepage
of the website. But yes, we're trying to break
down every barrier known to mankind to make sure
that people just have an opportunity to see.
It's great technology. It works every time. But
it doesn't mean it's for everybody. It doesn't
mean that at this time in my life, it's important
to me. Fine. Maybe at some point it will be.
So our job is to make it easier, more affordable,
more accessible. Well, Jim, like I said, I've
been blown away. And the fact that Ken was the
one that brought it to me in the first place
speaks absolute volumes. I just want to thank
you for not only the story and coming on the
show today, but for your part in bringing this
technology to us. Because hand on my heart, the
other things I've mentioned are also integral
parts of overall holistic wellness. But this
is absolutely game -changing. And in a profession
that currently is woefully overworked and underslept,
the ability to reset after a shift, the ability
to start their restorative program so that they...
Don't die five years after retirement, which
is notorious in our profession. And don't get
lost in a fire and don't fall off a ladder or
crash into a minivan full of people at an intersection.
There are so many elements of this that I think
are going to be absolutely game changing. So
I want to thank you so much, not only for your
time today, but for bringing New Calm to our
audience. My pleasure. Thank you for having me
because it's opportunities like this that allow
us to showcase what is possible. Your brothers
and sisters can't help themselves if they don't
know it's possible. So appreciate the opportunity.
Appreciate the love and support. And people,
take care of yourselves. You're only in this
journey once. Now it's happening live. You're
living right now. Take care of yourself so you
can be there for the ones who need you and love
you the most.