Ep. 107- Calm Your Life with Muse Co-Founder Ariel Garten

This is the You Winning Life podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence. Each episode we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights, and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes. Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed LMFT 🎗️, marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, and certified entrepreneur coach, Jason Wasser. Okay, everybody, so this next conversation that already started, and we're just rewinding everything, is going to capitalize on absolutely everything I love. It's psychology, it's neuroscience, it's mind-body healing, it's technology, it's entrepreneurship. This guest is really just tapping into everything that this podcast stands for. And I have Arielle Garden. She is the founder of Muse, which you may have seen popping up on your Facebook or in your advertisements because they do really good stuff with that. But I'm also, you know, someone who bought this machinery, this, this incredible mind-body meditation, brainwave tracking, sensing machine that looks like a Wonder Woman headband for those of you who are into that. And I'm just so excited because we're already talking about using neuro-emotional technique. And if you guys have been listening to the show in the past, you know my passion and love for NET and mind-body medicine and changing the nervous system. So first of all, hi, thank you so much for hanging out with us today.

Hello, it is my joy and pleasure to be here. I'm super excited to dive into this.

This has been like, as I've been brainstorming of where to go, what to talk with you about, and listening to other stuff you've done, and I'm just like, and obviously our organic conversation that was the pre-conversation is now turning into the actual episode. I'm like, for people who can't see the video version, I'm grinning from ear to ear. So I, I like, I don't even like to even start with your bio, right? You neuroscience and therapist and international clothing line and then studying Parkinson's disease and neurogenesis, which you're going to get into, and, you know, all the science stuff, but combining like that with entrepreneurship and Silicon Valley and holy crap, like, where do we start?

It's been a very, very fun adventure. Yeah, that's absolutely true. So my, my real passion is understanding the way that people's minds are constructed, the stories that they tell themselves, the way these stories were built or, you know, encoded at various points in their life, and then how we can change or shift those narratives and understanding, heal those stories so that we can actually live free in our minds and free in our lives because we are also defined by the, you know, it's going to say the crap that went on when we were kids, but we're also defined by the narratives that we build as we go through our life and the narratives that we accumulate. And they can often create a prison in our mind, the prison of I'm not good enough, or, you know, when the person says this, it means that to me. The trauma that we, you know, tiny t trauma that we've held on to. And so I'm really fascinated methodologies that allow people to observe their own mental space, be able to understand the process of their inner workings and then provide methodologies to undo those things that don't serve you.

When did you know that this was your thing? This was your purpose? This was your passion? Like, when did that start coming to awareness? And when did you decide, "I'm going all in on this"?

So it's sort of been a tapestry. You know, I started— my mom was an artist, so I started out thinking that creativity and art was the most important thing. And this is how we created stories and narratives and, you know, visual experiences experiences that allowed you to transform yourself in some way. Like you see a painting or you see a work of art and you see the world differently. So this idea of like being able to transform your perception was fascinating to me. And then I was also really interested in science. So even in high school, I had my first job in a research lab and I really wanted to know how the world worked. You know, how do, how do these molecules interact to create stuff? And then when I got to university, I became fascinated with the brain and the recognition that, okay, you know, how the world works is cool, but how we work is really fascinating. You know, how How is it that we can be an organ, a brain, that is a bunch of chemicals moving along a concentration gradient? Like, literally, that's what it is. We are chemicals that move along a concentration gradient, and somehow the movement of these chemicals on that gradient allows us to have will and volition over how those chemicals are moving on their concentration gradient. It is nuts. Totally nuts.

It's insanity. One of my last interviews— I just started a new batch since I'm so backed up with interviews— and he said, Humans don't realize how awkward we are, right? In other words, not like awkward as in like social, but like our whole life experience. If you put it into context, like it's, it's awkward and we're just trying to figure out how to get to the other side of awkwardness. And when we have a language or we have a lens or a frame, right? Because a lot of times we get stuck in language and how do we put words to what we're experiencing and feeling. A lot of times that's just how our rational brain interprets it. But like you're saying, like the mind-body experience, right? There's, there's a distinction between those two, but we kind of like have to filter through this very nat— like narrow narrow, narrow stream to say, I think this is the best way I can describe it. And then we take it to therapy and we may not even be right in our own experience of that narrative. So I joke with my clients all the time with a big grin on my face. I say, I really don't give a crap why you're here. I care more about the story and the beliefs and the assumptions and the expectations you're carrying about the things that you're calling your problems, right? What's the Jenga pieces under that that's holding that upright? That's the level I want to play at. I don't really care that you're fighting with your spouse or that you have anxiety I care, obviously, I really care. But I want to hear what your story is that supports that. And let's play at that level, right, the meta in that regards. And then let's dance to the 10,000-foot view and then see what's going on there. So using all of this stuff, so when you started doing the research, was that at the point when you were doing— was that the Parkinson's research or that was later on?

So I dabbled in research in a few different areas. But what really came out for me, that the thing that grabbed me was that I was starting to work with brainwaves as something that both— the artist in me loved brainwaves— something that both had a kind of emotional, sort of numinal quality to them. There are these things that sort of are invisible that come off of our head that we can potentially translate into something that would become understandable. And so, I very briefly looked at using brainwave activity for epilepsy detection, sonifying it, but then very quickly after that started working with Dr. Steve Mann. He's at not a scientist, he's the inventor of the wearable computer. And he had an early brain-computer interface system that he was using, so an early BCI machine. And we started to create concerts where you would put a single EEG electrode on your head. And by tracking, at that point, it was so basic. This was early 2000s, this is like 2001. We were just tracking shifts in alpha or beta waves, and we would then sonify those to create concerts. So people could literally hear the sound of their own mind. And you could have multiple people in a room working together to get into the same brain state create a harmonious experience. And so, you know, metaphorically beautiful, right? Not necessarily super practical, but metaphorically beautiful. And I looked at that and said, this is completely nuts. Like, we're literally able to gain access into our mental self in this very different way. And so I got together with my totally incredible co-founders, Chris Amini, who is one of Steve's master's students and just the most brilliant engineer and artist and spiritualist you'll ever meet, and Trevor Coleman, who's like the business guy. And the three of us set about to bring this technology to actual use. And what we, what we recognized was there's a few processes that people try to learn that are really difficult to understand because they go on in your head. And there was one that we could actually help with, and that was meditation. So when you meditate, you need to be in a focused state. Your mind begins to wander and you have no idea what's really going on in your head. There's no little coach or guru sitting inside your brain telling you. And that with Muse, we could probably come up with a methodology to let you know when you were focused based on your brainwave state and let you know when your mind was wandering based on your brainwave state, and then make the process of meditation more obvious and actionable for people.

Yeah. And one of my favorite things about that, when I started using it, it was so difficult. And I remember mapping it out, um, like, I mean, going back and reviewing the data and seeing like, okay, what's going on? Because I have meditated before. I've done, um, silent meditations. I've done meditation retreats. But it's such a different thing, like you said, when you have something that's kind of recalibrating you along the way. So it becomes like a biofeedback, right, tool to— but it's so subtle because there's the birds chirping or that, right? That's the— there— that when you're really in that state of flow or you're really focused, and it's so subtle and, and so gentle that it really does help you figure out, okay, like, I know— and maybe do you want to explain the process first, and then I can kind of give my experience as a user of this?

Sure. So how you use Muse, it's a slim little headband. It's kind of like a little Fitbit that you'd wear on your wrist, but instead it's tracking your brainwaves on your head. If you want to see see a picture of it, you can go to choosemuse.com and see the thing that we're talking about. How it works is it tracks your brain and it gives you real-time feedback during your meditation. And the metaphor we use is your mind is like the weather. So when you're distracted or mind wandering, you hear it as stormy. And as you bring yourself to quiet, focused attention, it quiets the storm. So it's this really beautiful audio feedback that literally sounds like it's your own mind you're listening to when your mind is wandering. And when your mind is calm. And then if you're able to maintain your focused attention for 5 seconds or more, you hear a little bird tweeting. So that both becomes the reward for being in that state and a way to undermine the goal-directed nature of this whole thing, which we can talk about later. And so during the experience, you're getting the real-time feedback, and then after the fact, you get your scores, your charts, your graphs, the things that show you moment by moment what your brain was doing so that you can have another level of reflection and insight.

So I know while I'm using it, like I was just saying, is I started trying to figure out, like, you, like, you're— there's a duality that I mean, maybe this is just me. I don't know if this is anybody else's experience. But where I'm in the meditation, I'll hear the birds start chirping, and then I lose the birds. And I'm like, okay, what did I do? Did I move— my eyes are closed, but did I move my eyes to the left or right while my eyes are closed? Is it my heart rate? Like, so you consciously and then unconsciously will recalibrate during this experience. And as you use this, like anything else, as you— it's a muscle. As you use it more and more and more, it becomes more and more natural. And the cool thing, like you were saying, like the— when you start losing focus, the actual whatever sound setting you choose, whether it's the waterfall or the drumbeating sound or the city sound, like it'll get louder or quieter based on on where you're holding in that moment of meditation. So you're always having some— there's multiple layers of feedback that are going on. So it's really cool to see. And then there's challenges and points and there's a gamification of it. So have you seen— I mean, so typically in meditation, it's you commit to a time, you do it or you're not doing it, right? What's that old guru joke? The guy goes to his guru and he goes, I don't have time to meditate. And the guy goes— the guru goes back to him, you don't have time not to meditate. So So, and you give reminders. I know every night at like 12:30 in the morning, I'm like, you haven't used your Muse yet today. I'm like, oh yeah, yeah. So I have it right before I go to bed. But the gamification of this, how has that really— because you're seeing the raw data, you're seeing the numbers of people who are using it, how many days in a row consistently it tracks all of that. What have you noticed between this and maybe other platforms or other meditation experiences, whether even maybe doing it before yoga or after yoga or Pilates, right? Or someone by themselves? Like, what's— what the gamification, the stats, the numbers, what is that showing from your end?

Sure. So what we're seeing is that people get better at their meditation. So people come into Muse from all sorts of different levels of experience. We have people who've never meditated before, and maybe they don't even want to meditate, and their doctor told them to do them, or their wife told them that they need to do this. And so they start with this thing, and they're like, what is meditation? You have all these misconceptions, and we're able to take, you know, we see people who go from these crazy, you know, graphs that are all over the place because their mind is wandering to subtly and slowly being able to be like, oh, I really just want to be in the state of calm. And what we're doing is we're just training your brain. So we're training both your conscious mind. You are learning actively, consciously, like, oh, when it's stormy, I probably want to bring my mind away and place it when it's calm. And then you're also learning subconsciously. So when you're able to stay in your focused attention and that little bird tweets You— we are just rewarding your brain. Yep, stay there. Yep, stay there. It's Pavlov's dogs. It's, you know, very standard conditioning. The bell rings and you want to do it again. And so what we see from our graphs is that graphs that start off very wavy with lots of thoughts over time get calmer and calmer and calmer, and people are able to spend longer and longer in these zones.

So are you seeing people— I mean, because I know there's what, over 200 or so different research articles connected to this, this machine, to the, to the Muse. What are we finding longitudinally for people from the beginning of your studies to now that how this is changing people's experiences with life, with their health, with everything like that?

Yeah. So there's been thankfully a lot of studies with Muse. What we see in the shorter-term interventions. So there was one 6-week study by Baycrest Hospital, 10 minutes a day for 6 weeks led to decreased stress, obviously increase in calm, a decrease in self-perceived and self-reported symptoms like headaches, pain, nausea, and an increase in reaction time on Stroop task. So in the Stroop task, you have a word and a color, but the two conflict with one another, and we're able to see that people are able to give faster answers in times when there's conflicting information and they have to make a choice, so that like, you know, quick reaction time in an emotional situation improves. In another study by the Catholic University of Milan, they looked at a regular regular meditation practice while also listening to nature sounds, so that was their control, versus using Muse over a month starting at 10 minutes going up to 20 minutes. And there they found the same findings plus also more cognitive improvements in go/no-go task. And then they saw a persistent change in the EEG of people who were using Muse versus the controls. So, people who were using Muse actually had an EEG shift that seemed to be persistent throughout the day indicating they were in greater states of calm and focus more often.

One of the— I remember hearing a study about meditation that there was, and I can't remember who it was that did it, I think it was somewhere in the Midwest of America where they did a study regarding people who were lifelong meditators, 20 years and up, um, and people who are new meditators that maybe have done it a few times here and there, or but didn't have a consistent practice, or it wasn't part of their life. And the question was, how long will it take before their brain waves sync up. In other words, how long will it take for your brain to adapt or your body to adapt, uh, to becoming considered like that? And I think they found that when it was done consistently, I can't remember the exact number, but it was very quick. It was within like a certain amount of weeks or a very— or a certain amount of months. So this idea that like, well, I haven't been doing this for a long time, these people have been doing it for 20, 25, 30, 40 years. The misnomer is that I can't get there and I can't get there for 20 years. So why start now if I'm already in my 40s or my 50s or my 60s? I'm not going to get to reap the benefits. But we do see that within days, within hours.

Oh yeah, so there are studies that show, not with Muse but in meditation in general, like a brief intervention of an hour and a half can improve GRE scores significantly. Dr. Sarah Lazar at Harvard does a lot of brain MRI scanning studies, and she showed that just 8 weeks of meditation can increase the density of your gray matter. Real neuroplastic change, like that you can— significant enough to see on an MRI, an increase in density in gray matter. And yes, you don't need 20 min— 20 years to be a long-term meditator. Even 5 years will give you significant benefits of a long-term meditator. So in a study by Dr. Eileen Lüders, she looked at, uh, the aging of the brain and the changes between novice and— or non-meditators and meditators. And she defined her long-term meditator as somebody who'd been meditating for 5 years or more. And she saw that long-term meditators had on average brains that looked 7.5 years younger. So an investment of just 5 years for 7.5 years and, you know, improvement in your aging of your brain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the kinds of defining features that you tend to see are increased thickness in the prefrontal cortex, so the part of your brain associated with focus, planning, you know, higher-order processing. You tend to see a decrease in the size of the amygdala, so that fight-or-flight response. In shorter-term meditators, you see a decrease in activation, and longer-term meditators, you can even start to see the structural change of a decrease in size. You can see an increase in the hippocampus. Now, this is not necessarily because meditation increases the size of your hippocampus, but because stress decreases the size of your hippocampus over time. And so, meditation seems to have a neuroprotective effect in that way. You can see increased connectivity in the corpus callosum, so the parts of the left and right brain, the left and right brain, the two hemispheres seem to be connecting more effectively. And then, you can also see an increase in projections from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala, indicating that the prefrontal prefrontal cortex is better able to regulate the amygdala. So what this practically means is, you know, if the prefrontal cortex is the parent who's like, I understand logically what's going on, and the amygdala is the child who is freaked out by the shadow on the wall, the prefrontal cortex is able to come in more rapidly when the child is freaking out and say like, hey, it's okay, you can be quiet now, it's all good.

And that's the world that we were talking about before, or before, about neuro-emotional technique and using the physiology of stress with muscle testing in Chinese Chinese medicine meridians with the applied kinesiology approach to change that nervous system, right, where we're using— when the rational brain gets lost and the physiology goes into fight or flight, that survival instinct, how do you get back to a neutral state? And we're finding with the research of NET that the— that amygdala has that effect with, uh, with the positive effects from NET in a very quick way, including with fMRIs and, and all the other stuff. And those of you who've been listening or see the other episodes, you can go back to Dr. Walker or Dr. Andrew Newberg or Dr. Dan Monte's episodes. Those who are doing all the research on this, especially out of Jefferson Medical in Philly. Like, this stuff is like really— because I know people are like huge into like EMDR and EFT, right? The tapping modality. But I haven't seen anything that goes as deep with actually changing it, but also from a rational perspective of understanding what's going on and why you're responding to certain traumas. That's not that those modalities are insane and incredible and we should all access that, but if— but I'm finding that if you want to take it a step deeper and figure out really where the original story is, really what the original events are, what the narrative of the trauma is or the narrative of your self-limiting experience, that NET really does get there. And we do have the science to back it up, which is they want it to be the most clinically researched mind-body integrative modality out there. There. And he came out of chiropractic. So you have the medical side, like, what do you mean chiropractic? That's not real medicine. But it's— but the fact that like the integrative medicine department at Jefferson is now— they're now teaching this into the entire medical— it's a credit course now to be trained in the medical program.

Wow.

Yeah. So that's a whole— wow.

Sorry, my mind was just blown. Yeah.

And now— and which is really cool, it used to be a program at Jefferson Medical. Now it's its own department on par with oncology, radiology, pediatrics. So it's really Yeah, and so really cool stuff is happening in this world where back in the day we only knew about like Andrew Weil stuff or like, you know, it's been this explosion and it's like your muse is kind of coming in from a different angle in my way because it's— you can actually see changes. So when you're going to therapy, right, your background also as a therapist, we can only measure like, okay, I'm feeling better, I'm feeling less stressed, my life is happier, my relationships are happier, I'm better, whatever, but we you can't really quantify that. And then you have the biofeedback world, which you may have so many fly-by-night experiences, or people that aren't adequately trained, they might like buy a machine and like— because I know in Florida there's no law for licensure for biofeedback. So, so someone can, right, and someone can take Muse and open up a private practice just using Muse, which is kind of cool. But it also like— but they don't know really what's going on. They can just say, oh, I noticed. So I feel like Muse is like this incredible tool, especially when there's all clinical research behind it and your background as a, right, neurology and psychotherapy, um, and then bringing it with the other side just really does make this product stand out. Um, when it comes to trauma, has there been anything that you guys have seen on trauma-related stress using Muse?

That's a good question. So we have a lot of clinicians that use Muse, uh, psychiatrists and psychotherapists that use it in their practice, and psychologists psychologists, therapists. Dr. Michael Day-Care, for example, uses it extensively. He's been running a study, I believe, on specifically sexual trauma using Muse. But I haven't— I don't want to speak out of turn because I don't know any of the clinical results from the trauma, stress trauma research with it. I just know it's being applied and, you know, logically it makes sense. We're teaching you the skill of being able to observe when the trauma thought comes in, to be able to move your mind elsewhere, and then to teach you to calm your own physiology. So in Muse, we have the neurofeedback where you're learning to change your relationship to your mind and your thoughts, and you're learning that actually you don't need to get caught up and engaged in these thoughts. You can be rewarded for moving your mind out of thinking and just into the present moment. And we know the effects that being in the present moment have in order to improve the experience of trauma. You are here in the here and now, as opposed to in the past experience. And then we also have exercises for the heart, the breath, and the body. So we have a PPG sensor that tracks your heart rate, It can also track your breathing and then a movement sensor that tracks your body. So, we give you— in the heart exercise, for example, you're hearing the beating of your heart like the beating of a drum. And so, you're able to hear when your heartbeat increases and when your heartbeat decreases. And this tunes something called your interoception, your ability to sensitively understand your internal state. And research has demonstrated that people who are high in qualities of interoception also tend to be lower in qualities of stress because you're better able to observe your own body and then bring in an intervention to help you calm it. And in the breathing exercises, we teach you box breathing, balanced breathing, breathing techniques to help calm the physiology. So you're able to learn on multiple levels, disengage from the thought, you know, observe when the body's becoming ramped, bring in the breathing exercise to calm the body. And so you can start to sort of have the mind-body cycle move into a more positive space instead of ramping into the anxiety to ramp into the calm.

I love it because when I'm not able to be in person— so during the pandemic, I went fully telehealth and I just opened back up to see clients. I closed my office, I moved, right? I'm working from home and I just started seeing clients again outside my building where I live on the grass. I bring down two chairs, you wear a mask, I wear a mask, we're good to go. And now thankfully most people are getting vaccinated here. And I know people are coming over the border from where you are too. One of my friends just flew from Toronto because her family's family owns a place here in Miami, and she got— she's flying back and forth for the vaccinations. Um, so Canadians buy a place in South Florida. Um, so seeing the stress, especially during this pandemic, um, at the beginning it was like go, go, go, go for me. Like, it was an overnight— I remember, um, it was the middle of March of 2020 before, like, things were just ramping up. And I was doing a retreat in Asheville, North Carolina with a buddy of mine for a bunch of entrepreneurs. And overnight, I remember it was Saturday night that I sent an email for Monday. The office is officially closed. We're not— a Zoom session is still happening, but here's how you're gonna find me, like you and I are talking right now on Zoom. And no, I was using Zoom for podcasts, but I wasn't using it for like, you know, for telehealth. So it was like this overnight pivot. That was it. I never saw a client again. In my office. And then 3 months later, my lease was up. So I packed up my office and fully moved home. So now that I'm starting to see people for neuro-emotional technique outside, to see the stressors that, right, it's not just the additional life stress. But I remember like what I was going through, because it was go, go, go, go. Like I went into full service mode, which is my default mode. We can get into the Enneagram personality types in a whole nother conversation. But I realized like how numb and stressed out I became just out of fear because no one knew what was going on.

Yeah.

How you can get this. Like, it was like opening your front door at that time was like life hazardous. And I already knew a bunch of people who were unfortunately passed and whatever. So losing my crap while trying to keep it together during the day, wasn't sleeping, wasn't really feeling great. And I realized that I stopped using Muse. Like, I just— for some, I just fell by the wayside from during that time frame. Like, and it's literally sitting here next to my bed, and it's literally on my phone. And I'm like, oh, like, it's so simple. And it was such a simple intervention. And from that night— and, you know, the tricky thing about the app is if you don't catch it within the period of 24-hour period, it loses the day. So it looks like you skipped a day, even though I didn't. I might have done it at 2 AM in the morning instead of 11:30 at night. But I still haven't missed a night. So since that day, and I'm trying to— I wish I can find it quickly, but it's since whatever time that was in May or June, I haven't missed a day of meditation. And I know that's contributed to the other things that I've done, but mostly to have that every single day. It's a bare minimum of 5 minutes on the app, whether I'm using the headband or not. Where I'm just using the time meditation, which you can download the app and just use the time meditation to just see how frequency and consistency and how it's something where I even know there's been a few nights where I went to bed and like, holy— and then I either get the reminder or I'm like, holy crap, I didn't meditate. And it's just literally just the bare minimum of 5 minutes. And there's been times where it's felt like it's been a minute or 30 seconds, like Oh, did the bell ring already? And then there's been times where I know that I so was out of sorts, where that 5 minutes felt like 15 minutes. But it did refocus, it did recenter. So I know, like, especially with what we're going through right now, and yes, some parts of the world are opening back up, gyms are opening back up, people are getting vaccinated. And it depends on where you live. If you're in Canada, I know it's a little bit more difficult right now than the United States. This, this is something you don't need to buy a Peloton. One at $1,500 or $2,500 or whatever it is to do this, right? This is a, the top cost is what, $200? Like the whole package is affordable.

Yeah. $200. I don't know how much it is, but it's like $250. It's not much.

Right.

Right.

Right. And then you get the discount code and you get the case and it's still $250. Right. So there's all these cool things. And I know you guys always have cool stuff coming out about it. And there's, you know, I just saw recently there, you're sending out the, now there's events and activities that are happening with researchers and stuff that's going on. So walk me through the creation just from the entrepreneur side, because I know we just talked a lot about the science. The entrepreneur side also fascinates me. So how did you, from getting these ideas and participating in the, and, you know, the, the projects with the music and the art to actually forming this company and, and the, you know, going through the different headbands and figuring out what you wanted and then creating the app, what was that process? What was that process like for you?

That process was very long and enjoyable. I mean, everything was so exciting about all of it. So we started in early, in 2002 with the art projects, letting people hear their own mind. And then I said, clearly we need to be building something out of this. And it took a lot of years to figure out what that was. And along the way, we thought we were going to let people control computers with their own mind. And we're like, actually, that's useless. As cool as it is, it's not actually making humanity better. I think it's honestly easier to turn on your light with your hand than it is to try to do it with your brain. It's— if you talk about awkward, this is really awkward. And we kept sort of querying like, what is the highest use for this? We know there's so much value here by being able to make an aspect of your brain tangible, visible, actionable, but how is that really valuable? And then in about 2009, we shifted from the recognition of wanting to control technology with our brains to a deeper understanding that it was actually about allowing people to control their own minds. And every time we told somebody to, "If you just focus, the light will just get brighter," what we're actually doing was teaching them to focus. And for the first time, letting them see the tangible, you know, physical manifestation of their focus and then go like, "Oh, I could just do that. I could actually shift my own state and make that valuable and meaningful." And that's how the idea of the Muse as a meditation tool was born. But now this is like, you know, 2010, 2011. And meditation still was not mainstream. You know, we'd go into VCs because we had to build hardware, so you need money to build hardware. We'd go into a VC's office and we'd show them the technology and they'd be like, this is incredible. We can do so many things. What's the killer app? And we tell them with a straight face, meditation. And they'd be like, yeah, right, flaky hippies. We'll see you later. Sayonara. And it was really 2013, when meditation was on the COVID of Time magazine, that was the turning point. And we were able to, we went to this conference called Wisdom 2.0 in San Francisco that was the meeting of technology and meditation. And we got our first investment right there on the spot from Chad Menteng, who was the person who built Search Inside Yourself, which is really Google's meditation and leadership program. And he said, if you guys can do what I think you can do, you may solve world peace in my lifetime. So that's a big— that was really big. That was like, okay, and he, you know, gave us the check. Like, literally, we were in the Google offices. There were 3 kids from Toronto.

That's amazing. That's a big moonshot right there, right?

Yes, yes, that was the biggest moonshot you could, you could give to us. And, you know, Trevor and Chris were— Trevor was a practicing Buddhist, so he really understood the value of meditation. Chris has has just always been incredibly spiritual, intuitive, and understand— and like self-understanding. So the idea of creating a technology as an engineer that can promote the self-understanding was fascinating to him. And so we really created Muse as a meditation tool. And then we had to walk down the path of how do you give somebody feedback about their own mind that doesn't feel intrusive? Because as much as this is a technology tool, we didn't want it to be about technology. This is about the human. This is about your own experience. And if you get caught up in the technology, then we had lost because it's not about the technology, it's about you and your own self-understanding. And so Trevor came up with the metaphor that your mind is like the weather. When it's wandering, it's stormy. When it's quiet, it's calm. And we're able to create this experience that could actually bring heat, let you hear the storm and let you quiet the storm. And once we were able to do that, then the seed of Muse was born. And then we went forward. Raised lots more money from folks in Silicon Valley and LA and New York and Hong Kong. And the technique that I was teaching, the ability to quiet your own mind, to get out of your own way, to put, you know, negative self-talk about your limitations, you know, give it the backseat and throw it out, was really helpful in letting me walk into a VC's office on Sand Hill Road, you know, people who give out tens of millions of dollars and say, "Hi, I'm a..." 5-foot-2 entrepreneur from Toronto with long hippie hair, please give me millions of dollars for my great idea and succeed.

I can appreciate all of that, especially the 5-foot-2 therapist here in South Florida. So yeah, I see you and I'll raise you that on that mindset. It's so mind-boggling that like when people, and I hear this all the time and I love like, you know, when my clients come to me, whether it's a therapy client or coaching client, like I have this great business idea. I'm like, that's awesome. That's a wonderful a hobby, but that's not a business idea, right? And then to separate something that's already provable— what problem— like, I always like want to just challenge them, like, what problem are you truly trying to solve? Who's, who's already doing something like that out there? Because you don't have to necessarily reinvent the wheel, but you might be able to capitalize already on the research and, and stop trying to do it yourself. Who are the people that you can partner with this on to move to the next level? Because a lot of people, especially now that this entrepreneurship thing is like the thing now, right? Yeah, it's, it's funny how much it's even seeped into the therapy world. Because finally, like, therapists like, oh, I can actually charge money instead of being like, no, I need to help everybody at this, like, you know, $12 an hour, right? It's interesting how that has finally creeped into people helping find their value. And I do believe this from a therapeutic philosophy, that entrepreneurship, when done right, is a self-actualization movement when you have core values. Values when you decide to, right, when you have a problem that you're wanting to solve that you are uniquely positioned or have the experience or have the thing that you've gone through that you're like, I can help other people fix this. I can help because, right, you went through this. I think that's really the angle, the beauty of entrepreneurship. So I'm wondering like when you were, you were already doing this research with them, was who kind of came up with the idea of like, okay, we need to now make this a product. We need to know how can we make this a leverageable, financial, bankable thing. How did that come about from like, okay, we're having fun, we're doing research, but now let's talk about VC stuff. Now it's like, we're like, what was that mindset? Because people want to go from like, I have an idea that's in that, you know, that's in the ether to like wanting to meet in front of a venture capitalist. And there's like 14,000 steps.

Yeah.

Between that. So what can you walk us just for a few moments, like walk us through that little middle process, because I feel that's the part that most people think is like, no, I'm just gonna pitch an idea and have a pitch deck, and I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna give them my idea and they're gonna buy into it. And I know like David Meltzer, I don't know if you're okay, because he's huge into like neuroscience, right? So okay, so like I've seen people do his pitches and like, that's a great idea, but like there's nothing, right? There's no— you're missing these steps, right? Or Shark Tank or whatever it is. But David's really good because he's into them, you know.

And I've been a judge on David Meltzer.

Okay, so there you go. Okay, so there you can see, I should have done my research— that much more.

Actually, no, I haven't. I have not been a judge. I've been on his show a few times, but not as a judge.

All right. So, there you're right. So, we got to make that happen. So, what's that little nugget that people are missing from your story of like what you had to walk through, who had to present what ideas to who until you really felt that there was something to show up with and to make sure to ask for?

Sure. And it really is not, I've got this cool thing, let me stand in front of a VC. They will laugh you to the bank. You know, it's just not going to work. So you really have to understand, as you articulated, Jason, what is the problem that you are uniquely solving? You know, how is this problem going to be solved? How many people are bothered by this problem? How much are they willing to pay to solve this problem? You need to go out and demonstrate it yourself. It can't just be an idea. You know, we had to make lots of prototypes, demonstrate that it worked, go out and do user testing, demonstrate that people actually could solve this problem with this device and wanted to solve this problem with this device. You have to figure out your go-to-market plan, which these days is Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. It's all just on Facebook. Online ads, and you have to really understand the unit economics. So for us, that was quite complicated because we were making a physical device that needed to be manufactured and that we had to design, that we had to, you know, design for manufacturing, that we had to get the supply chain sorted out for, that we had to understand the unit economics of moving it from China to ship it to Canada and all the tariffs and all of the details, the warehousing, the ship, you know, the sending out from a warehouse. Are you warehousing at Best Buy or at Amazon, et cetera, et cetera. Et cetera. So there are a lot of details that I was entirely unqualified to figure out, but I had sufficient amount of belief in myself and what we were doing and the validity of it and enough early proof points to be able to bring on individuals who actually did know what they were doing. So, you know, I was lucky in Chris, he was able to be the chief technology officer and really design the technological stack and design the software, design the, physical hardware together, he and I, as, since I was a fashion designer also, and the million things I've done, you know, we were able to design something that really looked cool. We worked with an industrial designer to actualize those ideas. We did an endless amount of user testing to ensure that this thing was going to be comfortable and functional and work in people's heads. We, so in Toronto, there was a company not far from us called RIM that you've probably never heard of, but they created a device called the BlackBerry that you've heard of, though it's sort of long. Still exists. Their stock just, yeah. But the BlackBerry in, you know, 2008, '09, '10 had just started tanking because iPhone had come in. And so they were releasing thousands of employees. And so we were able to pick up people who had just spent the last 5 years building BlackBerry devices, physical hardware in China, doing the go-to-market, doing the manufacturing, doing the sales globally for it. So we had like 5 individuals from BlackBerry that we hired. Because they understood going to market with hardware. You know, as we bought in one person, the next person would bring in their friend, the chief legal officer, you know, and so we had people who understand, you know, contracts and retail sales and all of the details of it. And then I went to our local incubator, actually started in 2008 at the incubator, and this was before incubators were a thing. You know, there was just one of them in Toronto, it was called MaRS. We were one of the very first clients and they really taught me how you pitch. They taught me all of the structure of how you go and you create your company and you create, you know, the business relationships that you need to and you create your pitch deck. But like the pitch deck is the last step. You actually have to have a business behind it that works. And we schooled ourselves really quickly. Trevor, my other co-founder, was so smart and so just able to quickly understand the process of, you know, how you really craft a business. And we had, you know, very, very silly silly, very, very silly spreadsheets that said things like, well, there's 1,000 Best Buys. And if we sell one per store per week in 1,000 Best Buys, you know, we're going to be billionaires. And very quickly, that has to come down to that simple, right? It's never, ever, ever that simple. You know, when we actually got into Best Buy, we sold probably, you know, one per every four stores per every three weeks. And that was like a huge success. And we were in 20 stores. And there's huge fees associated with it. Insane fees associated with being in a retail store. And so, you know, there's, there's, there's a lot of detail that you need to understand. But with a flexible mindset, with a willingness to recognize what you don't know, with a, you know, compelling mission that people wanted to get on board with— people, people cared about bringing this to market. And that's how we were able to bring in these experts who who could work with us and support us and engage us as we went down that path.

One of the struggles I find with my coaching clients is the, when do I decide to spend the money on hiring either someone to bring in as staff or to consult with someone on the outside versus just trying to find the free advice? What would be that little bit of advice regarding that decision, right? It's like, well, I can wait and I can do it because I had this idea of like leverage out as much as possible, hire out as much as possible because you're going to get there faster. It's going to cost you a little bit on the front end, but that will get you to a higher, you know, uh, solution faster versus just trying to get the free advice or trying to get the insight or saying like, who can give us the best discount on this legal, uh, whatever. Like what has been some of the experiences you've had with with that and some of the decisions you've made along the way with those type of experiences.

Sure. So I mean, at first we needed all the free that we could get because we had no money and I was just funding this out of my own bank account. I had been a practicing therapist prior, so I had a little bit of, you know, I had a business that generated a little bit of capital that I started spending for this. We obviously tried to get all the free advice that we could and we needed to. We had a gazillion interns back when you could have a volunteer intern. In Canada, you can no longer have volunteer interns. Everybody needs to be paid. But 15 years ago, whenever it was, we had a legion of volunteer interns from the University of Toronto who were coding, who were engineering, and they genuinely learned. Like, they learned very quickly and a whole lot, who were doing some, you know, the science and the research for us. It was just whatever we could. And then Mars was really helpful. So, you know, my first piece of advice is go to an incubator because incubators are free. They might take a little piece of your puzzle, But if it's a good incubator, they will really help you understand the scope of your idea and understand how you very quickly go out, make the simplest, cheapest prototype, test it, ensure you have market traction, and then really put you in the position to demonstrate that you've got something.

Yeah, and I know that people are always afraid, like, well, I can't give up a piece of my pie. It's my idea and it's my brainchild and all this stuff. And the idea that that like it's better to have a percentage of something than zero of nothing that's never going to take off. And, and the idea of like a goal without action steps is just a dream. So unless there's implementable things, and if you're already like, like you said, you were working, you were, you were working as a therapist, you had some capital. But if people are like, I don't have the money to fund this and it's just an idea, and how do I make it happen? Like, you do need partners and you do need people that are right, you are, that are aligned in solving that same problem. Problem, or people that help other people from the financial side solve that problem. But I think that's like the big thing that we get so— and I see this in small businesses and family businesses— that like with the trust factor is not there. And I get it, today's society is very, you know, it's hard to trust. But in general, the idea of like, I can't let anybody know the secret sauce because they'll steal the idea, but that's where you spend the money on an attorney to get an NDA and to really make clean before you share your ideas with, with other people. And there's ways of protecting yourself, but you do need to consider who's the right people out there to partner, or who's already doing something like that, that maybe right off the bat they might just buy your idea or bring you in, or who knows. But that can happen.

Yeah, I mean, nobody really— nobody buys ideas. Ideas are free, right? Ideas are completely and totally free. What you have to do is do the incredibly hard work to prove out your idea. Make the prototype, try to go find clients, try to go and sell it. Will somebody buy this? And can you get it as cheaply as possible to some version somebody will buy? Because nobody is ever going to buy an idea. And also, people don't steal ideas. So this is really interesting. It's incredibly common to say, I have an idea, and I don't want to tell anyone because I don't want anybody to steal it. But it's incredibly difficult to go from an idea to reality. I mean, if you came to me today with 50 ideas for Muse, I probably could do close to none of them because we're already— we have 50 people, we're a big company. You'd think like, yeah, we could just steal that idea and do it. It's like, first of all, we probably heard most of the ideas. And second of all, we are already on a path. We know what we're doing. We have our 10 deliverables lined up for this year, and there's no way that we can change course to steal your idea. Even if we wanted to, even if it seemed like a great idea, there's like 50 other competing priorities inside our own company that we're trying to move forward on. Forward with. And even if we tried to like play around with your idea, we probably wouldn't come to market with it. Like, that's like a 3-year process for us and something we had to really care about. And if we really cared about it that much, we'd bring you into it because you'd be the expert on it. So don't be worried about stealing your ideas because bringing an idea to reality is so hard. You, you know, you're an entrepreneur. Like, if you have an idea, you, you obsess about it, you think about it, you spend all this time and all this energy. Because you care so deeply. Somebody else is not going to care to that degree. They're not going to spend the time and energy. They're not going to make it happen unless they want to partner with you. And you really do need partners. It's so hard to do something on your own. If there's somebody that you happen to find in this world that says, I want to do this with you, you know, say yes, because that's the way that you move forward.

And is there any red flags? Or because I know, especially as people are starting off in this entrepreneurial journey, there's so many things out there, especially now with social media and now we have Clubhouse and TikTok and, and all the things. And everybody— I love it— like, anybody can rent a, rent a Lambo to prove that they're successful, right? And that's the whole social media shtick, uh, with all the fake gurus that are out there. So, you know, to have someone that's provable that they've done this, how do you— how did you guys discern who to partner with versus not? Like, what are some of the red flags and what are some of the absolute green lights we should do this with somebody?

I mean, somebody who has a track record that they've done this before is, is key. We were really lucky through our incubator, you know, they were able to give us connections to mentors that were able to help and support us for free, and people who are there just to support our best interest. So, you know, incubators are a great way to go because people who are mentoring in incubators are typically there to either support people or to look for ideas that they can partner with. So that's a great route. And then in terms of larger company engagements, 'cause we early on had some engagement with Bose and across the board, it's rough because they, somebody engages with you, you hope it's gonna go somewhere, 99.99999% of the time it doesn't. So it's like, oh my God, I've got this meeting I'm meeting with XYZ big company, like, this is incredible. They're going to just, you know, buy my company or take my, you know, license my technology. No. Out of the, I don't know, 50 meetings we had, we've actually had a few that have gone great. There is one company that actually we partnered with to create a pair of glasses with the brain sensors in them. Cool. Yeah, the Lowdown Focus that came out in 2017. So there are partnership opportunities out there that really work. But in order to get that partnership opportunity, you know, we'd already been in market for years. We could already prove that we could do something extraordinary that they, they really wanted to have inside of them. And it took probably 2 years for that relationship to develop and another year for the product to come to market.

So as we wrap up, what's next? What's the next generation of this company? What, what, what, what should we be— those who have not yet purchased this product? And, and I, it was so just, I don't usually have this opportunity to also be be, you know, to interview one of the founders of the company of a product that I do stand by, um, that I've been personally using before I even reached out to you for, um, you know, over the last number of months. But it's, there's always an evolution, right? And you said you had your 10 deliverables. Is there anything that you can share with us that we could be, for those who have not, who are just hearing about this now and they haven't yet heard enough to buy in, or those who do have the product and like, okay, cool, what's, what's the 2.0, 3.0, whatever it is. What are some of the things you can share with us that consumers can expect from this company and from this product?

Sure. Sleep, sleep, sleep, and sleep. What we noticed was that people, when we talked to them about their Muse usage, they would say that they were using it at 10:00 PM to help them fall asleep. So we crafted a new device, Muse S, that's currently in market. And it's a comfortable headband that you can fall asleep in. It gives you beautiful guided meditations and biofeedback experiences that lull you into sleep. And then it tracks your sleep through the night. And EEG is the same sleep tracking tracking that they use in sleep labs. So it really is essentially a sleep lab in your own bed. And on top of that, we have built a whole host of interventions to help you fall asleep and stay asleep that will be coming out over the next, you know, 6 or 8 months. So once you buy one of the devices, you get all of the upgrades that come along with it. We push new upgrades every 2 weeks or so. We're always updating. So when you, you know, people who bought the Muse S when it first came out, we only had the go-to-sleep, then we gave them the sleep tracking. Now we give you the deep sleep intensity, so you can actually see the depth of your deep sleep. And we're always coming out with new features that come on top of the device.

So who would know— how, how would one decide which, which one of the two they should buy? Like, what would lead someone towards one or the other?

So the two products that we have now are Muse 2, and Muse 2 is meditation only, um, and it gives you the real-time feedback on your brain. So meditations for the mind, the heart, the breath, and the body, um, and that's an awesome experience. Muse S is the comfortable headband that you can also fall asleep in. So Muse S gives you everything that the Muse 2 does plus all of the sleep intervention, so the go-to-sleep and the sleep tracking.

Awesome. So yeah, so those of you who are looking to spend just a little bit more for that upgrade, it's definitely— I have the Muse 2 and it's awesome and it's simple to use and you can't screw it up. It syncs right away with your Bluetooth directly to your phone into the app and it's plug-and-play. You just hit— you pick a, you pick a program you want to run, you pick a time frame, and you just hit start. Start, and it walks you through everything, which is really simple. So I haven't yet used the Muse S, but it sounds super amazing. So as we wrap up, what's the best place like people can track you down? I know Instagram and social media and TikTok and Clubhouse and all these cool things. So where can people track you down? I know the app, uh, right, for choosemuse.com is the website. I know you do speaking engagements and You've done some other stuff like that, right? And a podcast.

Yeah. So you can find Muse at choosemuse.com, C-H-O-O-S-E-M-U-S-E dot com. You can find myself. I have a podcast that I co-host with Patricia Karpus for my company, and it's called Untangle. So you can find that by Googling Untangle podcast. And it's wonderful. We talk to all sorts of brain and meditation experts every week. And then if you want to find me personally, you can find me on Instagram. @arielsmusings. A-R-I-E-L-S underscore musings.

Awesome. So everybody out there, again, this is my favorite. It brought together everything: alternative medicine, psychotherapy, neuroscience, entrepreneurship. And, and I'm just— number one, I'm just so excited to finally meet someone like a product that I like, I've been personally using and invested in, that has personally benefited from. So I want to thank you, one, for you and your your team for creating something so cool, but for also taking this time out to share everything that's been going on on your side of the story.

Oh, thank you. It is my joy and pleasure. So nice to meet you. Thank you.

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