 But what was astounding, Alan, is that ten sessions of neurofeedback, I could calm the body without ever once talking about who you killed or who tried to kill you. And what we found out at Camp Pendleton clinically amongst us, that you do ten, twelve, fifteen sessions of neurofeedback, then somebody wants to talk about how the fuck can there be a God given what I did or with what I saw in war? How can there be a God? Then you can have that kind of conversation without losing your stuff, without becoming activated. So the great benefit is the ability to regulate the central nervous system without talking about what happened when you were a little boy or when you were a little girl. You're not avoiding it, but you are leaving it up to that consciousness to approach that subject when they are ready. And that's one of the greatest benefits to this. And that's why I really left talk therapy behind. When I was in that training, and when I came back from being awake for two days, I sat next to a psychiatrist and we were talking. They said something up there and I leaned over and I whispered, I said, there goes the DSM out the window, and he goes, I agree. Boom. What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sockin. We are still at Consciousness Hacking's Awaken Future Summit. We are now going to be speaking to Dr. Michael Villanueva. Hello. Hello. Thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. I'm tickled and honored to be here. I'm very excited. This is going to be a lot of fun. Michael is the founder of Alpha Theta Center where they're training the brain to neuro-efficiency. So Michael, let's start things off with who you are and what you represent. I am a clinical psychologist and I have been trained in clinical talk therapy and whatnot. And with a bit of a Jungian background, so when I came back from Afghanistan about five, six years ago, I had taken certain technology into this combat zone. I realized that I wanted to work with the brain in a different way. So I started with the help of actually a couple of officers that seriously donated funds, which surprised the hell out of me. I started up the company, but it became clear to me the purpose of the company and the mission. Actually, it's in the mission statement is for the protection and enhancement of consciousness because it became very clear to me that consciousness, whatever this thing is and however we define it is possibly one of the most precious things that we've encountered so far. I'm not going to say in the universe because I have no idea what's in the universe. But that was the driving impetus to start the Alpha Theta Center. Okay. So the work in clinical psychology even prior to Afghanistan, what were you doing in clinical psychology and then how did you get to Afghanistan and what have you been doing since then? Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk therapy, talk, talk, talk, talk therapy. I was at Camp Pendleton and I was doing talk therapy and some of the psychologists there were working with neurofeedback and they told me I should work with this and being the self-righteous, arrogant male that I am 100% of the time, I said I don't need to learn that and they said it's really powerful. I said if it was that powerful, I would have learned about it in graduate school. So I poo-pooed it. But my boss, Commander Bain, asked me again if I would go to the training and because I was a contractor she couldn't order me to and then next year she asked me to go again more vehemently. And so I went to the training and I had an experience at the training when somebody administered neurofeedback on me that was impossible to reconcile with my background. It's a very simple thing. I had 12 minutes of whatever they did with the electrodes and after that 12 minutes was done, I did not sleep for two days except I was not wired. I was not upset. I wasn't amped. I wasn't feeling like I was on coffee and I've driven across Texas for 42 hours. It wasn't like that. I was just awake. When I did sleep I slept for 32 minutes, woke up incredibly refreshed, had a great breakfast and said what happened to me? And that was my foray back in 2009, 2010 into neurofeedback. I was a reservist at the time because when I was working on the Hopi Reservation and I did a study there on PTSD, I realized at that age of late 40s I'd never done my piece for the community, which is what drives a lot of Pueblos to join the military as a sense of community. So I realized I've never done my piece. So I joined the Army Medical Service Corps and so I was a reservist. So the opportunity came up. I heard about a chance for deployment to Afghanistan and ironically I was kind of prepping my sailboat to sail to the South Pacific because I had in my mind that that was what I should do since I was in my late 50s and instead I opted to take a different type of deployment. So I went to Afghanistan but I took into a combat zone, the first psychologist, to take neurofeedback. That was just an amazing experience, what happened there and I had an interesting conversation with the battalion surgeon, this medical guy. I knew I had to get him on my side because the Army didn't know what neurofeedback was but since I'm a doctor I said I do this and they said okay, excuse me. The funny part is I went up to Captain Rader and I said, you know, sir, we were both captains so I just called everybody sir. I said I have this thing called neurofeedback and I think blah, blah, blah and I explained what it did and you know what he said to me? He says, you know, if that was that powerful I would have learned about this in medical school. I was thinking to myself, dude, you and I are going to get along real good. So I implemented in Afghanistan and there's a whole segue, a whole side bar about me being here but in doing it, the work I was working with, I was using two systems. One was the SIGNET neurofeedback by the Authmers and they were very gracious in giving me the equipment to take there and that's good stuff. There's no doubt. We've used many more additional modalities but there's a certain type of training called alpha-theta training which I think Joe Kamea, way, way back when they started doing and what this is, it's just rolling the dice. It's rolling the dice with electrodes. You are encouraging the brain to make alpha and theta together so what? Big deal. I've come to learn in the years past as I've moved heavily into digital signal processing and how the EEG works that what we were really doing, it wasn't just synchronizing because being in sync, everybody thinks it's cool, right? So put your hand up for a second. I know it's a really kind of a silly example. Not like this. Oh, this way. Yeah. Spread your fingers. Okay. So our fingers are in sync, right? And we think that's cool, right? It feels great too. Yeah. All right. So they're in sync but imagine if those were two kind of different waveforms like maybe like this. Oh. Now they're in sync, right? Interesting. How many fingers do you see quickly? Just to answer the question. Five. What if we offset the phase of the waves? Yeah, yeah, yeah. How many would you see? Yeah, not ten. Yeah. So the point is that obviously waves carry and how there's phases offset information by encouraging the synchrony. And if you talk to any clinician, your feedback person that does Alpha Theta training, they will say, yes, this taps into the unconscious. Well what it did in Afghanistan was it just didn't tap into the unconscious. It seemed to kind of, and I know it sounds squirrely, and I'm not a woo-woo person, but it seemed to open doors into altered states of perception. And we had some very unique, interesting experiences that happened in Afghanistan. And there's not the time and place to kind of get into that. But when I came back from there, I knew I wanted to take this to a wider audience. So my first thought when I came back from deployment, hey, I'm going to rock it. I'm going to go to the VA. I'm going to apply at the VA. So I applied at the VA and I got offered a position, right? I was a vet and all that sort of stuff. But they wanted me to do interviews, like intakes. I said, no, I can do neurofeedback, but I had no clue what it was back then. And they said, no, we just want you to do clinical interviews. So I said, all right, I'm not doing that. So I didn't work, and I had enough money banked in the bank to just start traveling. And so I started going to different people trying to learn what happened in Afghanistan. And that started this road into EEG neurofeedback and brain training. And that road has become exceptionally rocky. And then after it became rocky, there has been no road. And then I became an apostate within my own community. So I'm kind of wandering lost in the desert at this point. I better stop talking right now. Well, let's go and unpack this experience. So let's go piece by piece. Talk therapy. OK. So normally you're just— Oh, I'm glad you brought that back, yeah. So what happened with the talk therapy stuff, the problem with talk therapy. My personal belief, actually a professional belief, is that 100 years from now talk therapy is going to be looked at as barbaric as leeches. Wow. That's a cool statement that you just said. Well, it might be cool, but it also might be inaccurate. And I'm not trying to slump because it works. There's so many more biomarkers that we can also process. And the problem with talk therapy, particularly exposure therapy, you are activating the system and then getting it to un-activate. That's true. And so you're desensitizing the system. And I get that with exposure therapy. So if somebody's been in combat or somebody's been raped, let's talk about this over and then you get activated and then you bring the system down, then you explore more and you get activated and bring the system down. And it works. There's no doubt. It works. So it's bringing up the trauma. Well, you activate the system. Right. And then— And then you calm the person down, systematic sense of it. And how do you normally calm the person? Well, you're breathing. You reconnect them with their body and then, oh wow, they calmed down. But the problem I had with that, I have to be careful what I say here because I have a metaphor that I usually use that's probably not good for the air. The problem is that it's barbaric. We have a technology now called Neurofeedback and I went to Fort Hood. I was deployed for two weeks to Fort Hood after the shootings there and they were, of course, understandably irritated because they didn't need help but the Army, you know, whatever the Army does is what the Army does. I'll go there and help them. It's like, but dude, they are the Army. They got their own people. Your under orders go. So I ended up actually at a PTSD clinic and I have some amazing videos of Sergeant Roberts on our website. But what was astounding, Alan, is that 10 sessions of Neurofeedback, I could calm the body without ever once talking about who you killed or who tried to kill you. And what we found out at Camp Pendleton clinically amongst us, you do 10, 12, 15 sessions of Neurofeedback, then somebody wants to talk about how the fuck can there be a God given what I did or with what I saw in war? How can there be a God? Then you can have that kind of conversation without losing your stuff, without becoming activated. So the great benefit is the ability to regulate the central nervous system without talking about what happened when you were a little boy or when you were a little girl. You're not avoiding it, but you are leaving it up to that consciousness to approach that subject when they are ready. And that's one of the greatest benefits to this. And that's why I really left talk therapy behind. When I was in that training, and when I came back from being awake for two days, I sat next to a psychiatrist and we were talking. They said something up there and I leaned over and I whispered, I said, there goes the DSM out the window. And he goes, I agree. That's an inside thing where we do all sorts of diagnostic work. Because Norbert Meiner, I think in 1955, the father of cybernetics, I don't remember where this was written, and I'm pretty certain he said this. I hate to miss quote people, but I believe he said in 1955, someday, all mental disorders will be looked at as disorders of communication. And that's exactly what we're seeing, like when Tim and I were talking downstairs. That was at the core of what we're trying to understand is how does this brain organize and process information? And the only way you're going to get at that is by looking at the EEG and not by Yickey Yickey Yack. Stock therapy is like closing the barn door after the horse is already left. You are activated milliseconds before you're even consciously aware that you're upset. How many times have you talked to somebody and they kind of just lost their shit all of a sudden? You all right? Chill, man. Chill. You know what's going on with them? The stuff floods through us with prior to conscious awareness and then we struggle to say, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to call you a fucking bitch, but it just bleh just comes out. So if you can calm the system, if you put a few milliseconds between the emergence and close off the limbic system and let the frontal cortex say, hold on a second, because PTSD and trauma is like acid on relationships. It's a very slow drip of acid. It's not like alien acid from aliens where it instantly burns through. No, it's a very gentle acid and over years and decades it weakens the body, it weakens relationships and it isolates us. And to go from a process that you say to be barbaric, I actually really enjoy this way of phrasing it because I think being able to leverage so much of the new scientific advances that we have in the biosignal processing and like you said, the disorders of communication, this is what it continues to come up over and over again with the different leaders that we sit with is that the more that we study what's happening in the brain, we see that a lot of the ailments that we have today are due to disorders in communication of the systems. So, okay, now there's still so much to unpack, but I want to get to the story at Pendleton you were stimulated and then you had neuro stimulation. No, I didn't have neuro stimulation, I had neurofeedback. Neurofeedback, so would you teach us about the difference? Well, stimulation is when you put, there's two ways, there's multiple ways to stimulate the brain, but you put something on the head and you put some power into it, whether it's a magnetic pulse, PMF, I mean your cell phones to some degree stimulate the brain, although it's very, very weak. The newest one, excuse me, these days is TMS, transmagnetic stimulation, double cone, can actually reach deep into the brain, kind of stimulate areas of different frequency, so that stimulation, the zombie apocalypse method also works too, I teach my clients that. In case there's a zombie apocalypse and you want to stimulate the brain because you're feeling depressed, I give them my secret zombie apocalypse formula for that, and you can stem it with DC current, AC current, so that stimulation. Electrical or magnetic are the two. Electrical or magnetic are the two, well there's also ultrasound. And ultrasound for stimulation, right, and neurofeedback is just getting the bias. It's passive, it's just reading the signals at the scalp location and those signals then go into a computer and the computer has software, this is where it gets complicated because some neurofeedback providers write software but it's proprietary, so nobody knows what algorithms are going on like that. So there's proprietary neurofeedback, we call those black boxes. And sometimes people get a little twist because they think it's disrespectful, it's not, it's just that you're not letting anybody know what your stuff is, but it works, I respect that, you want to make money so you keep it secret, so what? There's black box approach, there's straight up neurofeedback where you know, for example, BioExplorer is one program, thought technology makes it, BrainMaster makes software, some of the stuff might be proprietary, but you basically see what you're doing, you know you want to decrease alpha, you know you want to increase the SMR band, right? So there's those two, that's that bifurcation. I used a black box in Afghanistan, it's a sign it's a black box, it's proprietary, it's in for low. What was happening with the period of neurofeedback? There was no neurostimulation, there was just neurofeedback for you for how long was it? It was 10, 12 minutes. 10, 12 minutes. It was just neurofeedback, and then you stayed up two days. Yeah, and something else happened too. And you slept for 30 minutes, and then you were refreshed. Yes. So, but how was it just neurofeedback then that caused that? I don't know. We don't know. And so here's the problem when I have clients like you that come and say, hey, you know, I do this high stress job, I want to do this, and this is what separates us from all the other neurofeedback providers, and this is why our company barely makes it. I get asked these questions, and what do you think I say? I don't know. I don't know. And so if somebody's about to spend money with you, that is not what they want to hear. They don't want to hear, I don't know. Then I have to explain that this is, for example, signet or neural optimal. It was a very, very wonderful program by Val. And it works wonders with some people. Doesn't do Jack with other people. Same thing with all systems, right? And they said, well, how does this work? I said, I can't tell you that. In the army, I could get away with that to some degree. Not that I'm trying to be stealthy. It's just that nobody would question my choosing a system to use. I only chose it, because that's the one I was introduced with. And we had efficacy at Camp Pendleton. And we had presented results at the Combat Operational Stress Conference at the Naval Hospital in San Diego. So I knew it worked. I knew it worked. But how it actually, that particular one, did what it did, I cannot answer that. And it's a possiblement. And it's not good to be able to tell people. In the civilian sector, I don't know. Through just neurofeedback. Right. Which is crazy. OK, so then taking this to Afghanistan, what was the result of what was happening with the troops that you were working? That's interesting. Nobody's ever asked that question, although I did a presentation on this several years ago. When I talked to the battalion surgeon, he and I became very close friends. I got investigated. About six months in, I got investigated. And it was interesting, because my colonel flew out of Kandahar to visit. And he does that. He visits people. But I found out we were high on the priority list, because he was getting pressure from his ups to find out what was going on, because you know the army. The army keeps records of everything, right? So utilization. How many times your office is being used. So combat stress by psychologists in a combat environment is not well looked at, because people call us the wizards. And they call us the wizards, because we make people disappear. That's why. And we do. You come to me, and you reveal, you've got all this stuff going on. And I have to say, oh, this dude should not be carrying a rifle. And you get whisked away to Germany, and you're flown home. So nobody wants to talk to us, because the wizard will make you disappear, right? So this is a very important point that there is a lot of stress that's occurring when one is in those situations. And so one needs to also be, we need to have honesty and transparency and the conversations that you're having. And actually, this happens even in the entrance process, is making sure that the psychology is strong enough to be able to be in those situations. But then you get into the situations, and again, there's another serious impact. Well, I would question anybody's sense, I don't know, wording that there's a screening process going on. There may be, but not one that I could see. But I'm on the flip side of it. So we were called wizards. And I never, I made only what two people disappeared that really were in serious trouble. It wasn't my MO, but we're looked at that way. My point is that the utilization, clinical utilization, combat stress offices are very, very low. 12, 15, 16, 17%. Our utilization rate was 70, 80%. And we had a waiting list. Wow. And that was unheard of. And why would you say that? Well, I can tell you why. Because people were doing this and they were getting to sleep. The battalion surgeon reported a 62% reduction in psychiatric medication prescriptions. Wow. People got off sleep meds. For neurofeedback. Yes, yes. From just wearing an EEG? No, just electrodes on the head and doing alpha thing. Just wearing electrodes on the head. For 30 minutes, yeah, a couple times a week, yes. And it was just reading out. You're just reading out the biosignals. Yes. And reflecting it back. And maybe, is that a process of just feeling like somebody cares about my psychology and then I can sleep better? Well, I'm certain that the placebo effect is in there somewhere. But if you've ever been amped up, seriously amped up, I can pat you on the knee and tell you, you've been great all you want. And you will lay awake till 3 in the morning. Let's be real here. Well, placebo effect is real to some degree. But not like this. The placebo effect tends to go to the average. The baseline, we went way past the baseline to zero. So, I mean, there's data there to support that the strength of the effect was way more than a placebo effect. I think a placebo effect clocks in at about 30%. 30, 35, I can't remember from the literature. We had efficacy rates of 80, 85, 90%. But then we were in extreme environment too. So anything we do is gonna look really awesome, right? So let me ask Michael. So then is it potentially that I feel as though I'm actually having neurofeedback, my brain is actually being monitored electrically through electrodes and then that signals being processed. But because of that feeling that I have, I then- You've never done it, have you? I've been in EEG before. You've never done neurofeedback, have you? Like. Have you ever had neurofeedback done on you? I've had magnetic stimulation, but just for like a tiny little bit. I don't think you've had it done. Because what you're describing, if you had it done, you would have used different language. Okay. Okay, please, yeah, tell me. Oh, you didn't teach, teach, yes. It's, your system calms down. You start breathing more deeply. You feel more physically more relaxed. You oftentimes feel physically more calm. Like your brain is probably spinning, thinking about this and that. Where is it gonna end? No, it just, all that shit stops. It just slows down. And you become pretty much present and centered. It's really that simple. So it's like meditation? I don't know because I don't meditate, but I think one of the vets I worked with really summed it up in a video I have, because I recorded him. He was so puzzled. How could somebody be so relaxed and yet so alert and so aware? I don't know if meditation does that. Interesting. So the image that I use when I work with people, I say, imagine, they go, what's it kind of like for me? All right, you're a lion on a savanna, giant lion. And it's hotter in the hell out there and you're under a tree and you're this big cat, because everybody knows about cats, right? You know, watch a lot of YouTube videos about cats. And often the distance, you see a herd of gazelles or a herd of zebras. And all your lionesses in there, everybody's just there, hot, it's hot. You're just laying just perfectly relaxed. Got these big open cat eyes. And one gazelle way off in the distance wanders off and moves. And as you watch this gazelle, your eyes go from this to this. And then the gazelle wanders back and it goes to this. Relaxed awareness. Now, if that's meditation, that might be it. I don't know, I don't meditate. Oh, that's a really good description. That's a good one. So what Douglas daily taught me, what neurofeedback does when you have neural efficiency or something interesting and I'm not a mathematician, I don't know math. And I've told you at the start of this, I'm not a scientist. But a clinical psychologist. Yeah, but I'm not a scientist. And even a not a very good clinical psychologist because they- He's humble. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they just, they just, whatever. But the point being is that, let me give you a math example. Four plus two equals what? Six. Right. So, and so how many degrees of freedom? If you saw four plus two equals with a blank square, how many degrees of freedom does that answer have? How many different answers could be? Zero? Yeah, one. Or one degree of freedom. Yeah, because it's what? Yeah, okay. Only one answer. Right, four plus x equals six. How many degrees of freedom does that have? Two? Possibly. Oh, there's plenty more. Oh yeah, you put more. Oh, because it could be the all the decimal point answers. So it's like infinity. Not quite. Not quite. Four plus x equals what? Right? So, or four plus x equals six. And then this can take a lot of different values, right? That could be infinity. It could be possibly, but not, it could be. But let's take x plus y equals z. Okay. That's a lot of degrees of freedom. That's a lot of degrees of freedom, yeah. When you're working with the EEG, like what we do when you are looking at this, one thing becomes very clear is that the EEG is scale invariant. And that's a very, very important concept to get. Scale lint? Scale, SC. Oh, scale. Scale invariant. Scale invariant. Invariant. Yes, which means it doesn't matter what scale you look at, it replicates its pattern. So it's like a fractal, right? You keep going and going and going and it's scale invariant. It's one of the reasons why, for example, cell phones, well, back when you were a kid and I had my first cell phone, it had this really long antenna, and now they're on a phone. Why are they on a phone? Because you can just micro-etch the waveform on a chip. And as long as it's the same, the antenna is the same, now you can do it digitally. So it's scale invariant. Okay, so the EEG is also kind of scale invariant. So if you're looking at somebody that's really, really anxious, you will see, for example, perhaps you might see beta waves or you might see something else. But the point is that you're seeing energy bound. And if you are able to increase neural efficiency, then the EEG comes like a bacon sizzle. And when it's a bacon sizzle, when there's really no form there, any state is possible, just like that lion. You can get angry, you can get happy, you can say I'm sorry, you can say tell me more about that. But if you have your energy bound up in the EEG and kind of PTSD with this, this, there and this, there, your degrees of freedom are way less. Okay, okay, so the state of relaxed awareness under the tree in the savannah and also the state of relaxed awareness as a human enables maximal degrees of freedom. That's absolutely, that's good. So, wow, I say I talk too much and you say, let's get it going down. My role's to synthesize the brilliance and play this game of tennis and this is going very well. So I want to, when we're in a state of non-relaxed awareness, our degrees of freedom are limited, we're going to. Yeah, to a degree. And then what you have is repetitive behavioral patterns. Yes, okay. So then this, if I haven't done neurofeedback, if I haven't trained my relaxed awareness, if I haven't done meditation, let's say, or maybe psychedelics or whatever it may be, that if we haven't reached a state of getting better and better at relaxed awareness where we can kind of ebb and flow between I'm all is one and then I go back to focus and then all is one and back to focus type thing, that then there's a higher potential propensity for me to get stuck in these behavior patterns of sadness or anxiety or depression. I would think you get more stuck in repetitive thought patterns. Period, yeah. Yeah, okay. They keep playing over and over again. Looks like the anterior cingulate, maybe a bit offline a little bit, too much slow wave alpha and you just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, even nauseate yourself. People, I often look at depressives, people very, very depressed and it's sad to see how stuck we can become in depression. And in some ways, it's like the flip side of narcissism. You think about it, it's two sides of the same coin. Yeah. It's just self-referential, except self-referential where, dude, I'm awesome and you're not. As opposed to self-referential, I'm terrible and you're great. It's still self-referential. It's like the same two sides of the same coin. This relaxed awareness, I'm just, I'm so curious about the studies then with what was happening in Afghanistan. If there's any way to teach about what was happening. What studies? Or what, the experiences that were happening, yes. So then it went from a behavior and thought patterns that had low degrees of freedom to behavior and thought patterns that had higher degrees of freedom. Oh, whoa, whoa, try not, that I don't know. I just know that people started sleeping better. We had reductions in anger and we had curious reductions in anger. We had people that were, you cannot in the army, like if you're my soldier, I cannot order you to get mental health treatment. Can't do that. But I can volunteer you to do it. I can volunteer, you know, Alan's really becoming a problem that would be really nice if you were to go down and see Doc Mead on it. I don't want to see no fucking wizard. I know, but it'd be really nice if you were, and then you can read between the lines, all right, you're being voluntold. So we would have reductions in anger and then we had a lot of curious things that happened, some extra sensory stuff happened. When I talk about reductions in anger, though, I remember a couple cases in particular, angry, angry, angry, angry, angry, came in there, did five sessions, both, one was a guy, I think one was a gal, and they calmed down. And I remember the guy in particular, he says, I'm not doing this bullshit anymore, I'm done. Told me how to do, well, he didn't tell me, he goes, hey, I was volunteered to come here for five sessions, so I'm done. I'm out of here, I'm not gonna do anymore. It's like, all right, sorry. Okay, no problem, so he takes off, right? Comes back two weeks later. I said, Sergeant, where are you back? He goes, I don't know what the fuck is going on with everybody else. But they told me I was acting a lot better. I don't see it, but they said that I was acting better, so all right, I'm gonna do some more. Now that, to me, I was really curious. That was really interesting, because I've seen that before, where somebody insists that there's been absolutely no change, and everybody around them goes, whoa, all right, sure, fine, there's been no change, just stay like this on what you are now. It's almost as if it's like a Einstein relativity thing. You're in a train, and you go from Chicago to LA, and you go, no, I'm still in the same train. What are you talking about? I'm nowhere else, but you've actually, so we've seen that. The other thing that we would see would be a dramatic increase in anger, six, seven sessions in the neurofeedback, and that, to me, was even more clinically interesting, because what are you angry about? I cannot believe I joined the fucking army. I can't believe I married that woman before I left. I can't believe I'm going back to this, and what we were seeing was mental efficiency, where we were seeing kind of a life review, and I don't like where I am, and how do I change this when I get back? Whoa. It was extraordinary, and we see this in the clinic sometimes. I have to warn people about this, because we've seen marriages dissolve, like I can't believe I married her. I can't believe I married her. Why am I still with this guy? You start thinking more clearly, more efficiently, you have more degrees of freedom of choice, and you start questioning your environment. So in essence, my takeaway from Afghanistan was this. Neurofeedback helps you become the person that genetically you were meant to be, and I had a chaplain that wanted to do neurofeedback, and he said, I don't know if I should do this. I said, what are you worried about? He goes, well, first of all, is this shit gonna make me gay? Secondly, when I go back and I'm, am I gonna become a Democrat? Thirdly, am I gonna lose my faith in God, and fourthly, am I gonna believe in this evolution bullshit? And I didn't laugh, because they're all very real legitimate questions. I said, I can't answer any of them except the God question. He goes, well, what do you mean? Am I gonna lose my faith in God? I said, no, no, sir, you're not gonna lose your faith in God, but I guarantee you that when you meet God, you'll be able to have a more, a more intellectual, effective conversation with him or her, because it does neural efficiency. And what we were seeing, the reason why we had the waiting list is that people were doing it not to sleep better, but they found their physical abilities were increasing 10 to 12%. And at that altitude, that meant a lot. We had people that were powerlifting, that were running and finding out, oh, shit, it's great. I can work out like I've never worked out before. So it's not just the brain that we're dealing with as an energy system, it's the entire bio. The whole body. Well. You all right? Yeah, I'm just too much mind blowing. I'm sorry. So much to process. All right, so. I don't think I answered your question. I think I got lost in the sauce. So much mind blowing has been happening. You did answer the question. Okay. So, okay, so neural feedback causing more relaxed awareness with a more efficient going to sleep and sleeping, more efficient just body in general with physical processes. And you said that this part was very profound. You said that the neural feedback enables you to become who you're genetically meant to be. I know that sounds rather materialistic, but it's almost as if the real person starts to emerge. And it's wonderful to see. It's really cool to actually see who you are in 3D or virtual reality as opposed to a two dimensional painting on a wall. It's an extraordinarily blessed process to which it witnessed the emergence of a true human being. That's what it does. Well, what it can do. It doesn't do it all the time. Yeah. I'm so interested now between neural feedback, psychedelics, meditation, their interplay because they all seem to do what you're describing. There is a unique, all of us, I've been liking to use this analogy recently, all of us are seeds and the seeds are all human seeds, but the seeds have a unique DNA within the seed. And that that DNA to fully express itself in the world needs the right nutrients for the seed, the air, food, water, love, compassion, et cetera. And then the expression of that is the fruits that the seed, that the tree can make and those fruits for the self, for the community, the family, the civilization at large. And so when we see ourselves in a 2D like a painting versus when we see ourselves in the way that we're meant to express ourselves in the world at our fullest, we like you said, we kind of put all of the degrees of freedom into question all of a sudden. It wasn't just two degrees of freedom who I've married, where I'm at right now in life, that's pretty much it, I'm always following this. Versus seeing all of the options that exist that we could collapse at any moment, we could choose to move into a different career, we could choose to move into a different relationship, we could choose to move cities, et cetera, all these different choices that we have. So is that a decent way of framing it? I have the works for you, sure. Okay, yeah, and would you say that that framing also, would you agree with it or there's some nuance to it? No, I think it's, you know, the words are the words. Okay. They, you're attempting to describe using a very linear thing called language, a complex field effect. Fair? Yeah. And one of the things I learned from Five MEO was, We have to talk about this. One of the things I learned, I mean, one of the things I have to reconcile, and I don't know if I'm gonna get my evolutionary biology correct, but I think us in our form right now, anatomically and brain-wise, have pretty much been the same for about maybe 200, 250,000 years. Okay. And I know other brilliant people have talked about this before, but I've always been struck that the emergence of language is so recent, so recent in our times. It's like 50, 60,000 years when language really emerged. I think, I might be wrong, might be a little bit longer. Sure, sure. But the point is that, and the anatomy might have been there prior to it, but the point is that there was a time in our history, there was a long time in our history where we didn't have language, and yet we built and communicated, we made it, we hunted, we ate, we raised kids together. And in my, not the first one, but the second five experience that I had, fortunately I got really terrified halfway through it, and I tasted it and coughed and spat most of it out, which was a great thing because I was able to maintain a little bit more in this plane. And as I looked around, I realized that, you know, here are these psychedelic people saying neurogenesis, and I thought, I heard neurogenesis one more time, I was either gonna take a shit or puke. It just really gets me annoyed. Oh, you know, five-in-mail creates new pathways. Dude, no, it doesn't, and a pathway is not like a frickin' freeway that you cut through a mountain. And besides that, nature's very efficient. And she's not gonna create a new pathway if old ones exist. And when I began to wonder where the other pathways, other, they're probably stored holograms actually in our neural network system that are subnested of other ways of communicating energetically, because I remember in that state when I looked at Sandra, who was my guide at that time, I looked at her shoulder, I reached over, you know, it's not like, at first I was part of my conscious brain, we're going, hey, dude, this is really pervy, right? You know, don't be doing this. I just reached over and looked and went like this and said, what happened? And she said, oh, that's where I had an old broken bone, and I could like see it. I saw this red kind of angry vibe, like I'm not real happy with you, like a petulant child. And I was like, all right. I was so struck by that and how, and then as I tried- Through the clothing? What's this? Through the clothing? Yes, yeah, it was just kind of there. And I remember trying to speak. And the image came to me of how speaking to somebody is like taking a 20 pound sack of potatoes and throwing it on their lap. It's a very violent intrusive thing that demands attention with no finesse. And I became, and this was so striking to me because I studied English literature at Berkeley and I love language and I love the way words work. And I began to realize how brutish and how forceful and how intrusive language is compared to these other ways we must have had of knowing. Okay, yes. The depth of communication prior to languages. Yeah, it was pervasive. And when you think about the heart, you know, the heart puts out this EMF field of what, you know, two to three meters around this, maybe it's just a meter. I always get the meters and feet confused. I don't know. I am wondering though what those other ways we had of communicating, and I don't think everybody was doing five in communicating or anything like that. I just think that we had other ways of interacting that were profoundly effective and efficient as more so than language possibly. You know, language rose up and it became the sexy star of the cortex and get a lot of shit done very, very quickly. There's no doubt about it and I like it. And I also wonder about these other ways, these other ways. Yeah, yeah, I agree. This is why this current argument that's permeating through scientific communities as well as just globally of that, this is the absolute best time to be alive, blah, blah, blah. That I think there's very fascinating things about our past that we're very ignorant of and that I think it's difficult to just make a binary statement about how things are today compared to how they were. Pre-language being invented, this EMF field of the heart is a part of also just being emotive or expressive with facial expressions in general without using the voice and you're right. It's just this thing that the cortex is so excited about language efficiencies creating with that and maybe that's some of the reasons why we see such ailments with climate change, wealth and equality, things like that. We just didn't vibe from the heart as we built as much as we vibe from the language in the cortex, potentially. Yeah, yeah, this is so interesting. Okay, let's do what's actually, because we could talk forever, let's talk about Alpha Theta Center. So, since Afghanistan coming back here, this is in San Diego Alpha Theta Center. Okay, so what have you been doing since then with neurofeedback? Learning as much as possible. I don't like saying I don't know and I have learned, since then I've literally learned how to interpret. It sounds like tarot cards. It kind of is like tarot cards, you know. The raw EEG, 19 channels. I've worked with a brilliant, brilliant mentor, Jay Gunkleman at Brain Science International. He's one of the top EEG people in the world who can read and understand. And so we look at the EEG, not that a neurologist would look at the same way. What we look at, they would be dismissive of. There's no giant epileptic spikes. We're not looking for that. We're looking for possibly slow Alpha in the frontal cortex or we are wondering about low power and very fast Alpha which tends to be a signature of people who drink or alcoholics, you know, high arousal system. Systems over arous, it's over amped. So I've had to learn that. And sometimes we'll get referrals from psychiatrists, you know ADHD, right? Kids get on ADHD to get put on stratera. They get put on concerta. And I remember several cases I had where, oh, you know, the kids got ADHD, he's been diagnosed and he acts like a bastard now. He's like, he's really an asshole at school. Well, that's not the parent's description, but when you extract their underlying frustration, you can tell that they would probably throttle the kid if that kid were throwing the laws against it, right? And so we would map the kid and find out that his rear Alpha was clocking at 11.5 Hertz which is extraordinarily fast. That's not the Hertz of somebody working at Wal-Mart being a greeter, no disrespect, that's fast. And what we also see then is we say there's wonderful 16, 17 Hertz bump, right, in the middle up here at 16, 17 Hertz. There's a lot of, the fuel is there. So we got a fast engine, we got fast fuel, and maybe not a best, you know, a best neurophysiological signature for a seal, a Navy seal, you want somebody to be fast at the back, but you don't want to be too fast because then you get over aroused, but you need that central bump to know when to pull the trigger and not pull the trigger. Same thing with the CEO. You need that sharp fastness, but you also need that bump to be able to take the risk or not take the risk. So you give a kid like that stratera, what does it do? It bumps up the rear alpha and other Hertz and a half. So instead of being 11 and a half, 12, 13 Hertz, it's just coming out of his skin. So we're able these days more and more to have a gentle conversations with medical doctors and psychiatrists because we don't prescribe it. And we have to couch our words carefully because I'm not saying you shouldn't take your medication. You might want to have a conversation with your provider and look at these studies and instead maybe you might want to take an SSRI. Oh, I'm not depressed. Well, yes, but an SSRI will naturally lower frontal alpha because your rear stuff is really in good shape, but you got a little bit too much frontal alpha going on. That's probably interfering with some of your cognition and whatnot. So we're able to kind of look at the neurophysiology of signatures these days and we're able to kind of maybe suggest you might want to look at an SSRI or an SNRI. And one of the things that we've, because of Jay's influence on the company and his profound knowledge about the EEG and sleep, the Millmillian brain should be able to stay awake for 10 minutes and not do this. And when you see this ebbing and flowing of vigilance model, which is out of the European School of Thought on EEG modeling, you see a waxing and waning of states and it's on part because people aren't sleeping very, very well. So we're able to, you know, we have people come in that say, you know, I sleep great and 90 seconds into an eyes open recording, we're seeing a vertex wave at CZ, which is a fancy way of seeing it saying, we're seeing stage two sleep happen in the brain, eyes open, nobody home at 90 seconds. So we call that a precipitous descent into sleep. There's no going through A1, A2. There's nothing, it's like, you're there right away. So we look at this and then we take it the next level and we use some very good tools out of the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience and we run independent component analysis on after we clean up the artifact, we clean the artifact, the eye blinks out, then we look at kind of more what we think might be the real brain wave activity with the blinks gone, the breathing gone, the muscles gone, you holding this like this, all that, your brow like this, all that produces what we call EMG. So we extract that mathematically out and we're left with a more clean recording. And then we run independent component analysis, which is a way of looking at areas within the brain, within the brain, not at the surface. This is where my field has really gone astray and unfortunately they're wandering in the desert and those of you listening out there, where are you over there? Yes, I'm sorry, but scalp locations are not where it's at. You want signal source locations. That's what you want, signal source locations. Those of you who think that scalp topography is the be-all-end-all, oh never mind, I shouldn't say they're gonna be dinosaurs, they're not gonna be dinosaurs, nobody's gonna go to them because it's ineffective. So we- The difference again is- I'm sorry? The difference again is- People get hung up that thinking that where the electrode is on the scalp is where the activity is and nothing could be further from the truth. Electrodes are nothing more than antennas that pick up every damn signal, whether it's biophysical or mechanical. Everything, even if I record your brain in this room with this equipment going, we are gonna get a 60 Hertz buzz somewhere in that recording. So we have to extract, once we extract that out, people like Tony Bell at Bell Laboratories and Terry Sinovsky, I can't pronounce his name, Scott McKay, they absolutely opened up a frontier door because they said, what if we take those signals and what if we mathematically work with them and maximize independence, temporal independence and separate these signals? It's the same thing your iPhone does. It's called a cocktail party problem. It's the same thing you can source signal, you can separate the signals out. It's digital signal processing. You do it with this stuff. You can take out this light. You can take out this light. We can do that with brain waves and what we're left with is then we actually, there's information on spatial. It's a spatial filter and we can localize these components within the brain and see where this energy, to use the new term or slow alpha, is activated. And it's extraordinarily interesting because now we get a window into where the functionality of the brain is. Now we can start mapping symptoms to brain regions. That's what Tim and I were talking about downstairs. Regions of interest using Loretta. You know, low resolution and electro tomography I think is what it is. We are actually able with Maxwell's equations to reverse engineering and I'm fortunate I don't know the linear algebra. My friends have been very patient with me trying to teach it to me but I feel like snug out of the summer night stream when he said, would you please speak slowly or I am slow of study. Me too. You know, like I don't get it but we can do it. And so we use very sophisticated software and mathematical techniques to image into the brain, look at where the problems are and we try whether we're right or wrong to enter that area on a scalp location by targeting certain frequencies. And we can do this non-invasively with a cap. We don't even need a cap. I just need three, four electrodes. And you just place them on regions of interest. Well, you need a reference. A reference, yeah, okay. All right, and then you need an area that you'd like to train and an area that you're using as a reference but the people I work with will also say that that's bullshit, that they're both picking up the same signal. So neurofeedback, the people I work with and they're very, very, very, very smart people, they agree that it works but in their opinion, and I have come to share it, it is exactly like Chinese medicine. It works and we don't know how it works. And what we've been doing at our center because we've been gathering so much data and that's what I was talking with Tim a little bit about earlier down there. We have gathered so many EEGs that we are struggling. We wanna see what is, how does it work? How is neurofeedback working? There's different types. How is it that I could take 10, 12 minutes of a session and not sleep for two days and be perfectly fine about it? But it didn't even suffer for it later. It was great. How is this possible? How is it possible to do alpha theta and feel like you've gone into your past and you've talked with your mother and had a conversation and come out of it and go, wow, I feel so much better. How much does that sound like ayahuasca, right? So how are these things possible noninvasively without any medicines? So we don't have answers for your questions and I'm really sorry, Alan, at least I don't. I mean, there's other people that might answer better than me. So talk to them. Yeah, there's still so much to actually be able to understand. Okay, so then part of the neurofeedback process is being able to make sorts of analysis from the neurofeedback and make- No, let me help. There's no recommendations at home. No, let me help, let me help. First of all, we do a brain map. We analyze the brain map and we create pretty pictures from the brain map and we look at things within the raw and then from there, we say it looks like there's too much frontal alpha. We just need to reduce that. So we'll put an electrode here, electrode here, maybe run BioExplore or thought technology software. The person will watch a movie. I usually use the Brandenburg and Cheritose or Fleetwood Mac. I trained the music, like Cirque du Soleil. I trained the visual things and the screen will shrink, go up, the volume will go up and down according to what the brain does. So if we're asking you to make less frontal alpha, screen does this. If you, I'm sorry, it gets bigger because you're doing what we want it to do. So we can inhibit or enhance and all this happens prior to your awareness. So you have no conscious control over this because at its core- It's like a hundred millisecond delay or something. Right, but at its core, the brain is a novelty detection device. The brain is designed to help us meet the needs of the immediate moment. So any deviation from that moment kicks in, it kicks in this novelty. It's like, it's called an N100P300 waveform. So the moment that thing starts to shift, brain recognizes that, like, well, what's that? Now this is where it gets a little technical and a little interesting. Your eyes are glazing over. I'm trying to keep up. This is so interesting. So the last bit here, because it kind of helps put, if you have a whale in an ocean, it stands on its head and admits a song, how far away has that song heard? Just through the water? Yeah, how far? How far through the water? Until the sound wave stops. Yeah, you got a whale singing a song in the middle of an ocean. How far away do you think you can be to hear that? Maybe a mile? It goes quite a ways. Couple miles. So you've got this whale emitting this very low frequency boom, right? Kind of like contact. Whale sing. Whale sing. Low frequency, high energy. Low frequency, high energy. High frequency, low energy. This is a one over F power distribution. This is kind of like a fundamental law of the universe. Low frequency tends to be associated with higher power than high frequency. A dolphin squeaks can hear it very far away. The brain behaves the same way. Why? Because it is metabolically efficient. And if it can learn that it doesn't have to make that low frequency, but it can make this and still get the job done, it starts reorganizing itself. It's the only thing that writes its own damn software. It's mind astounding. And we have no clue how this happens. But generally the eat and jeep. So I can use less metabolic processing to capture almost a similar amount of information. If I asked you to get me a cup of coffee right now and you jumped up, kicked your stuff over, ran out there, ran downstairs, got a cup of coffee, kicked down the door and ran here and gave me my coffee, you would have accomplished a mission with a tremendous expenditure of energy. So think about this behaviorally or you could have gone down there very quietly, come back up, put the coffee down with minimal expenditure of energy. Relaxed awareness. But speed. Relaxed awareness. That's not confused my poor metaphor here. It's relaxed awareness. So the brain is wanting to be metabolically efficient. It wants to follow that power distribution curve because it's very efficient that way. The way the interplay between physics, biology and communication within the brain is astounding. And we're only standing, we're not even standing at the shores, we're like in lifeboats land. I think we can walk across part of that water to get there on the shore. It's astounding. So when we're doing neurofeedback, essentially what we're moving that brain towards is that one over F power distribution. Making the brain more efficient. Making the brain more efficient. Okay, yeah, it came home at least with its 0.001% understanding for me. I'm forever in. I'm sorry. No, no, no, no. For, no, I am a chimp trying to understand. And so for others, I think it's easier to understand. No, it's not. This is why I have my assistant talk to people because I talk too much and then they get confused. You're actually, no, no, no. Actually my mind has been expanded. It's awareness multiple times in very profound ways from this conversation. So you've done an exceptional job teaching me, but I'm very humbly saying that only 0.001% I understand. That's my point of why I say that. And also because I think like you just described, there's just so much we're still ignorant of. And so I'm trying my best to help other people understand how much we are ignorant of just like you are with what you said. I wish I knew. And just raw intelligence ability to, like for example, someone like Tim or you that have been in the industry for so long, you can talk jargon, industry jargon for days, no problem. Sometimes with others, I try and synthesize and make. I appreciate that. And you actually have very good analogies. Your analogies have been very strong and even all the way to like what you were saying about language and there was just so many good ones throughout the conversation. I mean, there's still so much to understand about neuro-efficiency. I mean, we'll have to do another conversation on this on the subject here in San Diego. So we'll have to, you know, next time you come up to San Francisco or when we go down there, we'll have to revisit the conversation. Sure, that'd be fun. There's still so much. But in general, it's you're, the Alpha Theta Center does neuro-efficiency, trains the brain. It can, yes. We hope. We hope. That's our goal. Okay, okay, okay. And not through neuro-stimulation, just through neuro-efficiency. We use that as well too. You do, okay. Because when you stimulate the brain, you're actually sometimes priming the pump, particularly with TDCS. And you, it's the same thing, you know, if somebody's micro-dosing and then we stimulate and we do neurofeedback. I mean, they're choosing to do that on their own. You're priming the brain and you're really kind of tickling other networks that are latent in the background. And so we are seeing kind of the deep, deeper, I don't know what, an interesting type of learning. Have you ever had an experience where you kind of stare at your hand and you winnow into your hand and you're like tripping on your hand and it's amazing what it is? So imagine the brain is doing that with a video that's shifting in relationship to its own being. Okay, yeah. That's the closed-loop feedback. No, it's not closed-loop. It's not. That's called neurofeedback. Okay. I don't know why, maybe it's for patent processes that Ben or Adam is calling a closed-loop, but it's neurofeedback. Neurofeedback, yeah, got it. So instead of adding closed-loop, it's unnecessary. It's just neurofeedback. It's just neurofeedback. It's more of a scientific, accurate description of what's happening, but neurofeedback's the same thing. Okay. And what the brain will do, the attentional process it brings after a stem or after a microdose is really interesting. We think there's something there and maybe someday we'll understand it. It potentially becomes more efficient. Yeah. Yeah. And potentially by visiting Alpha Data Center and going through this process of doing something like what you do with the visual adjustment and auditory adjustments and the physiology of this. And any neurofeedback person can do this. Okay. We're not that special. Cool, cool. Yeah. Okay, just two quick questions on the way out. First question is, are we in a simulation? No, I do not think so. I think that's pretty narcissistic. And I don't think so because what I have to reconcile is, of course it could have been created in a simulation. One could always argue this, right? But what I have to reconcile is that we've had life on this planet for millions and hundreds of millions of years before quote consciousness appeared. So you wanna explain that? So in your right, it could be simulation because we're simulating that. The circularity becomes endless. But no, I really don't think so because I have a hard time. We talk about the heart warmth and how consciousness is this. Well, what about the dinosaurs? What, 100, 200 million years? I don't know. Something feels rather self-referential about the simulation theory. And then what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? I think the most beautiful thing in the world is to feel the facets of love and gratitude. They're not quite two sides of the same coin, but they're facets on a wonderful gem. I think to experience that is transcendent and mystical. Yeah, this has been such a fun conversation. Those are great answers. I wanna know more about the effect of like five MMO DMT on what the research has been, but we'll have to do that again. Yeah, we've modeled some interesting states. I don't think anybody has done the type of data that we've done. I think even Tim was surprised when I said that, what we've pulled out. And like on my computer, I mean, we've got the modeling of what happens. We have the 10 minute baseline on several of the videos that we animated using his plug-in where you see the components firing with information granger causality. And then you see at 600 seconds, which is 10 minutes, you see the hit, right? The person takes the inhalation within 20 milliseconds. You see this radical shifting transformation of active inhibition. That's what we were talking about when you walked up, that the brain is actively inhibiting itself. And that is astounding to me. It's actively not communicating. And in that silence, something wonderful emerges. Yeah, so I'll have to talk about that. What do you think is the wonderful thing that emerges in that silence? I think the magic of consciousness is in the interplay between empty spaces. So Pam mentioned that the magic of music, I think, is the space between notes. I think there's a very deep truth in that because as I was explaining to him, I said, we saw the power drop out across the cortex. That makes no sense. Intuitively, you're going, oh my God, I'm visiting this, I'm visiting that. She's teaching me about my mother and I'm realizing this, I'm realizing that. I'm throwing up, I'm hearing the sound of creation. I'm witnessing infinite fractals of iterations of spirits before me. Well, yeah, that's what's going on in there. But I'm telling you out here, we're just like, it's a tremendous drop in power. It's astounding. That's why I mentioned that as I was wondering my kind of secret theory is, is this an example of stochastic resonance? Which is when you take a very, very faint signal and how you amplify it is that you flood it with random noise. Think about it. If you take a very, very faint signal, like a very degraded photograph and convert it digitally, and you amplify, if you shoot it with random noise, your random five hertz is going to enhance the existing five hertz and make it come up more. You see what I'm saying? And it's a tool used, I think in Photoshop even, the NSA definitely uses it to extract license numbers. But you take a faint signal of any sort, flood it with random noise, you're going to enhance the inherent signal. And I think one of the things that we suspect, at least we, there's no royal we, there's no like a part of some we-ness, maybe it's just me and me, is that the inherent noise in the brain is vital to our consciousness. The inherent noise of little tiny things happening, I think in the psychedelic state, that noise is not noise. There's inherent information there that gets amplified and gets experienced. That's what I think the secret is, or one of the pathways forward in understanding this stuff. And that could potentially also be an analogy with our obsessive use of the technology every time there's a moment of silence in our lives. And so if we were to not use the technology in those little moments there, that would give the space for that to come up. It's not that unusual. And just let me just say this little bit here. 1797, William Wordsworth wrote a beautiful series of poems. Expossilation and reply, I think it's either 1797 or 1798. And I don't know the, don't have the poem memorized. I just know it a little bit of it. But his friend comes up to him in the poem and says, dude, why are you just sitting there wasting your time by this lake? Come on, go read books, man. This is where it's all at. I mean, I'm paraphrasing that. But he responds. He says something like, the eye cannot choose but see. The ear cannot choose but hear. Our bodies will feel what it will with or against our will. So why should I be seeking when I and wise passiveness here can learn more of moral and of evil than all the sages can teach me? So that notion of wise passiveness and attention or in meditation and listening enables, I think he was spot on. Cause to me, you know, the people like, I'm sorry, you're a good generation. Oh, we've invented this, we've got this. Like dude, no, 1798, William Wordsworth was sitting by a lake. And then wise passiveness, feeling the vibe of what's important and learning. Even Shakespeare hints at this in his writings. I mean, when Gloucester was blinded, you know, and his son said, hey, let me help you. No, I have no way because when I had eyes, I could not find my way or something like that. So they had put out his eyes out and he was feeling sorry. He says, no, when I have eyes, I still was lost. Now that I have no eyes, I know where I'm going. So there is something about wise passiveness, about meditation, about silence. And I think in psychedelics, what's happening is that the practicality of lowering certain power levels in the brain emerges a different type of knowing to emerge. Yeah, that's great. The allowing a different type of knowing to emerge through the silence. Yes. Through the wise passive. Wise passiveness. Really, William Wordsworth. That's a lot of expostulation. It replies 1797, lines written in 10 turn Abbey. I think you should read that. It's beautiful. It really nails that experience. He really came back at him and said his friend in his place. Yeah, yeah. Damn, that's so good, that's so good. So, and maybe that piece of feedback is important because you know, tune this off, go and do some wise passiveness. I love that. I love that. We're big proponents of that. I'm sure we talk about that quite a lot. So. All right. Holy cow, Michael, thank you. Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much. It's been such a fascinating conversation. Thank you. Oh, hope I didn't. Your wealth of wisdom. We have to have you back to unpack more. There's still so much to talk about. I love it. Huge thank you everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode. Also, check out the links in the bio below. Is it alpha theta center dot. Yes. Dot com. Alpha theta center dot com is the link in the bio. Check that out. Also check out the rest of Michael's links as well. Go and talk more to your families, your communities, your coworkers, people online on social media about neural efficiency, what we talked about today. And also check out the links below to consciousness hacking. Also to simulation support the artists, entrepreneurs and organizations around the world that you believe in. And go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. Thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon. Peace.