 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Saki and we are at the transformative technology conference We are now sitting down with Boris and Mike from Conscious. What's up guys? How's it going Alan? Thank you for coming on to the show and talking to me appreciate it. Good to meet you. Yeah. Yeah, it's such a pleasure I'm excited to talk about this this so-called This wireless biofeedback system that can help increase state self-awareness I'm really excited to talk about this Before that, let's talk about who you guys are. So how did you guys even get to the point that you're at today? I Think maybe Mike could kick us off with that one. Cool. I'll start so about four years ago I was an entrepreneur working at Lulu lemon in their tech department and Basically, I ended up leaving there because it was less meditation and yoga and too much work so I ended up becoming an entrepreneur and deep dove into two specific kind of Jobs or industries one was romance publishing. So publishing books about romance. I didn't tell the pink shirt, you know Yeah, yeah, yeah, I honestly know nothing about that industry. It's just business. I became one of the top romance publishers in the world at one point And then I dove into e-commerce and ended up being one of the top Facebook marketers in the world I was spending about 30 to $50,000 a day on Facebook advertising And so I made a lot of money in that and now Here's conscious and essentially the vision of conscious came to me as I was meditating with Boris down in LA I think at the time about eight months ago and I had this vision of really just Liberating people on all levels and what that means is paying people to essentially meditate and be rather than do And so this is our passion project and now we're working on it full-time. So okay, okay, cool. Cool. Boris. Let's hear about yours I have a lot of questions. Yeah So yeah, my background coming, you know from my professional background is in psychotherapy. So ever since Ever since I kind of started diving into this understanding of how do we you know How do we heal and how do we optimize the human experience? It really Grabbed me and so I went through various different trainings healing modalities looking into body work looking into breath work looking into neurofeedback and Seeing what what is it that really makes for that liberated human experience? When Mike went into e-commerce, I kind of followed him Down that path and we both had some really great success in e-commerce But it was also very Draining for me because that had nothing to do at all with what my calling is what I felt I was here for and so You know when when this opportunity came about when these ideas started to kind of Ripen in in our minds. It was very exciting to just dive in and to really serve from the heart and to put all of our Skills to use. Yeah. Oh This is awesome. Okay, so Alright, so it seems as though, you know a lot of entrepreneurship a lot of high tech sort of figuring out the cutting-edge tech stuff a Lot of psychotherapy and then so then this this moment of aha, we're gonna start to Pay people to do to be instead of do. All right. How does one get paid to just be? Yeah, so this is kind of the initial concept of why this vision came to be since then It's obviously just like any startup taking a lot of twists and turns now The ability to pay people comes with cryptocurrency in the blockchain So as you know for the first time in human history with the blockchain We're able to create shared value economies and what that means is if mean you share a value in this case Let's say we say meditation is valuable or alleviating stress is valuable Then we should be rewarded in some way shape or form And so now we can literally just create some sort of trust mechanism between me and you and then we can flow currency or cryptocurrency back and forth and so this trust mechanism and this is how we kind of gotten the quantified self movement Was how do you determine if somebody's meditating so we went down that path and we found the key metric which is HRV So then we started looking at quantifying the self essentially So the eight so the HRV ends up being more varied when someone is meditating rather than correct I believe it goes into higher states of Yeah, when you analyze, sorry, yeah, this is the same. There's a couple of patterns So when you analyze HRV on the power spectrum, you can see You can see specific frequencies light up one is called the meditator's peak So when somebody's actually meditating you can see that in the change in their physiological biomarkers, which ones are you measuring so specifically it's HRV And so as well said the meditator speak is when you're doing an analysis of HRV on a when you plot on a graph You can see a very distinct Signature person is meditating what's happening in their heart when they're coming into a meditative state and that meditative peak Is that because I've seen some of these analyses before and yeah, there's for sure a distinct peak Now is that distinct peak is that a state of them really getting to a Peak of what would you say that is? This is a really good question. So this peak is associated with a state called Popularly, it's called coherence Scientifically, it's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which sounds like a disease Respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which means that your breath and your heart are synchronizing into a coherent Singular wave that starts to entrain this starts to entrain your entire body and all of your organ systems So your body comes into the most efficient state both in terms of your mental performance and your physiology interesting. So Respiratory sinus arrhythmia Means that my breath and my heart are coming into sync and therefore my physiology my all my organs are kind of they're all synced coherence rather than the high beta just Running around just Through stuff and that way there's no real rhythm when you're doing that versus so that peak is that is that state of complete Coherence or rhythm that you can have us. It's like a cadence of life cadence Almost if you can keep that as long as possible throughout your life, then you can likely Live longer healthier happier and be more kind to people. There's lots of yeah Good things that come from this so okay, so that's like a lot on the science Yeah, go ahead. I wanted to just tag on to what's one thing There's one more important correlation when this state occurs when we can see this HRV marker and that's that at that point The brain also goes into alpha. So as you were starting to mention like that this kind of a rhythmic beta So when we start to see coherence, we actually start to see heart-brain coherence as well So we really have that peak. It's the underlying Physiological state of flow. Yes, that's what happens when we start to feel really in the moment really tuned in Yes, yes now All right, let's go back to the blockchain stuff. So and then actually I also want to talk about the bio feedback How you're actually connect collecting it wirelessly? So On to the blockchain stuff quick Give me the breakdown of why I How I meditate I accrue some sort of Currency that has some sort of worth and there's some sort of accountability between people to be so yeah Let's let's unpack that sure. Yeah, so I mean the blockchain right now as many people know is in a weird state Especially cryptocurrency where we had that huge rush last year and we see many projects get funded and then instantly fail or shut down so We are taking a safer approach and I recommend this for any startup company right now is really to create an Economy where you have a large amount of users our goal is 1 million users to start that are going through your in-game economy gamification token or basically your points system and Ensuring that that is sustainable before you implement blockchain into it because what we're seeing is people are launching these ICOs With poor tokenomics models that are not sustainable And then it's just it's not just not gonna last so really you need to create a real core company or product Have blockchain in the back of your mind. Yeah, and stay on top of it And then when it comes time you just turn it on so you're a centralized ledger for the first hundred percent a year or two or Whatever it requires until you get the million Users that are frequently using the platform and then you see you've proved your concept and then you can decentralize it And you can move slowly towards decentralization. Yeah, we still don't believe in a fully decentralized system Especially in this wellness space. We don't yeah, it's it's maybe it's not even necessary at this point Other markets why financial markets? Yeah? Yeah, you're not trying to capitalize on people meditating You're you're just trying to help people meditate. Yeah, there's an yeah I guess it can sense and ideally I think in the in the next year or two or maybe five years. We'll start to see Specifically blockchains related to wellness and right now. We're not really seen We have one-off projects like high-vibe network, which are paying people to meditate also We have shivom, which is storing DNA on the blockchain and stuff like that But really nobody's proven anything at this point So it's really too early and this is why we've we've taken the concept of blockchain put it in our documents letting people know That this is on our radar, but we're not going to turn it on till maybe next year We'll see how the market goes, but okay, and then let's go back to the wireless biofeedback system So how are you collecting HRV wirelessly? Yeah, so in the beginning we also Just as you see at this conference you see that many people are creating these different wearables different things to basically have a Sort of hardware that you interact with the the product through and this is what we were thinking too in the beginning But when we started to do more research realize that there is Technology available technology really comes under the name of computer vision So computer vision is a way of using cameras just like the cameras we have here, but pulling them through signal processing Algorithms that filter it to such an extent that for example when I look at you. I can't see your pulse totally, right? but Computer vision can through filtering in a certain way We can actually see how the blood goes up each time your heart if it's not as your face If it's that acute, right? It's got to be really sensitive. It's well pick up even the like commercial Consumer-level cell phone front-facing camera can do it. So it's really more about the filtering algorithms What it's really doing is it's looking at the minute change in color on the pixels that are Representing your face on the on the video stream and when you magnify those when you magnify the difference Our eyes can pick up the difference, but when the computer is magnified then you can see very distinctly flush flush Yeah, and so we can that's really Distinct, I mean that's a very smine new difference. It's so it's a hard distinction to make That if I that's a really sensitive technology that I would have to pick that up It's just it's just interesting to me that this is now coming out with even a front-facing camera on a stock Cell phone that can yeah, they can do that 94% accuracy compared to ECG or EKG, which is the gold standard for measuring 4% of the front-facing camera. Yeah Hmm. Whoa. Yeah, yeah, that's that's that's pretty crazy Yeah, that really frees us up from having to have that barrier to entry of having to buy more hardware Hardware and wear it. Yeah, so you can use any computer or any Tablet or any cell phone to actually practice and to get feedback that you're really getting progress that something's really happening You're not just sitting there listening to a playlist, but you're really seeing that things are changing as you are training or meditating. Yeah Interesting Damn so so then it's okay, so you're wirelessly collecting it so then you conscious So I would download conscious is that how I would do this and then okay, so I would download conscious And are you on both stores right now? So we haven't launched yet Okay, but the way that we are launching is that there is this underlying core technology of contactless biofeedback That's really its goal is to optimize for stress reduction. That's what it's essentially looking for So as you come closer to the flow state, of course the corollary is that you're coming out of stress states, right? So what we're going to be doing is we're going to be launching it as Multiple applications one is going to be a multiplayer Meditation application and another one is coming under the umbrella of conscious games where you're going to use the same exact mechanism Except now we can put it into Categories such as kids games where simply that you know They're progressing on the screen based on very simple exercises to get them into a little bit of a higher coherence So they're learning self regulation as they're playing Okay, so For now you've just tested the technology and tested your your games and your your processes with with people and then You're aiming to launch this soon. Yeah, yeah, we're I'm not sure I think it was definitely be in 2019. So right now we have the prototypes ready We're optimizing them for accuracy We're kind of putting the skins and the beauty around them because this is a very important aspect So to be able to present something beautiful polished and clean. Yeah, yeah okay, and There were things there were things you just mentioned this both this group this group meditation And this the gamification of modern meditation So what would that what would that look like for for me to? Turn on conscious on my phone and then to just prop it up against the wall And just sit there in front on a cushion in front of the front-facing camera and just meditate and then accrue points in game points that could potentially be useful for Something as long as other people found the valuable Yeah, do you want to say more on this or do you want me keep You know Yeah, so we have two other products which might give you a better use case and really since we are we have four products on the road map We're really looking for our investors So we're opening a seed round of two million dollars at this point to give us guidance and really see which one of these products are Attention should really focus on one of the products which Boris didn't mention was something called the conscious plug-in Which is essentially a plug-in in your browser Which will allow you to then see what you're consuming on the internet and how that's affecting your your nervous system essentially, right? So people can start to see let's say they're on Facebook for an hour and they start to see their coherence level start to go down Well, then we can warn them in real time, right? So that would be a probably a bigger use case for the masses. That's kind of interesting can use it from facing camera on the laptop Yeah, exactly, and it's the more stable than the smartphone, right? So there's certain challenges We are getting it to a point where we have motion detection, so it's very accurate So even if you are kind of moving the smartphone, it should still be able to track it accurately Damn, I wonder what percentage of Time spent on social media actually increases coherence or decrease totally And this is what we're seeing in the kind of cultural trend, right? That people are becoming more and more aware of what they're consuming fake news all this stuff So just making it people more aware of it. Yeah quantifiably. Yeah Yeah, it's actually quite rare that I think I I leave the social platforms Feeling more coherent, I think it's it's it's The only times I leave it feeling more coherent I guess is when I see that you know Maybe the Dalai Lama tweeted something and then I really liked the tweet and I retweeted it or whatever And then I got off the platform right away something like that, right? Yeah, you spend just a minute on it and you know you go and see someone that said something about someone's you know Like they're they're so grateful for something and then you're like, oh, that's great And then you're really grateful for a moment and then you get off the platform So like though that's like really good experiences, but whenever you see the the firefights that are going on and stuff That's never increases gratitude. It never increases coherence. It's just Firefight and we're really riding a huge wave. We're not the only ones We just saw apples releasing some headphones that start to track on your HRV just using the headphones So they'll be able to link that to the next music playing or whatever and seeing how that your consumption music maybe So does that their next iteration of those wireless headphones? Tim was showing us that yesterday with the headphones that had Sensors in them for but he wasn't doing HRV. He was doing Measuring neural activity around that region and then it seems as though we are All of the companies are trying to move to a place where they have additional data to work with so biomarker data, so Okay, what's the fourth one that was those three you've listed now So it's the fourth one the fourth one is a workplace app So just like many people are working on corporate SaaS products We also have that in the roadmap and that just makes sense Although based on a lot of the feedback from the program a lot of people are saying don't go down the B to C route first Start with ours don't go down to the B the B route start with B to C. Yeah So what do you what do you quickly just what would you? Go through go through all four one more time again sure so we got the multiplayer meditation app We have something called conscious games and then we have the conscious plug-in and the conscious workplace app And the difference between the first two again is the meditation app and the games So the meditation app is really for people that are using let's say headspace and calm Existing meditators. Maybe we'll catch some new meditators just with a lot of the uniqueness of our product And then conscious games is you can think of it like so we can explain one of the games Which is on our roadmap, which is called beautiful minds Essentially you're using your coherence levels to open a flower Yeah, that's right. So that targets people that may not necessarily be interested in meditation per se But they're interested in maybe the novelty or if something beautiful opening. Yeah, yeah, we also just talked to Peter Freer from freer logic and he's he has a meditation game where it's about coherence opening a flower beautiful Yeah, yeah And there's so many use cases it doesn't have to be around mindfulness to we can race Rocket ships, for example, yeah, yeah to the moon or whatever. So again our goal is to reach a billion people Just like many companies here. Yeah, and with our marketing backgrounds. We think we can do that in case to widen That's right. Yeah, the yeah the The science mixed with the business is very important to actually get it out to people, you know I guess one thing that I'm starting to realize is that There's this there's this trend that occurs with Companies that I have the opportunity to discuss with or or mentor and one of them is for example at Indie bio Which is the largest seed stage biotech accelerator when I'm talking to entrepreneurs there a lot of them are building out some sort of a Therapy to some sort of a problem within the human body and that they want to solve that problem take example like cancer or whatnot and I'm constantly trying to press them to find what is the golden solution like what is the thing that could potentially wipe it all away and With this there's a lot of silver keys being developed in a sense And so I think that might same thing might be true about transformative technology There might be a lot of silver keys being produced, which is great because we're learning we're figuring things out There's different markets for different things and I just I do feel there is some sort of a gold standard for Transformers technology fork for edging people closer towards coherence that has yet to be I guess Manifested and scale to a billion people, but it could be you guys It could be the some of the other people that we've talked to it could be how you guys share information and share Communities that they get there. It's all that's that's just a repeating pattern that I guess I'm seeing and that it's it's interesting It's interesting to me because it goes across these different nodal networks of impact across Sciences or yeah fields. I love that Boris and I were talking about that on the walk here It's essentially it doesn't matter what the the how is it just matters that we set our our vision really and Have faith that it's gonna happen and the technologies like you said with the silver keys will appear Yeah, and yeah, we'll be able to solve this. Yeah, Boris. You wanted to say anything? Yeah, I mean one thing that I just wanted to riff off of what you were sharing is like What are we doing here as humanity, right? Because you're talking about this golden key right this golden thread that ties everything together We're all trying to solve problems, but what is that core that is like? What's that well spring from which all the problems are sprouting and we're like, okay I'm gonna get this one and this one and this one and you get that one But what is that and so, you know, this is kind of how we also in this inception of this company We're thinking about this more as a movement like what is it that we actually need to change for? Humanity to be different right and so we started looking at what is the commonality of the core commonality is that we all want to Be happy we were all seeking a better feeling, right? Okay, so but what's happening day to day? We know exactly we actually heard this in the conference We know what to do science tells us all the time if you do this and this and this you will be better Yeah, we don't do this these things So what is it that's blocking us day to day that does not allowing us to feel the gratitude that we know We can't feel to meditate to go out for a walk in nature to to commune with them with our loved ones Right what's stopping us and so what do you think stopping us? Yeah, so this is this is it So like in public speak if we say something that is very easy for everyone to understand I would say that it's stress is essentially stress if we can go down levels and we can talk about it more as Really, it's a lack of self-awareness Like we're just not aware of what we're doing. What is it that's like what it like taking this action will create? What result we don't really know we think we do but then oh it turns out wrong and it's also the secondary part of it is lack of self-regulation like again, it's We have all of the tools to apply it right the emotion is happening inside of our body You're not making me feel any way. This is the fundamental reality. It's proven by science It's been taught, you know through the wisdom traditions Nobody's making you feel any kind of way the feelings are sprouting here based on your how you're reacting to your own Sensations now. What if we start to train and put attention on this area and we start to say wait a minute if I am the source of my happiness of my feelings of how I feel well then maybe this is An area to focus instead of focusing out there. What can I do to change out there? So I feel better What if I change something in here and I feel tremendous? What if I discover that wellspring within me and this is essentially, you know What we're building this technology around whether it's you know contactless by feedback or something else that comes along in the future Doesn't matter what matters is how do we? point attention to this area for for the greater Human collective so that we can start to really make some difference at the causal level instead of at the level of all The different effects that sprout from here. Yeah You point to something that I found really interesting You said that if you could make an easy word to describe it would be stress What's holding us back from coherence and I like that. It's really simple and Self-aware the lack of self-awareness those those two things together Makes it makes a lot of sense and then So I just came back from my fourth ten day meditation treat Vipassana Yeah, yeah, and so you know when you realize that you are The sensation happens and then you react or you observe and then you kind of like you start Understanding that you are the source of how you feel and everything to the outside world and then When when you kind of start mastering that process What's nice is that then it makes it so that you can vibrate on a state of bliss No matter really what's going on around you and then Then if we can build the communities around the world that also helps so that the when a children's born They don't have to be born into stress They can be born into a community that helps the child get the the inward growth and flourishing so So yeah All right, so it seems like you know, we covered a decent amount of Conscious so you're gonna be using the front-facing camera on either a cell phone or computer and you're gonna be Having people play either group meditations or they're gonna be playing individual games or they're gonna be you're gonna be observing the browser Activities you're gonna be using blockchain technology is down the line We're gonna be building up this base through really strong marketing You're gonna have your own Value currency that keep can exchange. What are they gonna be able to use that for? Yeah, so this is again as you see what we're doing here is we're taking it step by step and experimenting Since we're both coming from the background of marketing like our mind always goes to like a B testing Market survey like what is actually going on? What do people actually want and how what are they using not using so one? very basic use case I would say is This app sweat coin right sweat coin. Have you heard of it? No, I don't think so It went up to number one in Europe and the States on the top three apps Okay, and what it is is it's a walking app now. We've had step counters for how many years now Oh my god, okay, right? There are more. Yeah, okay So why is this happening now what they've done and they're not a blockchain They're also experimenting and playing in this field, but they each time you walk They give you a portion of a sweat coin, which is like a cryptocurrency, but it's not it's not a true cryptocurrency It's just an in-game, you know, it's just like in any other game and what you do with the sweat coins And so what you can do is they have their partner offers. So for example, you can Perhaps if Muse is on there, you can say, okay Maybe a month subscription of Muse you can get for free. So or you know, they have other other different Since their focus is like a solid chain and you can exactly you see different like health foods You see different athletic gear different things like this that are relevant to that So you're basically trading steps for the other value in the world. Yeah, so that's pretty cool Okay, so then would you be similar to that so we could explore we can start exploring a similar model So we have partners for example that hosts retreats So offering at least partial scholarship to the retreats as you're meditating right things that are relevant to people and also Connecting with yoga studios connecting with so this is kind of looking at a mutual network The mutually beneficial network that can support both, you know, the client and our partners and And ourselves to be able to offer something really cool What's it called? What's your coin called conscious OS? What's the coin called? I think in the beginning and we can just call it conscious coin. We had it It's quite cool. Yeah, we had it as wisdom coin in the in the beginning. I like that That's cool. Is there something else about conscious that we should know as we Finish up our conversation This is where I like to close my eyes and just meditate on Something you should know about conscious You're gonna start to see it everywhere Is I think you're gonna start to see it everywhere and it's gonna be beautiful and it's gonna be so beautiful that you're gonna Want to try it for sure. So I think just be on the liquor you can check out conscious OS calm Yeah links in the bio. Yeah, yeah, check them out. Nice. I do see that I do see that I see a very bright future of a more aware less stressed communities. Yeah, I love it flourishing It's a beautiful place Transforming technology conference beautiful people like yourselves. Thank you for what you're working on. So bless. Thank you so much And this has been a this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate you guys. Thanks for worse Mike. Thank you Thank you both. Thank you. Yeah All right, thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it give us your thoughts in the comments below Let us know what you're thinking about what this technology could look like what we could do by decreasing stress around the world and increasing self-awareness and Go and create go and build the future go manifest your dreams into the world much love everyone You