From Combat to Calm: How Sound Technology Rewires the Traumatized Brain

Tony Crescenzo, Marine Corps veteran and CEO of Intelligent Waves and Peak Neuro

What if healing trauma didn't require endless therapy sessions or medication? Tony Crescenzo, Marine Corps veteran and CEO of Intelligent Waves and Peak Neuro, reveals a groundbreaking approach that's changing lives.

After eight years in the Marines and time working undercover for Naval Investigative Service, Crescenzo battled PTSD for decades. "I was one of those veterans who goes from zero to FU in about 10 seconds," he admits with candid honesty. His journey from combat to corporate America ultimately led him to discover neuroacoustic brainwave entrainment—a technology that would transform not only his life but the lives of countless veterans, first responders, and elite athletes.

The science is fascinating yet approachable. Unlike traditional psychotherapy that requires verbally processing trauma, this technology uses specific sound frequencies to entrain the brain into beneficial states. The prefrontal cortex quiets down, rumination stops, and the body processes trauma somatically rather than narratively. "You may observe the event that caused your trauma like watching a movie, but the emotion dissolves. Your body essentially digests it," Crescenzo explains.

The results speak volumes. A Navy SEAL with 21 traumatic brain injuries went from three hours of fragmented sleep to six uninterrupted hours in just 30 days. Headaches disappeared, brain fog lifted, and EEG measurements showed actual neurological restructuring. Perhaps most remarkably, users don't become dependent on the technology—the brain undergoes permanent trait-level changes, eliminating the need for ongoing medication or therapy.

Ready to experience this transformation yourself? The Peak Neuro app offers free trials with exercises for sleep, stress reduction, and cognitive enhancement. As Crescenzo powerfully reminds us: "If you're struggling, don't struggle alone. Whatever happened is over and your body's here, but your mind is there. Bring your mind with you and we can help you do that."

Chapters

• 0:48 Introduction to Tony Crescenzo
• 3:48 From Marine Corps to Corporate Life
• 8:30 Leading Intelligent Waves
• 11:19 The F-35 Program and Human Performance
• 16:20 Neuroacoustic Brainwave Entrainment Technology
• 22:20 Resolving PTSD Without Medication
• 29:08 Peak Neuro Applications and Benefits
• 32:43 Final Thoughts and Future Developments

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:25

Hi, how are you? This is the Mindfully Integrative Show and this is Dr Damaris Maria Grossman, and today we have an amazing guest President and CEO, tony Crescenzo. I hope I said that correct, but he is the CEO of Intelligent Waves, but also Peak Neuro, and he has so much to talk to you about what he's done for veterans, for amazing things in his company. There's a lot that I feel like I can't even say so. Thank you so much, tony. If that's okay, I can call you Tony, how are you?

Speaker 2: 0:51

Please, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 0:53

So first off I always ask what's a little fun fact? Someone may not know about you.

Speaker 2: 0:59

Well, I spent most of my post-Marine Corps time, until I was too old, climbing mountains. I'm a very experienced Alpine mountaineer. I've been on every peak in every continent. The highest peak in every continent except for the Himalayas.

Speaker 1: 1:13

Wow, oh my goodness, I'm lucky if I can get up like one hill.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Yeah, I'm old now and my knees are bad. If you're a veteran and you're listening to this, your knees are probably bad too, that is, if you can hear me, because you're probably half deaf.

Speaker 1: 1:27

Oh no, and then so do you still do like rucking, like you rock with, like the pack.

Speaker 2: 1:32

Not so much anymore. My literally my knees, as I got older, started to get worse and worse and worse, and now that all my friends are having knee replacements, I'm trying to avoid it at the last possible moment.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Oh no, okay, maybe some some stem cell or a regenerative shots in there. Exactly, yeah, some stem cell or whichever good shots in there.

Speaker 1: 1:47

Exactly, yeah. So I really appreciate you being on the show, taking the time to kind of let the audience know a little bit about you and a little bit about your business. You have two areas of your business, but you know, first tell them you know what you do and what you like worked on, and then kind of you know, so you're a veteran too. So from veteran to veteran, you know I I'm so glad for you to be on the show and to you know, kind of talk to those about the hard work that you've been doing, not just for veterans but for others.

Speaker 2: 2:19

Thank you and thank you for your service. You've certainly served a lot more recently than I have. I go my time in the Marine Corps goes back to Beirut, to that era where it was much different open sights on rifles and no sappy plates or any of the fun stuff that people have today. So I spent eight years in the United States Marine Corps, some of it in some really interesting situations. Three years working undercover for what I think your listeners would know as NCIS but is actually called NIS. Back in the day on a drug and fraud investigation that, in me, created what I found out many years later was a pretty nasty case of PTSD. Many people think that PTSD is just for military veterans. Certainly not true, and anybody who suffered trauma can have symptoms of PTSD, including first responders, police who work undercover. I didn't have much of an issue when I was downrange in the Marine Corps. It didn't bother me very much to be deployed. But what my first wife, second wife and daughter would tell you is my subsequent time working undercover with NIS apparently had a very negative effect on me. I was one of those veterans who goes from zero to FU in about 10 seconds the guy you don't want to get a car with, because if somebody cuts them off it's on and, as I said, my first and second wife would both agree it's probably not fun to sleep with me, given the nightmares. That all changed for me about four years ago. I spent literally 30 years dealing with some of the outcomes of my service, along with some of my close friends. So, as you mentioned earlier, I'm the president and CEO of Intelligent Waves.

Speaker 2: 3:53

When I got out of the Marine Corps I wound up. My last duty station was in Garden City, new York. I was on independent duty. I was recruited by a technology company in New York City, in Manhattan, that was run by three of the craziest people you'd ever want to meet in your life. They taught me so many things. It was an incredible experience. I would have never imagined I could have a transition like that and for those of you who are veterans who listen to this and you've probably been through some transition training back in the day, transition consisted of the sergeant major walking in your barracks and saying take off that uniform and go home, and that was pretty much it. So my original transition out of the Marine Corps was writing pill bottle quality control code at Merck, the pharmaceutical company up in Rahway, new Jersey, not too far from where you're at, and if you've seen the building, it's 300 yards long. It's a manufacturing center and an office building, and I had just gotten out of the Marine Corps. I was probably three months out. I was a sergeant when I was in the Marine Corps and everything that you think a Marine sergeant is I probably was. One thing to keep in mind is that even today, the Marine Corps doesn't have HR.

Speaker 2: 4:59

If you have interpersonal problems at work, it usually involves some exercise behind a building or a squad bay, followed by a beer and maybe changing your clothes. And I wound up working with a gentleman who was not a very nice person. He was very condescending to a lot of people, went on for quite a while and this is, by the way, before the era of cell phones and at one point I looked at him and I said listen, if you talk to me like that again, I'm going to knock you out. I said it in a much more forceful way, with some more strong language, and I guess he didn't believe me because he's from Jersey and he was kind of a condescending guy. So I wound up chasing him through the building, all the way through the building out into the parking lot where he got in his BMW because, of course, he drove a BMW and drove away. And I thought, oh yeah, this is the day where my career takes a turn, and now I'm going to deliver packages for UPS. This is the day where my career takes a turn and now I'm going to deliver packages for UPS. Unfortunately, I think UPS would have hired me with a background check where I got fired from my last job for beating somebody up.

Speaker 2: 5:54

Anyway, he flew out of the parking lot. He actually went to the office and spoke to our boss. Half hour later I got a phone call and I walk in the boss's office and he's got this funny look on his face and he said come and sit down and tell me what happened. And I said the guy was kind of a jerk to people for months and months and I warned him twice and he didn't listen. And my boss said well, you know, I know you just got out of the military and Marines are a little bit different than other people and I know you wouldn't have hurt him. And I said oh no, if I'd, he is kind of an asshole. So we just fired him, go back to work and try not to hurt anybody. And I thought to myself am I on candid camera? What just happened? And it turned out that my boss was a Vietnam veteran Air Force, retired Air Force colonel, 31 combat missions in Vietnam. But for him, where would I be? If not for his understanding, his background, his ability to see in me some things in himself, I certainly would have changed careers pretty quickly then, and that really was a transformative point in my life. I wound up working for that company for a little bit longer. It was sold in the largest M&A transaction of that year.

Speaker 2: 7:08

I was fortunate enough to come down here to Washington DC in the early 90s, worked for some of the world's largest software companies in the technology business and eventually found myself back in the defense contracting space where I started a company when I was 33. I sold it and went through a string of venture-backed and private equity-backed CEO roles and eventually got to the point now where I like to think of myself as a very expensive janitor. I typically come into one-owner companies that are looking to transition, say, from a service-disabled veteran-owned business into a full and open business, or a small business to a large business or turnarounds for private equity firms. And so Intelligent Waves started by an army veteran, an amazing, amazing man, who spent some time, a couple of tours down range in Iraq, worked on the joint IED defense program, grew the company to a very, very good size and then was looking for some transition leadership to bring the company into a much larger organization. So I've been here for about five years and the work we do is really interesting.

Speaker 2: 8:13

Probably 85% to 90% of our work is classified above top secret, which makes it interesting for me because, as the CEO of the company, even if you have a security clearance, you might not have a need to know. So while I know basically what we do, no one in our company knows everything that we do. But we do a lot of work in cyber defense. We're the cyber defenders of the US court system. We do work primarily in DOD, in the Air Force, army, navy, marine Corps. We do work for our special operations community, for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, ditra. Most of our work is done by former military or civilians who work for the government, who go back into jobs that they've already done in downrange and in the military and then essentially take off a green suit and put on a blue suit. So we're very close to the mission, always have been, and part of the work we do is supporting the F-35 program.

Speaker 2: 9:09

The F-35 is a very interesting aircraft and the pilots who fly them are extremely interesting people. You might think of a fighter jet as something you get into, you fly up in the sky, shoot some guys down and come home. But the average F-35 mission is about 15.7 hours about 15.7 hours, and many of those pilots might be sitting in their kitchen having breakfast one morning in Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, get on a plane seven in the morning, fly to the other side of the earth, engage in a very high stress mission, come home over several refuelings and tankings, land that aircraft, maybe six, seven o'clock in the evening, and on the way home their spouse calls and says, hey, we got to go to a PTA meeting, no problem. So imagine what it's like to come back from that level of stress and then have to engage in a regular life like everybody else. So we do things like communication via modulated light, right, an F-35 is a stealth aircraft Can't see it, hear it. It's not on infrared, it's not on radar, very hard to detect. But the minute they key a microphone they create radio frequency energy. So we're capable of replacing things like wingtip lights and drogue lights and refueling aircraft to pass data and information that can't be intercepted, can't be jammed among other very interesting and classified things that the company does.

Speaker 2: 10:25

But as part of that program, we were asked to support the Air Force Fighter Weapons School, the version of Top Gun with physical human performance right. The F-35 creates a very high G environment. It's very tough on your body and the people that we brought on to do that. Actually their resumes include Cirque du Soleil and worldwide wrestling, so a very interesting crew of people.

Speaker 2: 10:46

Several years ago I was at an exercise called Northern Edge up in Alaska and getting a briefing from our human performance team, who told us that they wanted to look at things like cognitive human performance, downregulation, stress, et cetera. And as we started to look at that, we discovered a technology. We spoke with a man who'd been working on this kind of technology for 31 years. It's neuroacoustic brainwave entrainment. And what does that really mean? Well, you know, everyone has a physiology, a biology, a psychology and a neurology, and your neurology is your electrical system. It's how your brain works when you engage in thought and cognition. It takes about 12 watts of energy to power a thought and that 12 watts is comprised of oxygen, atp, acetylcholine, glucose, and that's the metabolic cost to have a thought. So imagine you're a war fighter, you're a pilot, you're making very fast decisions under high stress and those thoughts eat up an awful lot of those resources in your biology, your neurology, your physiology. So we looked at how can we attenuate, how can we enhance cognition, how can we deal with sleep?

Speaker 2: 12:01

Sleep is an interesting if you're a veteran, nobody sleeps in the military. You're lucky if you get a couple of hours sleep. The problem with that is sleep has everything to do with cognition. There are two types of sleep slow, wave sleep, which is the slowest, lowest level of sleep you can get into. It's below your dreams and that's physically restorative. And when you think about how your body restores itself, it primarily uses your lymph system. Right, you've got a lymph node all over your body and that collects all of the junk that you accumulate in the course of a day and deposits it in your liver kidneys and it would be cleaned or excreted. But where's the lymph node in your head? You don't have one. Your brain doesn't have a lymph node. So how does your brain clean itself? Well, when you engage in slow-wave sleep that is the deepest, deepest, non-dream sleep your glymphatic cells in your brain actually shrink, and they shrink so much that they create a vacuum and they pull cerebral spinal fluid up through your spinal cord, over your corpus colossum. It soaks into your brain and when you wake up, the longer you sleep, the longer your deep sleep, the longer it soaks in. When you wake up, those cells expand, push the cerebral spinal fluid down your spinal column, into your kidneys and your lymph nodes, and that's how your brain cleans itself.

Speaker 2: 13:16

So, poor sleep, poor recovery, whether that's emotional recovery in NREM or it's physical recovery in slow-wave sleep. So we've done things like reverse engineer sleep into a series of brainwaves that we can entrain. You put on a set of headphones, listen for 30 minutes and over the course of weeks to months, you're training your body, you're training your neurology to achieve higher levels of sleep. I am, at this point in my life and in this podcast, a 64-year-old man. The average 64-year-old man gets somewhere between 18 and 22% restorative sleep in an evening. After six months of using the technology myself, I now get 47 to 51% of my sleep is restorative, which means that I can get half the sleep and get just as much recovery, and that's been true across the board for all age groups. We're actually, I'm sorry, go ahead please.

Speaker 1: 14:11

No, that's amazing. No, I don't want to cut you off. Go keep talking.

Speaker 2: 14:15

So we work with our work around. This has morphed into not just working with the military, but we work with Division I and professional sports teams. We work with veterans and first responders. We're working with a veteran now who's anonymous, but I will tell you after one month. This is a gentleman, 24 years as a Navy SEAL, both officer and enlisted, been downrange, 11 years of his life in combat, 21 traumatic brain injuries, concussions. He's a former Division I football player, sleeping three hours an evening and it's fragmented it's not all in a row, brain fog, very hard to remember names, not the most profoundly fun retirement for someone who's given that much to his country.

Speaker 2: 15:01

In 30 days of using this technology, which is as simple as, as I said, listening to earphones. You can go to the app store and download versions of this and try it for yourself. His sleep is now gone. In 30 days it's doubled in length six hours uninterrupted, and the only reason it's six hours is he got an old dog that has to go to the bathroom, so it wakes him up every morning. He has no more headaches, very little brain fog, and we look at we're actually measuring this through EEGs. So every two weeks he comes in, we give him an EEG and we're seeing trait level changes in his neurology where his PTSD is resolving, his TBIs are almost resolved and over the course of about six months we're going to see that that gets pretty much erased. So not only does it build, does it repair, issues like PTSD, but it builds resilience in your neurology that prevents PTSD.

Speaker 2: 15:55

So when we talk about trauma and we talk about resolving trauma, the number one methodology, the number one thing that people do when they've suffered a traumatic event, is to go to psychotherapy, and psychotherapy is talk therapy, and talk therapy is about narrative. Narrative means I have an autobiography and 30 years ago, 30, 36 years ago, I was involved in some things that made an imprint on me and I now have to rationalize how those things that happened to me fit into my autobiography, which requires me in psychotherapy to sit down and talk about it. And you're a veteran like I am. There's a lot of things that veterans, excuse me, don't want to talk about, especially with non-veterans, and anyone who suffered trauma doesn't necessarily want to revisit that trauma.

Speaker 1: 16:42

Of course.

Speaker 2: 16:42

So if we think of psychotherapy as very complex.

Speaker 1: 16:45

It's like oh, I don't want to talk about that.

Speaker 2: 16:47

Oh my God. Yeah, if we think about psychotherapy as narrative and meaning making, that's a semantic way to resolve trauma. It's talking about it. It's finding some structure in the grammar and the words and the experience, some structure in the grammar and the words and the experience. What we do is we do something that's very radically different Through the program that we've put together over the course of about six months. What we're doing is we're creating a brain state, a level of consciousness that's very different than a traumatic state. So for most veterans you know I'm on a couple of veterans boards I do a lot of work with veterans who are transitioning or have transitioned and are having some problems around this area.

Speaker 2: 17:32

What that looks like as opposed to meaning making and narrative is, this technology pretty much suppresses the executive frontal as a prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. It suppresses your ability to create narrative, in other words, brainwaves. If you're familiar with them, you have five different kinds of brainwaves delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma. Delta is very low. That's your deep sleep. That's also, if you're a Buddhist monk, your sort of meditative state, and so is theta state, and so is theta. Alpha is a light meditative state. Beta is your normal cognition, and gamma is integration and also anxiety. So when we get into these rumination loops and if you're listening to this and you've ever walked out of a room full of people and thought to yourself, why did I say that? And you can't put it aside or someone says something to you and you say to yourself, man, what did they really mean? And you're laying in bed at night six hours later. That's rumination. That's your prefrontal cortex locked in a rumination loop that you can't get out of and it keeps you awake and it creates stress for you. Cortisol gets released. It's not a fun thing. What we do is we essentially shut down your brain's ability to even process narrative. We suppress the front part of your brain, we suppress beta and gamma and we open up the anticular cingulate cortex, which is right up here in the parietal part of your brain, and the occipital cortex, and what that does is we flood it with very slow wave, very soothing brainwaves, and what it creates is a somatic way to process trauma.

Speaker 2: 18:59

So, while you may observe the event that caused your trauma, you may see it like a movie or feel it like a memory. You're not going to build a narrative. You're going to sort of see flashes. Emotions will come by, but you'll be completely divorced from them part of your autobiography. But the emotion that came with it doesn't. The emotion dissolves. Your body essentially digests it.

Speaker 2: 19:29

It's a way of using your body to semantically resolve and dissolve trauma in your life and what that brings you to is a place of equanimity. And when you get to the place of equanimity, if a new trauma occurs, your ability to deal with it and bounce back quickly becomes much more enhanced, to the point where, over the course of about six months, when we look at some of the trials that we've done, we're seeing people have literally three or four minutes of drag after a traumatic event and they go right back to equanimity. So it's an interesting way to train your brain, your mind, your states of consciousness to deal not just with life's little things but with life's big things and to heal yourself, as opposed to thinking that somebody from the outside, some drug, is going to do that for you. Most veterans get prescribed antidepressants for their PTSD and they hate it. It puts 27 panes of glass between you and the rest of the world and no one likes that. And after this gentleman that we're talking about is 30 days, we have another trial that we're doing on someone that's six months, you find these people to be two or three standard deviations above the normative population and our ability to handle stress. So we make that available to the military, make it available to first responders, and now it's essentially available to everybody through our Peak Neuro subsidiary.

Speaker 2: 20:52

And if you're interested in trying it, go to the App Store, go to Google Play and look for Peak Neuro P-E-A-K-N-E-U-R-O and you can download it there. You can go to peakneurocom and look at it. It's a free trial, doesn't work. Throw it away. So far we haven't had anyone who hasn't come back and really thought that was an amazing thing. And there are exercises there for sleep, for cognition, one of the side effects that we're still exploring right now. In a six-month longitudinal trial we worked on in sleep, we discovered that one of the side effects is neuroplasticity and if you're not familiar with that term, it's really your brain's ability to wire neurons together in new and inventive ways. It's the way to adapt, it's learning. So when you think about things like artificial intelligence artificial intelligence everybody's afraid of. But let me tell you nothing to be afraid of, it's still a lot dumber than my ex-wife. I'm sorry if that offended my ex-wife she's actually a lovely person loops.

Speaker 2: 22:05

It gives you the opportunity to get out in front of it, to find the root cause in the self, not in your physical self but in your for lack of a better way to say it your soul, your spiritual self. If you, like me, have experienced a near-death experience, you may have people who do that all the time. It just kind of changes your worldview, the way you see things. But you find that in a world where we're still stuck in Newtonian physics and materialism, that you find a post-quantum, post-materialist view of what you are and who you really are. So the kind of interesting outcome is it doesn't matter if you're a knuckle dragon marine or a delta force operator. That state of consciousness that will help you achieve is analogous and very similar to a Tibetan monk who's in Buddhist practice and you're going to feel that way. It's a very interesting way for us who have served and who have had some resolution to this to pay back to others who are still kind of going through that process.

Speaker 1: 23:02

This sounds pretty profound. I think we just spoke briefly about the need of like that way of thinking and kind of getting out, of getting back, I guess, the calmness. As a veteran myself, I just briefly said, hey, I didn't have a choice but to learn some of this and I would definitely like to check out your peak neuro. I think it's so important for those, not just those that have been exposed in the veteran sector or military sector, but, like you said, anyone in some manner has had some, especially now in this day and age. I feel like there's some sort of traumatic or social stressors in lives, that the anxiety has been turned up. So I can imagine it being effective for a variety. You know, just like a spectrum right and trying to calm that mind right From all this chaos. It's just, it's, it's profound. How much people will need, you know, need need.

Speaker 2: 23:53

So it's. That's really well said. It's kind of ironic. When you look at an EEG, you look neurologically at PTSD. Ptsd, traumatic brain injury and depression all look almost identical on an EEG. They involve asynchrony in the front of the brain, they involve overactive beta and gamma in the front of the brain and they get resolved in very much the same way. So what you get is an ability to return to the self that you were before the trauma. The only difference is that whatever you learned in it you keep and whatever's not for you goes away.

Speaker 1: 24:31

Yeah, that's beautifully said. I think it's important for those listening to know that the story isn't the full story, right, or there is a room to manage and room to change, and I think that those listening can get a tidbit to know that you're saying that they can improve or they can get past this and part of the technology that you have been working on and also those can really, you know, benefit from it.

Speaker 2: 25:01

That's absolutely true If you're a veteran first responder and you've ever had those dark thoughts. I've had them too, and I'm sure that many of the people who listen to this have had them too. And I don't have them anymore. And I don't have them anymore not just because of the technology, but I will tell you that I don't use the technology anymore. I don't listen to the sleep sounds and it has made trait level changes in my neurobiology to allow me to just live my life without having a crutch. And that includes drugs. And we talked a little bit earlier about PTSD. A lot of veterans will engage in years of either psychotherapy or a lot of veterans are trying psychedelics now, and what those psychedelics are doing is affecting your neurology. They're affecting your default mode network, and it's as a temporary fix. Hey listen, whatever works for you works, but as a permanent fix. You can train your brain to do that yourself. You don't have to rely on an outside pharmacological support infrastructure. You just don't have to do it. You can learn how to do it yourself.

Speaker 1: 26:02

I think it's a really important point because I feel like as a person and you know can definitely gauge on the I don't take any medications myself, you know maybe on the supplements and the natural side and can definitely tell you that you know we were given many of options, right, every single pill you could think of, and none of it can work. But it does take work and I think the conversation has to be one to step and talk to someone like you and listen to this podcast, if you are listening, to ask for help, to come and get the resources needed and then not to be afraid to know that those answers are, you know, available to them. Now how I think I about my question is more of those individuals that obviously they have the answers, you know you help them, do you have to kind of do tune-ups for them? You know, like long-term, you know, maybe not everybody is necessarily cured but managed more of a management kind of like a management diabetes management of other yeah, I love that.

Speaker 2: 26:58

That's a great question and we're all, we're all works in progress, right? All of us Right. The funny thing is it's it's not like exercise, right? So when you exercise your body, if you do pushups all day, you're going to get a pretty good looking chest and you're going to get some good looking arms, but eventually you're not going to get any more progress and you're maybe going to want to look at how do I work on my legs or my neck or losing weight.

Speaker 2: 27:23

Your consciousness exists on many different dimensions, whether that's just dealing with stress, or it's sleep, or it's creating higher cognition, intuition, learning more. So for me, as I went through this program myself and I'm still I guess I would say I'm one of the crash test dummies that we use to test this stuff on. It's not just about down regulation, it's about up regulation, it's about sleep, it's about cognition. It's also about allowing people to find comfort in altered states. So if you'd like to learn how to meditate and you don't want to sit there and try and think of nothing because trying to think of nothing is thinking of something it can be very daunting. So you know, if you're a TM practitioner and you got to say that mantra over and over again. I can tell you that you can achieve some very interesting states of consciousness just by using the meditation pieces of this that will give you. It will let you think of nothing and actually enjoy it and watch what happens as it goes by. So to be in it but not of it.

Speaker 2: 28:28

And for me, when I got past the wanting to be in, what did my wife say to me? We'd been married five years. My wife looked at me and said you've been in more fights than all the men I've ever dated combined. And I would say to her I never started a fight in my life. And she'd say no, I watch what you do. You get them all pissed off. They swing at you. Then you knock them out and go home and say, well, he started it.

Speaker 2: 28:57

So I had to supplement, not with bar fighting anymore. Now I'm a pickleball guy, but it allows you to sort of pick and choose what you want to do. In a week we'll be starting trial at Columbia University with some of the cognitive psychology professors and the president and provost of the university, and that's mostly about sleep. But sleep leads to better cognition and neuroplasticity, and neuroplasticity is about learning, and the more you learn actually, the more fun it is. So, but, by the way, if you're not a trivia buff, columbia University is the country's oldest teacher's college, which is why we're working with them.

Speaker 1: 29:22

That's amazing. I love it. Oh yeah, I'm a big. I can talk about sleep, tons of sleep, not having sleep, having sleep. I talk about sleep hygiene. We can go on that, no it's really like I said.

Speaker 2: 29:34

It's like exercise. You're going to exercise different parts of your brain to achieve different things. I've been involved in it now for three and a half years and I haven't even gotten, I haven't even scratched the surface of all the things you can do with it. So good news is, once you get to the part where you're sleeping well, you'll continue to sleep well.

Speaker 1: 29:57

And so far I haven't needed a touch-up, but from time to time I'll throw the headphones on just to see if it has any impact. Oh, I wonder how. I probably will need it not just to sleep sometimes, but then I still have a little one. So those intermittent nights I need a few minutes. I need a few minutes to get back to my REM sleep. So I can't wait to check it out.

Speaker 2: 30:15

In about a month we're going to release a version for students children, elementary school, middle school and high school that really focuses on getting them to sleep, keeping them asleep and enhancing their neuroplasticity.

Speaker 1: 30:28

Oh, I can't wait. You need to reach out to me again.

Speaker 2: 30:31

You go to the app store, you go to the website, look for it. It'll be out relatively shortly. The interesting thing is that your brain changes a lot until you get into your sort of mid to late 20s. So we have to really focus on targeting this and for Division I athletes, for fighter pilots, for specific cohorts of folks, we can actually tailor these signals to someone's specific neurology. People's neurological systems are as varied as the looks that everyone has. You might have an identical twin somewhere on the planet, but for the most part, we're all just a little bit different.

Speaker 1: 31:04

That's fascinating. I can't wait for it to come out. I find that there's a lot here Glad for you to dive in. I feel like you have to be on again to have another conversation with me. Thank you, I enjoyed it.

Speaker 2: 31:15

I feel like you have to be on again to have another conversation with me.

Speaker 1: 31:17

What key point would your or what fun like thing that you want to have, a takeaway for someone to know, or you know, obviously, to reach out to you on the peak neuro, but what else? Those are something that you want to kind of tell someone before we go, obviously.

Speaker 2: 31:32

Thank you. I would tell you this If you're, if you're listening to this podcast and you're struggling and you'd like to reach out, call Damaris, send her a text, send her an email, reach out through this program and she will get you in touch with me. Absolutely. I grew up in South Philadelphia, in the neighborhood that Rocky runs in. When Rocky was made, my dad was a mechanic. My mom was a secretary. I came from a very blue-collar background. I've been fortunate to have a lot of success in my life, both in business and in life. I find myself at this age at a place where it's really about giving back now, and so my goal between now and the time that I step off this planet, is to pay it forward, just like the folks who made it possible for me to do it. So if you're struggling, don't struggle alone, because you could never be alone. It only feels that way. Whatever happened is over and your body's here, but your mind is there. Bring your mind with you and we can help you do that.

Speaker 1: 32:36

Well, that's beautifully said. Thank you so much. I know that someone is going to hear this, whether they're a veteran or they're just someone that just needs to be heard, you know they need a voice, like we all do, yeah. Yeah, thank you again for being on and I look forward to having you on again, maybe in another aspect of the conversation. But can you let them know your websites that they can reach you and connect with you?

Speaker 2: 33:02

Sure, it's wwwpeakneuro all one word dot com, Easy to find. Right on the website You'll see links to the App Store or Google Play for a free trial of the product. You can try it. It's not the full version of it, but what's in there is not dumbed down or toned down. They are production level exercises that you will feel differently the first time you try one.

Speaker 1: 33:27

That's amazing. I can't wait. I'm going to have it in the show notes for those to check in and I really thank you for being on the show and taking the time for the audience to hear all your beautiful words and for all the insight.

Speaker 2: 33:39

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me and thanks for your service.

Speaker 1: 33:42

Oh, thank you, you too, and thank you all for making sure you have a mindful way each and every day and for making the time to give yourself some time and space. Have a good day, guys.