Your Brain Voltage Measure It, Raise It, Control It Paul Sorbo

Foreign, A state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that, well, if you're an older person, nudging your brainwaves into sync can temporarily boost your recall powers. So if you're writing your autobiography or you just want to tell your kids or your grandkids about the cool old days when you had to walk uphill through snow both ways to school and coming back, you might want to be able to do this. This is a new study where researchers synchronized brainwave patterns of 42 people between 60 and 76 using precisely calibrated electrical current stimulation. Now, what they did is they focused on two parts of the brain, the left prefrontal cortex and the left temporal cortex, which we think are involved in your working memory. It's. And if you have read Game Changers, you understand you can train your working memory. And I write in Game Changers about how you can add IQ points. In fact, I added 12 IQ points doing the kind of training that's in Game Changers. What they found, though, in this electrical stimulation study is that after 25 minutes, older people could better remember whether an image on a screen was the same as a previous version or slightly changed. That is working memory, not long term memory, but it probably helps long term memory. Who knows what they found, though? And this is what's cool. These people who are 60 years old performed on the task the same way that people do in their twenties. This is neuroscientist from Boston University. Holy crap, right? A little bit of electricity in the brain, and all of a sudden you just took 40 years off your performance. And the brain benefits last for at least 50 minutes. And here's the cool thing. They said, all right, what happens if we take younger people and we throw their brainwaves out of whack with a device? Their working memory suffered. So there we go. We have electrical stimulation. Oh, and sorry, Elon, great respect, but neural lace, you don't have to stick things inside the brain to change the state. So let's work with the current skin that we have before we penetrate it. I'm not against putting stuff in my brain. I just feel like the hardware I have ought to be maximized before we go deeper. And what this means for you is that there's a bunch of tech coming online that can help you reshape your brain waves. And this could mean non invasive therapies for things like dementia, schizophrenia, autism. But also, it could just mean, oh, I wanted my brain to kick ass all day. In fact, I wanted it to do that every day. And it can, and it might. I use electrical stimulation pretty much twice a week at least. And when I do 40 years of Zen training on myself or with clients, I use it every single day. Because it's a way to not just do what this study showed, but to actually increase something called brain derived nootropic factor bdnf. Electrical stimulation does that. You know what else does that? Exercise. You know what else does that? Coffee. In a recent study, you know what else does that four times better than exercise? A supplement called Neuromaster. And yes, Bulletproof makes that one as well. So it turns out maybe you can have a younger brain. In fact, I'm sitting here at Bulletproof Labs Alpha here on Vancouver island with a guy who just finished scanning my brain using an advanced EEG machine. And he said on several of these metrics, Dave, even though you're in your mid-40s, you're performing at the level of a 20 year old. So not only can it be done, I did it and it works. Either that or I'm a freak of nature. The guy I'm talking about is Dr. Paul Sorbo. Actually, Paul, you're not a doctor, are you? You just sound like one on the Internet. Yeah. All right, fine. So Paul Sorbo of WABI is a Boulder based company that has a mass screening EEG device with software for looking at how your brain is doing in the fields of mild cognitive impairment dementia, and just seeing whether your brain acts like other people and doing huge amounts of data on what's happening inside the brain. This isn't neurofeedback. This is just, hey, let's measure what's going on in there instead of this crazy idea of let's sit on the couch and let's talk about our feelings.

Yes.

And then let's give you some highly psychoactive drugs without ever looking at electricity or neurological function or metabolic function in the brain.

But we'll just do it.

Yeah.

Blind.

Do you have any wellbutin?

No.

Me either. But in all honesty, like, I just believe that looking at electrical signals and physiology and metabolic performance in the brain, it's. It's a godsend to be able to do it. So I wanted to have you on the show talk about what you guys are doing because it's kind of cool. All right, give me the lowdown. What's different about what you're doing in the last 50 years of EEG based neuroscience?

Yeah. So I mean, to start just what we do is we're a total, all encompassing brain performance platform. So we take a number of different measurements, we utilize EEG, we utilize ERP, we do a number.

ERP, ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning. SAP.

Yeah, SAP, NetSuite.

I'm sorry, sorry, define that for our audience.

So it's evoked response potential. And so what we do is we basically measure how the brain is processing signal. We measure how efficiently your brain is able to donate available cognitive resources to a given task. And it's called P300. And we're able to pull this out of traditional EEG. And we have a couple of different software patents as well as some hardware patents that we utilize to be able to do so. So in the past, EEG is great and it's done a number of different studies, but it's really passive eeg. We're not actually seeing how the brain functions. And so what now we're able to do in such a easy, simple and fast, affordable way with WAVI is that we measure the functionality of the brain and how well it's processing, either through lifetime different interventions, intervention efficacy.

So you can test someone before bulletproof coffee and after bulletproof coffee and see what the difference is in about eight minutes.

Eight minutes or less with setup. I mean, literally with setup to run through a whole test is less than 12 minutes.

That's pretty cool. And it doesn't require a lot of.

Goop in your hair, no EEG gel, no nothing. We have an unbelievable cap that's been designed by Momo over in Italy. It's just phenomenal.

It does look cool. And it looks pretty darn. Pretty much like something out of altered carbon or something. It is, yeah. It's a good graph and all that. But what's different about this? And I've. For 20 years, I've had at least several EEG machines at home, and I've started an institute to do this. When I do the training, it's always looking at, okay, what do you do with your eyes open, eyes closed, or responding to sounds by changing your state? Because I'm looking at advanced states of high performance. And what I found intriguing about the WAVI work is that this evoked response potential, I'm listening for sounds and you're saying, what does my brain do when there's a sound that I don't need to know anything about? And what does it do when there's the sound I'm looking for? And saying, well, how good am I at discriminating these sounds? And that's a very different Task that's going to measure really core functionality, auditory processing. And I found that interesting because I've had a history of substantial auditory processing issues to the point that I retrained my ears using custom software and sound files and things. Yes, I'm a dork, which is why we love it. And then you also had the visual thing. You look at something called the flanker test. And so now instead of just the signals that we're relying on at 40 years of Zen, which is, you know, clinically validated QEEG things, those are eyes open, eyes closed, no stimulation. But by selectively applying stimulation and watching response times, you're getting a very fast signal. It's not a full clinical quantitative 3D mapping. No, but it's like, are you functioning well or not functioning well. So it's more of a functional assessment of the brain.

It is a functional assessment of the brain. That's why we measure available cognitive resources. How many resources can your brain. At every localized point, we have 19 leads across with one ground. Is your brain able to donate to any one of those given signals? And what we're finding is functionality of the brain is different than everything else. You know, it's not a SPECT scan, it's not qeeg. But we are measuring something that's very, very valuable.

Could you even do something like this 10 years ago?

No. No. And we, we were in the process of development. We've been in the process of development about 10 years. To say that this has been over scienced would be an understatement. It's just been amazing. And you know, we went market live and ready to the fact that we can collect brain data. And you experienced it for yourself in less than 12 minutes. Especially to the detail that we can and the precision. I mean, this is a full FDA regulated device class two. You know, our margins for error are so minimal. And the fact that you can roll this out at just about anywhere it's transportable is just astonishing that you can collect that data.

And just full disclosure too, we're partnered in that you're rolling this out at Upgrade Labs.

We are. Which is really exciting, which is awesome.

Yeah, yeah. And Upgrade Labs, you're listening. This is a bulletproof spin out. That now is the experience of upgrading your human performance and recovering faster. There's the Beverly Hilton and Santa Monica, and we're making plans to expand that nationally. So there's all sorts of things you can do to make your brain and your body work better. And the first thing is, how am I doing Right now and understanding that. So this is looking like it's going to be a part of our technology stack for that.

Yes, which is great because ultimately we've always measured biomarkers of the body. Now we're able to measure biomarkers of the brain and so easily. And everything affects the body, everything affects the brain. Why are we not measuring what that's doing?

You talk about your grandfather dying of dementia or dying with dementia anyway. What role did that experience of dementia have in the creation of avi?

So, you know, for me, it's what got me involved in the project. There are, in the next 20 years, the amount of individuals affected by dementia and Alzheimer's is expected to skyrocket. And there's a number of different causes that obviously I think we can all talk about. But, you know, giving people a way to measure the way that their brain is aging is so important. We look at heart health, we look at blood pressure, we look at colon. I mean, literally, we look at everything. Why are we not measuring the one thing that controls all of it? I mean, it.

Just having the brain of a young person is the most precious thing you can have. You can do okay without your legs. That sucks. If you have your legs and you don't have your brain, it sucks harder.

It doesn't work. So that's amazing to me. And if we can, there's a lot of our collaborators that believe that we can significantly not eliminate dementia and Alzheimer's, but we can either delay onset and. Or kind of hopefully not even get to that point if we look at these proper biomarkers and we intervene early.

I care a lot about this because in my teen years, I know I had cognitive dysfunction, but I didn't feel it as being abnormal because I just thought that's how it was. But then I took a term for the worst in my mid-20s from toxic mold. And I got to the point where I was. I couldn't pay attention to meeting. I knew my brain was failing. I went to the doctor and they said, there's nothing wrong with you. I'm like, no, I can't do the stuff I could do two years ago. Something's really wrong. And I felt when I talk with older people who've been to basically senile cognitive dementia and early stage Alzheimer's, and I've talked to them about what it feels like. I'm like, oh, my God, I know this state. And it's terrifying. I'm not going back. So, I mean, we're going to talk about my brain scan but the idea that I really do have a 20 year old brain on a lot of metrics, I came back from that and I've spent 20 years doing neurofeedback and other neuroscience stuff kind of as a hobby in the anti aging side, because I'm like, I don't want arthritis though, had when I was 16. I don't want the cognitive dysfunction. And so I'm not going back.

No.

But how many people do you see who have brain performance issues who just don't know it?

Nobody's ever been able to measure it. You know, I had a really powerful story. One of the, literally a couple weeks ago, I met one of our partners in Denver and we're sitting there and I have this very high powered, high cognitive functioning individual. He's represented multiple Fortune 500 companies on the legal side of things. And you know, in 2017, he's like, I. My brain short circuited. Yeah, I have no way of describing it. He's gone to Harvard, he's gone to ucla, he's gone to cu. He's been to every, you know, possible facility that he could do to look at things. And he's like, I've no, I have no clue. Nobody can find anything wrong with me.

Yep.

Imagine if we had a baseline scan for him and we were able to scan him and find some things that were, you know, different in his brain, comparatively speaking, to himself. And, you know, just to see the difference in his just overall demeanor between when he walked in and he was telling us the story. I mean, this was a very defeated individual. He's like, I've looked for answers for two years and I haven't found anything. And I walk in and in less than 12 minutes, you're at least able to give me a place that I can start. Imagine if we have that for everybody in the world. If everybody, no matter what happens throughout life, car accidents, you never know. There's only so many things that you can control. But if we have a way to look at people's cognitive function, not only as they age, but as they go through life, we have the ability to hopefully intervene and make people's life better.

When I look at all this stuff that you should have to perform better and just avoid those places. I've been in a lot of those places from a health perspective, and I know thousands of people I've interacted with who've gone bankrupt trying to do this. Because your health is the most precious thing you have. In fact, it's not even your health, it's your Energy. It's the most precious thing you have. And when that's gone, nothing else matters because you can barely wake up every day. And you look at this, there's a functional genomic assessment that we all need. What are your genes doing to you? And then there's the functional bacteria thing, like the viome test, to tell what are your bacteria in your gut doing to you. You need a functional mitochondria test, which Upgrade Labs has, the only one in the world that measures actual oxygen consumption, which is cool. And then you need to say, all right, what's my brain actually doing based on all of that stuff.

Exactly.

And along the way, you might need some vitamin levels, you might need some toxin levels or whatever. But if you know, you have those basic things and your brain works well and nothing hurts, I'm pretty sure I'm doing it right. But if you have everything and your brain still isn't working, you will not know it unless there was a dramatic change. And if it was a slow change, you'll be entirely unaware of it.

Exactly.

And I've talked with a few people, including me. I took a. This is what, two, three years ago? Took a knee to the head, flying through the air, actually, at Burning Man. And I was sure there's a story there. Yeah, you've seen Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?

It was there, absolutely.

And I was pretty rattled, in fact, to the point where I have amnesia from it. And as far as my friend who whacked me in the head, she's probably listening. And as far as I can remember, I won. I just want to say I won the fight, but I have amnesia. So. Wait, did you. Anyway, we have it on video. So I came back. We actually went to the hospital. They did a MRI and said, yeah, you have a mild brain bleed, but it's already stopped. You're okay. This is a meaningful concussion.

Yeah, seriously.

And so I looked at the doctor, and I said, great, so I can get on an airplane tomorrow. Because I could not process what the doctor was saying. I believed what I was saying, and he just looks at my wife, and she's like, yeah, I'm in the emergency room, Dr. J. I got this. No problem. I'll take him home.

We're good to go.

Put him in bed and turn the lights off. And fortunately, I camped with a bunch of doctors, and we had all the supplements, and I was able to have that, plus another week of neurofeedback. I got my brain back. But until I did that, I was swearing at everyone. I couldn't play go fish with my kids, I was completely scrambled. I could feel that. But when I was swearing at everyone, I even sent a cranky email to another big health influencer. I don't remember why I was pissed off. There was something that I perceived, but my perception of reality was scrambled completely. So if something happens, nutrient wise, toxin wise, you're not going to feel it because it's slow, but if it's a smack to the head, you still won't feel it. And I've seen marriages fall apart and it's all brain function. And you're saying, oh, here's a 12 minute mirror, like, oh, there's something caught in your teeth.

Let's look. And if we have a baseline scan to compare, I mean we can talk about some of the studies that we're doing later to show that. But when you talk that word, concussion, it's such a powerful word. Does anybody really know what a concussion is? We know a lot of the symptoms. But what is concussion? It could be, you know, there's funny one of our there's a demographic and a picture of an elephant and everyone's looking at an individual piece of an elephant. Oh, it's a trunk, it's a foot. It's a number of different things that are happening at once. It's a cascading effect. If we're able to look at how your brain is able to respond to signals, we know acutely through P300 that your brain does completely change after something like concussions and or TBIs. Now we have a way to measure it. And if you have a baseline and the data that we've been collecting over the last six years, it'll blow your mind. Pun intended.

Six years of data. Well, one of the things that was really interesting to me is my new book which is called Superhuman, is the hey, here's how I'm going to live to 180. And one of the big things I'm calling the four killers in the book is Alzheimer's disease. And you look at the odds of what's going to take you out when you're old. Well, cardiovascular disease is at the front of the pack, but it turns out that Alzheimer's disease and diabetes and cancer are the other ones. So it's one of the big four. For six years you've been looking at what concussions do for pre symptoms of Alzheimer's in NCAA athletes, right?

Yeah.

Tell me about that.

The pre symptoms of Alzheimer's. Just to kind of explain, there are some correlatory marks that Some literature is referring to there where if you have a mild tbi, I think a new study just came out that a mild TBI increases your risk of dementia and or Alzheimer's by up to 30% I think is what the literature referenced. How do people know? I mean, ultimately that's scary. So we've been in collaboration with a number of different places, but one of them mainly is CU Boulder. And we've been looking at their football program. We've been studying concussion protocol over the last six years, and we've had a longitudinal study that we've been able to study these players and return to play. Protocol, protocol. And what happens is we're able to scan them preseason before anything happens. And then we scan them at a concussive event, and then we're able to scan them at the return to play and at the end of season. And this is a double blind study that we've been able to do. And what is found, it's pronounced that ultimately we're finding that these players are going back to play too early and they've been cleared being via other forms of clearing them, they're like, yeah, no, you're 100% ready to go. And what we're seeing from their brain voltage and how their brain is processing signals, they're not good. Their voltage could be suppressed up to 80%. And that's really scary. And what's scary about that especially is through the end of the season, we may not see that voltage come back. And these are. Imagine four seasons of that. And we see we're seeing such a high spike in cte, we're seeing all of these issues. There's an easy test to be able to do this. And if we can look at your preseason, we can look at your concussive event. And if we can see that your available cognitive resources or that P300 voltage has returned. What we're seeing at the end of the season is that that voltage is still normalized from the beginning of the season versus when these players are going back to play after that concussive event and their voltage still being suppressed up to 40, 50, 60, 70, as much as 80%, that voltage may not come back.

I am 100% convinced that there are some things you can take that enhance mitochondrial function before your hit. And this is based on the physiology of concussion that we understand now around ischemic injury and mitochondrial function. And so it's not necessarily the hit that gets you, it's the inflammation that comes after the hit and then the cell death, particularly the mitochondrial death, which is subcellular things. So if you can enhance their performance so they can actually make a greater voltage that your the amount of damage you would get from that. And there's some pre treatment stuff where there's great literature about it. It's all in the nutrient side of things. So most physicians are unaware of it. But it's like, what were you on when you were hit? One thing would be having even small amounts of ketones present reduces the reactive oxygen species that come out massively. So what I think you'll see is that players who think about what they eat, they don't have pizza, beer and fried stuff before the game. If they get a hit in the head, they're going to perform better. And the ones who take the right nutrients, the right supplements, the right mitochondrial enhancers, they're going to actually be able to take the hit. They're going to see a dip in voltage. You're going to measure it with Wavi, Wavi, Wavi, Wabi, Wavi.

Sorry, no, you're fine.

And then they're going to come back and you're going to see a smaller dip and you're going to see them return to baseline. And why we're not doing that for all of these athletes, I don't know. But I think it's coming and you can prove stuff like that works.

It's getting there. And what excites me so much is we can measure how quickly this is happening. Because like we've talked about, I mean, we're learning more and more about this, whether it's mtbi, concussion, one and the same. Ultimately. How do we know if it's a mild tbi? How do we know that that's recovered in a week or two weeks or three weeks or four weeks or five? You have no idea. Or we've seen severe brain issues that have recovered in a week, but we're able to track it. And that's what excites me so much about what we have the ability to do, is it's all efficacy. Ultimately, that's what it boils down to. We have a way to measure and you can't improve something that you can't measure.

Oh man, you sound kind of like Dr. Amen, who's a great friend. And his SPECT scan was really controversial, going back almost 20 years now.

Yeah, it is 20 years.

And I, I had it done after his first book came out and he was just getting all this criticism and his thing was like, look, I'm a psychiatrist and we're the Only profession who doesn't look at the brain before we treat it. And here's an imaging tool that works. And to this day, he has the largest database of spec scan data. And he looked at my brain back then and said, oh, interesting referral. You have toxin induced brain damage or something. And you looked at my most recent score, it's like it's completely healed. So we know the brain can heal. But when I went to the doctor back then, if I'd have had access, well, they didn't believe that testimony, took it to a normal doctor. But if I'd have had the scan from Wabi say, look, here's my baseline, here's what's going now, something is off. And they would have believed me instead of telling me that it was all in my head and trying to give me antidepressants and stuff. That is, I think 40% of people listening to the show right now have probably faced that. Before you go to the doctor, something's not right. And they say, mm, it's just in your head. What that means is I'm a doctor and I'm afraid that I don't know what the diagnosis is. So I'm gonna blame you. And if it's in the data in the brain, your doctor has to say, maybe I'll order more tests until we solve it. And like, that would change the world.

It can. And we can give them the power to do that. And that is what we have to do. We have to give them the access to this data and it's the education behind it. All right, it's available.

Okay, so now someone's listening to this, are going, all right, I think my brain is jacked. I want to get a wavy thing. You guys just came out of stealth, right? So there's a few clinics, a few.

Clinics have this significantly, if they go.

To a normal neurofeedback guy on the corner, is this the kind of stuff you can get?

I mean, if we're there, obviously as we're spreading, it will be more readily and readily available. There are a number of different practitioners we do have across the United States.

How many cities would you say right now?

I'd say there's a good majority. I'd say, say we're in probably 15 to 20 cities.

Okay. Certainly in LA, we've got it.

Obviously you have an upgrade. You can always go get it done at upgrade.

Beverly Hilton in Santa Monica. I suppose the big thing though is this isn't for people to diagnose. Oh, I have a specific Alzheimer's or brain injury or something. It's to say my brain is functioning well or it's not functioning well. If it's not functioning well, it's time to roll out the diagnostics from a medical facility.

Yeah, and that's exactly. We are not going to be a diagnostic tool. What we are is we measure performance markers of the brain and we know that they correlate with a number of different things, as you and I discussed in your scan. But to me, it's the last piece of the puzzle. You know, at least we can look a little bit further in depth and we can say, all right, what's the issue here? And to me, it's having the ability to have year over year scans. You know, if you're, if I asked you, Dave, how do you know if you're getting Alzheimer's?

Yeah. I mean, in Superhuman I go into what is an amyloid? Like what is a plaque? And there's amyloid or there's plaque, not necessarily amyloid, throughout the body. And anytime there's inflammation on a chronic basis, your body makes basically subcellular scarring. That's what that is. So the fact that this stuff is in the brain, it comes from inflammation. Would recovering, that's essentially scar tissue. So recovering from a hit to the brain cause scar tissue in the brain? Yeah. Would having chronic inflammation throughout the body create essentially calluses? Yes. Are they always markers of aging? Yes. So one of the strategies to live a long time might be reduce plaque formation throughout the body.

We have a really cool study about that. We've been working with a cardiologist in Denver who's just a phenomenal individual. And you can find him on our website and some of the data that.

He'S been publishing, by the way, wavi.com wavimed.com Wavimed W A. Yep, we're have.

Our new website up, which is super exciting.

Okay. And you've got the cardiologist research. Okay. Heart and brain health, how are they connected?

Crazy. I'll say. Heart health with brain performance is what I'll say. And you know, we talk about voltage as well as we talk of the latency or the speed that your brain is processing those signals. And what we're finding, or what Boone is finding is that literally with suppressed cardiovascular markers, brain performance is suppressed significantly. And through his protocol, he's able to improve each one of these markers not only cardiovascularly, but the brain performance markers by up to 40, 50%.

So you fix the heart, it fixes the brain?

No, it's all blood flow.

What does that mean for the guys who think they're going to cut their heads off, freeze them and then be restored?

I'm going to say that's a really not good idea. Ultimately. Maybe science just hasn't caught up yet, but we're going to have to figure that one out.

You might want to get the whole body is all I'm saying there. If you think it's going to come back. Because I think it's a system that's more complex.

It is. And I think the part behind that that just really shows to me is it's, it's wellness, ultimately. It's whole body wellness. And I think you preach this through the bulletproof lifestyle.

Yeah.

And I think that that's so important because people need to look at the whole picture. It's not, you know, people aren't necessarily scared of cardiovascular disease because everyone knows somebody that's been affected by it. But when you tell somebody that their heart is correlating to them possibly getting dementia and, or Alzheimer's, all of a sudden their compliance may, through these doctors, skyrockets.

Heart disease isn't that scary until you say your brain will go and you'll have erectile dysfunction. And then all of a sudden people get real serious about their cardiovascular health. It's amazing.

Isn't that so weird? It's just all of a sudden I want to follow my protocol. And not to mention, if I follow my protocol, I'm seeing my brain performance metrics improve and my cardiovascular metrics improve.

It's kind of inspiring to do that. All right, talk to me about hearing loss and mental functions. There's some cool stuff that I've seen that I've never talked about. What have you guys discovered in the six years of research you've done?

So it's kind of been unique and this is a little bit more of a new category. But part of a P300 wave is actually the N100. And what we see, it's actually how your brain is processing the signal when you hear it. And so we've been doing a little bit of study with a couple of different companies showing what hearing aids do you. And surprisingly or not surprisingly, when your brain is able to hear and or process a signal, the voltage of your brain goes up. And so I think that's really important as just when you don't utilize a muscle, it can atrophy. What happens if the input to our brain is being suppressed because we're not able to stimulate it through hearing loss? And so what they're Utilizing is these companies are hopefully showing that through hearing aid compliance, it's actually boosting performance of the brain.

So your brain works better when you get a signal that it can process.

It's amazing how that works.

It's funny because the voltage in the brain thing at the beginning, the cool fact of the day, we talked about running electrical current through the brain. And that's something that I've done for 20 years before TDCS came out. And I've done some cool stuff with Halo. In fact, they're about to come back on the show. But even before that, it was something called cerebral electrical stimulation. Running a tiny current back and forth between my ears when I sleep sometimes, based on Russian space program sleep research, because, well, like I said, I'm a dork. And I think that that has very meaningful effects on the brain because the electricity is there. The brain kind of has to do something with it which is going to force myelin to grow and things like that. You also could probably cause damage if you're doing properly the wrong things. Sticking one 12 volt battery on your ears is probably not a good idea, but we're teasing out a lot there. But one thing that's made a difference, I believe in my own performance is something that we do at 40 years of Zen and we actually train your brain to increase voltage. So if you have low voltage, there are training protocols where you can just show the brain, hey, dumbass, you're not making enough electricity. And then you, through the force of will with feedback, learn how to increase the voltage so people can walk out of there and they can have measurably higher voltage in the brain than they did before. But you only want to do that if you need higher voltage. If you're already at the top end of the range, maybe it would be dysfunctional. So you got to look at the individual brain and do it. But the fact that you're just getting that in a 12 minute scan is pretty legit. So you could highlight the people like you're running with a half dead battery here. How do you fix that?

Or even if you're not, I mean, there are a number of different interventions that we have a number of different practitioners utilizing. And that's what excites me about a place like Upgrade labs is there's places. I mean, literally, you have so many different interventions in one place and you can measure how every one of those things affects the brain.

We had someone with hundreds and hundreds of millions of YouTube views from the music industry who had a TBI and couldn't perform, who came through and did a series of things, ate all the right stuff, went all in all the mitochondrial resuscitation stuff that we know about. And after 30 days, her brain scan showed that her brain was fine and she could sing and dance again, which was legit. And we didn't treat anything. All we did was say, let's help your body make energy again. Let's let your brain relax. And it's just recovery, recovery, recovery plus mitochondrial enhancement. And then without touching the TBI or even focusing on it, just to let the body do its own healing work. That was profound, and we weren't expecting that result to be that dramatic. So I know that we can fix whatever. Not we upgrade labs, but we as humans can fix all kinds of stuff that's supposed to be unfixable. But having the data is the first step.

The data is the first step. Having a way, like I said, unless you can measure it, you can improve it. And we work with a number of different TBI clinics.

Should this stuff just be in every high school?

Ultimately, in my opinion, it should. I mean, I think everybody that's doing sports should have a baseline scan. In my opinion, it should be in every practice primary care. This should be a part of your physical.

It makes a lot of sense. Look at your blood pressure. How much do you weigh? Maybe body fat analysis and do a quick brain scan. Yeah, I love that. One of my goals is to get neurofeedback in every school in the country. I don't think you should be able to graduate from high school without having done some neurofeedback to deal with the trauma in your brain. But it's gonna take a few years to do that.

We're all on a mission.

And I don't mean just physical trauma. I mean bullying, bad parenting, whatever garbage you got from social media, we can clean that out.

Absolutely.

All right, let's shift gears a bit. I want to talk about my brain because I am a human guinea pig. And we just ran a scan, and I'm going to describe what I saw. I want you to tell me where my descriptions are wrong here, because I know more than the average bear about neuroscience. But you're doing some stuff that's different than what I'm used to. All right, so one of the first things that we did is we looked at what my brain does when you're playing a low tone that I don't care about, and then every now and then you hear a high tone, and then I've got to Press a button really fast as soon as I hear the high tone. So it's kind of a boring test. You're saying that there's nothing, eyes are closed, and it's like. And then all of a sudden you press the button and then you boring, boring, boring, press the button. And so that. What is that one called? What do you call that one?

That's our audio P300.

Okay, audio P300. And then the next one was the flanker one where now I'm staring at a screen and I got to press the button on the mouse says, is the arrow going to the left or the right? When there's distracting stuff again, it's boring, boring, boring, press, boring, boring, press. And so now you've gotten those two things and then you had some things like station with your eyes closed for a little while. And that's what your brain's doing.

Yep.

Kind of simple sounding stuff. What did you get out of that when you looked at the results? Like, how does that work?

We got a number of different things. So what's been. What's really unique about Wabi is how we get data out of a traditional EEG and ERP and how we're able to process it. And like we talked about at the beginning of the episode is, you know, our software patents to be able to pull that data. So the first thing that we look at is that audio P300. And that's how well your brain processes signal, as well as how strong, strong your brain processes a signal. And what we get out of that data is invaluable. I mean, it's literally this is how your brain is processing available cognitive resources. This is how much your brain is able to donate to that task. And what's happening is your brain is hearing this really common tone, and then it's something completely randomized. And your brain goes, oh, that's different. And so we're able to measure that. P300 and P300 has been measured since 1960. It's not anything new, but the availability to get it is. What's so new?

It's the fact that signal processing and analysis has gotten dozens of orders of magnitude cheaper than it used to be. The gear that we regularly use now, that's 20, $30,000 either at upgrade labs or at 40 years. Some of that stuff would have cost a million dollars 15 years ago. And it's ridiculous. Just the quality and quantity of data you can get. You can even analyze the signal. There's no way you can store it.

No.

Yeah.

And that's what's astonishing. And that's a whole other conversation that obviously we can have later. But we're able to look at that. We're able to look at how your brain is processing things visually. We have those cognitive evaluation tests that are great for aging. And so we're able to have year over year comparisons. Say that you do go back to Burning Man. You get hit in the head again.

Ain't gonna happen.

Yeah. At least we can scan.

I'm wearing a, like a really thick helmet the entire time. That's probably a good idea. Yeah, it's just part of my costume.

No, that's good.

It's a helmet and nothing else.

It's really. That's a unique.

Oh, I can't unsee that. Just kidding. No shirt cocking.

Yeah. And so we're able to generate that report instantaneously. No processing. It literally comes right to you. And you can present to the patient, your client, whoever it is.

Okay. Now what did you see? That was abnormal in my brain? Like, was there broken stuff?

So I want to start with every brain is different. We're looking at an individual.

You're special too. Okay.

Yeah, every brain is different. But we're getting a baseline for you. We do have a normative database that through data, we've been able to kind.

Of correlate to how many brains are in your normative database.

It's continually growing. Hopefully, by the end of the year, we'll have the largest database in the world of brain performance. 10 million?

1 million.

No, we're not in the million. We're hopefully in the hundreds of thousands by the end of the year.

Wow. Okay. Hundreds of thousands of brain scans, hopefully. So how do you compare to hundreds of thousands of other people? Yeah, it's kind of useful data.

I mean, it's 10 years of data. And so we're getting to that point. We're not there yet, but hopefully through all of our practitioners and partnerships, by the end of the year, we should be able to be somewhere near that number. And ultimately we're able to compare individual you to basically your peers. And we have a normative database. So for you, we look at something like your P300 latency. You were lightning fast. You were very, very quick. How fast does your brain process that signal? And the reason it's called P300 is it happens around 300 milliseconds, and you were actually faster than 300 milliseconds, and your voltage was fairly good as well. And so each brain is different, and we're able to compare that against yourself on a year over year basis. Ultimately, if we see a giant drop. Okay, what's going on here? Is this an indication of something? What do we need to look at? But if you're not measuring it, you don't know. I think I feel slow.

Yeah. Having that measure is really interesting. So if you walked into a doctor with a quantified thing, they might say, oh, let's look for an onset of thyroid dysfunction, which is an easy way to lower voltage throughout the body. If you don't make enough thyroid hormone, you were exposed to too much work stress and you had a virus or a bunch of food inflammation. It turned on autoimmunity. By the way, that's a chapter in game changers about how that works. But that sort of thing.

I'm in that chapter right now. I'll throw that out there.

That's funny. But this actually happens. So then you. You go to the doctor like, something's wrong. My voltage is low now. Like, oh, something really is wrong. In fact, now I'm thinking about moldy. Mold will reliably lower voltage if you're exposed to toxic mold in your house. So moldymovie.com, you can watch it for free. But there's a husband and wife who are in the movie, and they're both physicians. And she's feeling like garbage. She's wrecked. And she, being a doctor, says, oh, if you have 10 symptoms, it's always psychosomatic. It can't be anything else. So she thinks she's nuts, except her body temperature is 1 degr too high. So she knows it's not all in her head. And they biopsy every organ in her body and just, like, rip her apart. And her husband's like, I feel nothing. My body's completely fine. And they're living in the same house. And finally they figure out it's mold, and they clean out the mold, move to a new place, and her biology comes back. She would have seen the voltage drop without the one degree. So everyone out there with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and all those things.

Crazy stuff.

Do you see less voltage in their brains?

Well, I mean, I have a clinic that is specifically studying chronic fatigue and.

Fibromyalgia and I. E. Toxic mold poisoning. 90% of the time, that. Yeah.

And the results that they're seeing, I mean, especially with chronic. We talked about latency being a little bit. What we're finding through the data or what the literature is showing is that that P300 latency is correlating to more chronic symptoms.

In other words, they hear the sound and it takes them a long time to press the button because the reaction time is too low.

Oh, it's so slow. And not only. I mean, if we can look at now, we can look how supplements, pharmaceuticals, every one of those things affects the functionality of the brain. And to me, that's astonishing that we have that power to do. I mean, it's invaluable.

That is super cool. All right, so my response time for an auditory potential was what, 280 versus 300? Yep.

You were 280.

And 260 is like the fastest anyone could.

240 is about the fastest that you're going to find a P300. Our CEO and David Oakley believes that 240 is about. Because there's also a P200 wave and they can start to blend. So 240 is typically where we see, you know, the fastest that a P300.

And this is a professional video gamer kind of brain or like, who has reaction time like that.

You've said it ranges from a number of different individuals. I wish I could look at somebody and tell you that they're going to have a fast brain. I have no clue. There are just certain individuals that process things extremely quickly. There are also certain individuals that have extremely high voltage. I mean, we're talking 30 plus micro volts, which is just unbelievable.

There are people, I know some of them. You use wireless mics on them because they fry. Wireless mics. And they shut down watches. I mean, like, there really are people like that. And this is not fantasy land. No, it's real people where their AV crew just knows. No, we use a shotgun mic on that guy because wireless is going to fry.

I'd love to have his brain scan.

Actually, you can't. I bring those people 40 years in and they white out the scanner. Seriously?

Absolutely. Oh, that's amazing. That is crazy. So, you know, through the data, we're finding that people kind of sometimes fall on one end of the spectrum. They're either really high voltage and a little bit slower, or they're really fast and a little bit higher voltage. But then you have individuals that are both. They're extremely fast and they're extremely high voltage. Do we know what that means? No, but we're finding. Yeah, it might be Professor X. We're finding out. Right.

So we saw that there's that. How does that correlate with aging of the brain? So there were two scores. I remember. I don't remember what they Were. But you said I was just running like a 20 year old. I'm like, all right, what, what were those?

Yeah, so we looked at your physical reaction time. So physical reaction time and brain reaction time are two separate things. Our CEO likes to call it the reptilian brain. How your nerves are processing things as well as then when your brain is actually processing that signal. So your physical reaction time was very quick. I think you were 260. And the fastest that gets is really 220. I mean, it doesn't get much faster than that at all.

Because what's average on that?

Average is a hard database to say. It depends on age. Right, because it does slow with age. For your age, I think your average was what, 290 to 360 roughly.

Okay, so it was pretty, it was pretty fast.

So you were fast, but it was.

Like a 20 year old.

Basically, you were a 20 year old, roughly. Yeah. Compared to the normative. And your brain speed, again was 20 year olds. And so I think, I think this stuff works.

Guys, go bulletproof. I'm just saying. All right, Sorry I had to say that.

But I think to me, you know, I come from the health and fitness industry originally, and it's all about lifestyle. Look at the bulletproof lifestyle that you live. You're taking care of your whole body. Now we have the data that we can show. All right, let's look at what this actually does to the brain.

You've also plugged in some AI, and this is a big area of interest a lot of people don't know. In my other life as a tech guy, cloud computing guy, my concentration in my bachelor's degree was in a type of AI called Decision Support Systems. We weren't allowed to call it artificial intelligence because the promise of AI would never be met. So the department was afraid to call it AI, so they made up another name for it. But essentially it's how do you use computers to make decisions for you? I've been involved in that field for a while, and what's happening now with machine learning has always been the big dream of big data and data warehousing and all this stuff. You guys, in one of the studies that I read about when I was prepping for our interview with you, could perfectly predict prior onset of Alzheimer's by three years, 100% of the time.

It's basically a correlatory. So AI. What, I mean, let's start here. What is AI phenomenal at? It's phenomenal at image recognition. So a human brain, we look at a House, and we know it's a house. We look at a dog, we know it's a dog. We look at a car, we know it's a car. Is it one variable that makes it a car, or is it 1.2 million variables that makes it a car? It doesn't really matter.

Pattern, pattern.

It's pattern recognition. And AI is phenomenal at that because AI can look at one variable and a million variables. Us as humans, we think in the Baconian method, we think, you know, here's a hypothesis, let me test it, let me see the results, and then I'll get a conclusion. Computers don't think like that. And that's what's so astonishing. And so what we did is we wanted to take some data sets and are there images from a brain scan that we can create that represent a image of X condition or whatever it is? And so the first place we started is we started with ptsd. One of our. The guy that does all of our AI, in his opinion, PTSD is something that probably creates an image. And our CEO thought it was total.

PTSD is an image recognition problem. I am absolutely certain of that. And so having lived it and worked on it with neurofeedback and all. Yeah.

Is there whether it's one variable or is it a million variables? Somebody that has ptsd, is there an image that their brain is creating that we can recognize? And so we tested it with car accidents. We had 79 individuals. Some had been in a car accident and had ptsd. Some we thought that were maybe just trying to get insurance fraud. Some individuals had not. And what we found with less than six seconds, now we collect four minutes of data on every one of our scans. Less than six seconds of data, we're able to identify exactly the individuals that created an image of PTSD from it.

Wow, look at the power. Were you showing them a video of a car crash or something?

No, it was just. Literally, we just had them on their typical brain scan. So whatever in that EEG that we were collecting in the ERP was displaying the same image for the computer of ptsd. So then we wanted to correlate that. Can we create this for Alzheimer's? Is there a path pattern that the computer can pick up with Alzheimer's? So we had a three, six years, roughly, we had. Unfortunately, we had individuals that we had their scans prior to Alzheimer's as well as development of Alzheimer's. And was there an image before the onset of Alzheimer's that the computer could pick up? And it uses cluster data and it grouped three years prior to onset. It grouped all of the individuals that were creating a common pattern in their brain with basically 100. I mean, really, it's close to 100% accuracy. Then you could correlate it to the three years or the onset of Alzheimer's. And it was showing every one of those individuals early. A lot of experts believe that Alzheimer's and dementia are a 15 year disease.

I think it's probably a 60 year disease.

Yeah.

So does this mean that if someone gets a WAVI brain scan at their doctor or at a clinic somewhere and the results say, hey, you fit this cluster, they should immediately go to a brain doctor and say, diagnose me?

No, I mean, this is the long term vision of wabi, right? This is what we need mass data for. But inevitably, hopefully, what we're able to do. I mean, think about the power behind this. Of all the images, there's an image for pain, I'm assuming there's an image for migraine, there's an image for headaches, all of these images. So maybe in five years when you come in, okay, maybe your brain is producing the image of ptsd. Do we know why? No, but what are the interventions? What are the prescriptions that can be written from lifestyle, from supplementation to diet, doesn't matter what it is, what are the interventions that we can move that needle away from that cluster? Same thing with Alzheimer's and dementia. Can we move that cluster away from the pre Alzheimer's? So in five years, that big data becomes next to invaluable for helping people realize what, what's happening in their cortex.

Isn't there kind of a dark side to this?

There could be.

I mean, right now there are certain governments, and I've talked to the top AI scientists from different governments looking at what we could do around human performance, human health. And the two big areas where we have crazy data are facial image recognition and gait analysis. And that's mostly for monitoring populations who haven't consented to monitoring for the most part. And I'm talking about you, nsa, by the way. Are you listening? Oh, wait, of course you are.

Of course they're listening.

Anyway, sorry, I do not consent to listen to this podcast. Not that you care. It's relevant anyway. So where did I get all my tinfoil hat just came down now I look at that and I say, all right, if you have brain scans from 100,000 people, I mean, could you say, I don't want to run the Alzheimer analysis cluster, I want to run the troublemaker Analysis cluster and just go in and restrict those people's rights to buy grass fed butter and collagen protein so that they'll become essentially a smaller and weaker image of what they could be.

Yeah, so ultimately everything that we have is an odd anonymized. We have no correlatory data to who it is, no matter what, instantaneously the data does get anonymized so that we don't know who it is. All we care about is the metrics behind it. You know, we're not looking for individualized patterns.

Well, I mean, you say it's anonymized, but I mean, the clinic does get a report.

Only the clinic has that data.

So you don't store the data for people to log into your cloud and look at it.

We store the anonymized data. We store on the individualized clinics. They have all of their patient data, we have all the anonymized.

Oh, that's cool. So you got to go to your doctor, get your scan and all right, that's probably less convenient for patients, but it's like 23andMe has been used in ways that law enforcement likes that 23andMe users don't necessarily support.

No.

And in this case you're saying, all right, you go to the anonymous data, even if you could say the brainwave of the killer looked like that, you're like, well, we don't have any relative information there.

The clinic does have the data. Right. We want to make sure that all of our practitioner data is backed up because technology has issues. We know that. Right. So we always want that data protected. But it's backed up on that cloud server. Only when it goes into our Wavi database, it's completely anonymized. We have no correlatory to where that came from.

All right, I do pay a lot of attention to what's the future of this, because you could do some pretty negative stuff. And what about a judge says, you know, I'd like to have a Wavi scan of your brain. I'm going to order one against your consent, against your will. And I'm going to do that because if you don't consent to it, I'm throwing you in jail. If you do consent and you don't have whatever markers I don't like as a judge, then you go free. But if you have the bad man marker, I'm sending you to jail. Isn't this not necessarily from Wavi, but just as a brain reading brain scanning, Isn't this like kind of the Dark dystopian future of brain science.

I have no idea. I have no idea if there's an image that we can create for that. To me, that is so complicated on where that even gets. I think you have to look at so many more data variables than just a brain scan to be able to correlate any of that.

The reason I'm asking is that already AI is doing sensing algorithms, so a lot of people don't know this.

I did not know that, actually.

It's frightening. So a lot of judges saying, well, we're just going to use this AI system that is a black box made by a private company that determines the likelihood of recidivism in this person based on a bunch of variables. And then based on that, it tells the court, hey, here's the likely best sentence for this person.

Oh, that's astonishing.

It's freaking horrifying, to be perfectly honest. And it's the same sort of thing where if you get pulled over 50 years ago, the cop would take a look at you and be like, is this person actually a likely threat? And is this person a known member of the community? And whatever else. And yes, it opened it up to unconscious bias and bad things. However, judgment to do good was also there.

Right.

And now we've removed all the judgment and it becomes like a robotic interaction. And I'm a little concerned that that AI side of things will move into brain scans. And have you guys looked at lobbying legal protections? I mean, what are you doing to make sure that that future doesn't happen? Because, I mean, granted, I run a neuroscience institute, right?

Yeah.

So I'm also talking to myself here, but, like, what are you doing for that?

We're taking every precaution that we can. I can truly say that we really are taking every precaution to anonymize, protect patient data.

The anonymized bucket is pretty cool.

It's really important to us to make sure that that stays and. And this is out to help people. This is ultimately to give people a way to measure how their brain ages, to measure how their brain is performing, and to look at their performance metrics so that they can either improve upon it, or they just have a baseline for their whole life that is invaluable information for individuals.

It's precious knowledge and data.

It is.

And there will come a time. In fact, we're right now in the third longest period we've ever gone without any constitutional amendments. And the last one was, like, around the time of the Civil War. So it's about time that there will become, at least in the US Some probably constitutional protections for data privacy.

Right.

And I'm in full support of that happening. And when that happens, my guess is that your genetic data and your brainwave data and all of your other health data will be constitutionally protected, so it can't be used against you. And it should only have a functioning society.

It should be. But there's. I just want to spin it to a possible.

Oh, it is a positive.

There is, because we can talk about that, but we can also talk about all of the beneficial things that we can do. All of a sudden, we create these images, and our practitioners can write prescriptions to help people based on data that they've never had.

Really? That's cool. But the really big bright side is you can take someone like me who weighs 300 pounds and has a brain that's not working right, and I know damn well it's not working right, and I can show the data to the doctor and hear the words, oh, you're not crazy. Because it's that. That irritates people, and it's completely unfair. You don't blame fat people for being fat. It's a biochemical problem. And you don't blame. People's brains aren't working for their brain's not working. It's not an effort. It's not everything. You know what causes low effort? Low voltage in the brain. You couldn't generate electrons to create willpower. And there's actually studies of mitochondrial function and willpower and voltage generation because voltage comes from them. So blaming the patient here doesn't work for brain stuff, and it doesn't work for obesity. And they're actually intimately tied, right?

Extremely tied.

That data, it's precious because it shows you that it's not all in your head. It's not. And that releases the guilt and the shame. And now you're like, oh, I can take action on the hardware problem, but if it's a you're a bad person problem, you probably can't take action on that and you'll die. About person like, that is not an okay sentence. That's why I spent a lot of time hacking human body, because it's kind of cool.

Oh, extremely cool.

All right. You spent a good amount of time looking at brains. You understand brain aging and things like that. How are you doing? How young is your brain?

I got a pretty good brain, I think.

Yeah. How old are you?

25.

You're 25. All right.

I have a very, very fast latency. We're in debates about my latency, actually, at the home office, I've put up some numbers that have theoretically broken what we think neuroscience is.

So you're a world record brain performer.

I don't know. We're looking at it. I put up a P300 latency the other day of a 218.

218. And I was 280.

Yeah, 280.

All right, give me a week.

Give me a week. But I don't know. Right. So we have to shift through that data because theoretically, is it 240? Is it blending with a P200? It is fast. But I'm somebody that has a significant series of concussions in my life.

Okay. There are a group of people who've been on the show who have brain superpowers as a result of injuries. T.S. wiley came on and was like, how do you absorb information? She kind of thinks like I do in terms of systems biology. And she's like, oh, it's easy. I was 20, I had a tumor in some part of my brain or a lesion. And that part of the brain, when it healed, it grew twice as big. And now I can just look at research papers and just drink them in in a way I couldn't before. And my wife, she has a chunk of her brain. When she was 10 or something, she fell out of a three story building. And until she had her Dr. Amen Spect scans, she didn't know this was missing. But she can do simultaneous translation in multiple languages, which means you can hear one language and type or speak the language as you're hearing it.

It's astonishing.

It's an unheard of skill.

That's unbelievable.

Like 1 in 20 something million people can do that. Well, the visual or, sorry, the auditory processing part of her brain is missing. So her brain took over as a distributed function across the whole thing. So she just has superpowers as a result of that thing that happened. So there are people like that. So maybe your brain is tweaked in a good way.

I don't know. I don't know if it's good. I don't know if it's real. We're finding out. I do. I have typically high voltage. I do have some really high areas. But to me, it gives me assurance. Like, because I did grow up and I had a lot of concussions, I played impact sports. To me it's always like, okay, did those have a pronoun effect on my brain as I've aged? To me, I'm looking at my scan and I know my voltage is good. I know my processing speed is good. We've measured a number of different NFL players that have retired. And the reason that they've retired is they want to make sure that their brain is functioning okay. And they've scanned and their brain compared to a normative database, they're like, this is exactly what I needed. This is exactly what I needed to show me that my years of playing and my years of head hits, I'm still okay. Or if it's the opposite side, what can I do to improve it? And at least we have a way to measure it.

All right, you're the youngest person I've asked this question of so far. And since I switched to the data set for Superhuman, my book on longevity that's just coming out, I switched from the human performance question set that formed game changers to how long are you going to live? So given your current age, given what you know about brain neuroscience, how long do you think you're going to live?

I think with proper lifestyle and me really being able to measure all of my metrics, I think I can get to 120.

Are you kidding? People already do. People already do 120 without any of that crap. That's the best you can do?

I'd love to be 150. I mean really, that would be phenomenal. Realistically, that would be phenomenal. But I think science is going to continue to grow.

Look at that. Let's see, 120. So in the next 95 years, including all the work you're doing, you think the best you can do is what we can earn today?

You know what, you're right. You're right. So 150.

All right, good deal.

150.

So I'm at 180.

That's your 180.

And I have 20 years of hard living. More than you do. Like to be honest, my biology was probably more trash than yours, right? 300 pound thing and all. I seriously think, okay, I know we can do 120, right? And I'm pretty sure in the next hundred years we'll get a 50% improvement. You're 25, man. Most people your age are going to live to at least 100. Most of you, at least in the developed world, assuming we still have soil and air.