Transcript of a YouTube conversation between Moha and Josh Trent about emotional regulation, neuroplasticity, and the Mendy device. Moha shares personal background (childhood trauma, parenting hesitancy, therapy) and frames emotional regulation as a form of strength; he describes Mendy as a tangible tool to increase prefrontal cortex blood flow and enable self-control. The discussion links breathing/vagus-nerve practices, real-time neurofeedback (compared to Muse), and research (e.g., a Sweden study on violent offenders) to the idea of training the brain like a muscle.
Chapters
I heard recently that the ultimate superpower that a human can have, I don't remember exactly where I heard it was. Emotional regulation. Yeah, right. It's, it's that ability to stop yourself from shoving somebody's face into a urinal like that. That is actually more strength than actually doing it. Right. Like, there's something, there's another level of strength above being able to be the guy that does that. That makes you the guy that has the ability to do it, but doesn't.
That's right.
Because, you know, so for me, I, I, I've had to learn these things in my adult life. It's funny because I tell you, my, my mission is to have, to enable Mendy. Being able to help 100 million people. That's my job. It's unrelated to money. It's, it's a goal that is just kind of like my life's mission now. And then the next thing that I've set out for myself, which will get into, like, the more personal side, is, you know, the reason why I'm 43 and I haven't had kids yet is because I've always felt a lot of it comes from the trauma from just not having parents that knew very well. Like, you know, my dad, who passed recently and who I, I loved a lot. You know, he used to, he used to joke like, I don't even know what schools you guys are in or what. And it was a very real thing. It's just like a very macho, Libyan guy thing. It's like, I don't do that. Like, what? And he'd, like, joke about, like, men that change diapers and stuff. And it's like I've kind of, like, I've kind of gotten myself to the point now where I feel that I am worthy of being a parent. Like, I would be better than them. So it's like, it hasn't been about resources for a while. Right. But to me, it's just been about now I feel that I have the capacity to raise a kid better than I was raised because I don't want them to have to figure out the shit that I figured out and go through an overdose and a war and 50 other thousand things. Right. And obviously my prefrontal cortex being able to fight that amygdala, you know, is, is kind of like what has made me be able to arrive at this because I had enough money to have kids at, you know, a few years ago, before Mendy.
Yeah.
You know, so it's, it's very, very powerful. The prefrontal cortex controls everything. Use like, a physical analogy. If you have a torn bicep and I start screaming at you that you need to do pull ups, you might. My intentions are good. You might understand that, yeah, pull ups are going to be good for me. You just don't have the ability to do it. So for me, Mendy is more about having the ability to do things. I went through therapy and I had this incredible therapist. Her name is Brigitte Flensburg. She's unbelievable. I love this woman. And she helped me a lot to understand why I did a lot of the up things I did and why I reacted in the wrong way and why I would lose my. If somebody would roll their eyes anywhere in my vicinity and stuff, and all sorts of stuff, and little Moha and all this. But it didn't give me the ability to control my behavior. So for me, that is kind of like what Mendy brings. It's a very physical thing. It's a very tangible thing. It's. Yes. It's like telling an alcoholic, drinking is bad for you. If the alcoholic is lying on the street and they see that I'm staying at the Four Seasons, the alcoholic probably wishes they were staying at the Four Seasons, not sleeping on the street in their own piss. The problem is they don't have the ability to stop drinking and go get their together. And to me, that combination of things. That's why I don't believe that there's one thing that fixes anything. Mm. It's the combination of things that make the whole.
One of the things that fascinates me about the neuroplasticity element is that our brain is literally plastic. Like, that thing trips me out when I think about, like, if you heat up plastic, you can mold it and shape it, and our brain is basically warm plastic. People forget people.
We.
It's so easy to forget about that. And I'm like, wow. So if I take a device, like, I used to use the Muse for a long time, and then I stopped using it because Muse was kind of like my training wheels to meditate. And so I've actually been sharing with people like Mendy is both hardware and software, right? Because you know what's interesting is that when you get this real time feedback. So for y' all that don't know, we'll put it on the screen. Right now you can see there's a handheld device. You're getting this video game element from the visual cortex, which goes into your brain, which then utilizes the blood flow to the PFC and what's really cool about this is like, I've actually used this thing. I've shared it with buddies and it feels good. So that's the biggest report card that I could say for anyone else is like, when I'm focused on one thing, whether it's like a gamified little nodule on a screen, I'm not thinking about other shit. And when I'm not thinking about anything else, it becomes really, in a way, like an active meditation, where instead of me just sitting and going, okay, I'm going to focus on letting go. Which is really hard for people. Which is sometimes why I say, you know, if you want to breathe, come with us at Breathwork IO, because breath.
Work is for people that can't meditate. But I'm really curious how we can combine the specific breathing practices with the Mendi. Because essentially. And you please share. With this blood flow increase and the different. I think it's microscopy that goes in and actually measures the blood volume increasing in the pfc, which, again, during times of stress, shuts off. Could we also use the vagus nerve and the enteric nervous system to spike even more blood to the pfc? And then how can we see that unfolding in times of stress? When the kids are screaming, when the dude cuts me off in traffic, when I'm upset with my partner, whatever it is, I can see this literally heating and molding the plastic in the brain. And that's what's most exciting. Like to me if, you know, you Talked about the 80s when my mom's manic bipolar. So if she had this, if I had this, I'm the only one in my family that hasn't taken SSRIs. Knock on wood. Like, hopefully I'll never have to. But it's in our epigenetic expression that my family has to depend on certain things because genetically we're wired in this way. And I think people can relate to this. So the short question for my long story is, how is this going to help us? Like, how is this truly going to help us in the brain, mold that plastic so then when it counts, when we're under the stress, that we can respond in a loving way.
Well, it's about having control. For example, it's about being able to flex your bicep at will. Right? The problem is that. And there's a study that's being done in Sweden on violent offenders, on teenage criminals. Like the worst of the worst kind of like the. The rough, rough, rough. And the one thing they all have in common is that they have a lack of oxygenated, you know, blood flow to the prefrontal cortex. They don't have enough oxygen in the prefrontal cortex. So, yeah, being able to control that, being able to tap into these things at will is an incredible, powerful skill to have. It's a life changing, it literally is a different life. The person that can turn that off and walk away from a problem and the person that can't, they have very, very different outcomes and very different lives. Right.
Yeah.
That's the difference between know, being awarded and celebrated for achievements versus ending up in prison. Like, it's literally like that, that you're talking about breath work, you're talking about physical exercise, you're talking about all these things. They all add up. Right. But what I will tell you, and you mentioned Muse, for example, which I think is great, you know, it's like they're all, It's a good starter. It's, it's, it's. I, I, I, I, I've never, people get very surprised that I've never talk about any company out there. I'm not an expert in the field. There's a lot of people that know a lot more. You know, the people that I have interviews with and people that you guys all know this, this space so much better. I'm not like a hardcore biohacker in that I'm the guy that knows all the wearables and knows all the technologies. I'm not that huge of a reader. But what I will tell you is that to me, the closest thing to Mendy would be the squat, like the squat rack or the bench press, or you could even say the treadmill. It's one of those things where by itself it doesn't do anything, it's just there and you need to do the work. So basically, as opposed to, for example, Muse or any of these, you know, these products which can help you feel better, they can get you into a meditative state. There is a benefit to all these things and I'm a big fan of anybody that's building anything that's going to help you have a better day and have a better life. But what we do is like we've just created a barbell and we've said if you lift this weight every single day or if you run every single day, over time you will be stronger. And being stronger is the difference between saying, baby, please sit down and beating the out of your kids, which us with the way that we grew up, I think we know that very, very well. And I think that might be kind of like part of my obsession with this, because, you know, at some point, it's like, yeah, maybe I wouldn't have gotten the beaten out of me as a kid, you know, if somebody could have snapped their fingers and increased, you know, the blood. The oxygenated blood flow in the prefrontal cortex of the person beating me.
Yeah.
You know, so it's. It's one of those things where it's. To me, I see things in a very basic way, like, in a very. Almost like the way that a caveman would see things, but it's, you know, be a caveman with access to the smartest people and the best people. When I took the job as CEO of Mendy, I never wanted the job I like. Honestly, I thought it was a joke when they asked me. When Rikkard and Sammy asked me to take the CEO job, I had actually proposed that we offer the job to one of the highest people up at Twitter. Check out some of the videos on this screen that are perfectly curated based on the video you just saw. Make sure you follow me, and I'll.
