Rewiring Hypervigilance

Your nervous system can win a war and still lose the peace. I sit down with Tony Crescenzo, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and the President and CEO of Intelligent Waves, to talk about what PTSD, moral injury, and high-stress service can look like years later: hair-trigger anger, relentless rumination, broken sleep, and that feeling of being stuck in “hurry up” mode even when life is safe. Tony shares an extraordinary counterintelligence story from the early 1980s and how betrayal, retaliation, and stigma shaped the way his brain and body carried stress long after the uniform came off. 

Then we get practical. Tony walks me through Peak Neuro, his neuroacoustic neuromodulation platform designed to bridge complex physiological data and real-world recovery. We unpack brainwave entrainment, EEG-based personalization, and the idea of state-to-trait change: not just feeling better while you listen, but training the brain to access calmer, more focused states on demand. We also talk about measurable outcomes like restorative sleep improvements, hypervigilance reduction, and how clinicians can use this alongside talk therapy, CBT, and other evidence-based care. 

We zoom out to modern “episodic war” and why transitions can be brutal for fighter pilots, drone operators, special operators, and anyone expected to shift from lethal decision-making to family life in minutes. If you care about veteran mental health, PTSD recovery, moral injury support, sleep optimization, neuroplasticity, and cognitive performance, this conversation connects the dots without hand-waving. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more veterans and families can find tools that actually help.

Learn more at: https://peakneuro.com/

Transcript

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Moral Injury Support Network podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Roberts, President and CEO of Moral Injury Support Network for Service Women Incorporated, a nonprofit organization based in North Carolina that focuses on helping women veterans recover from trauma they experienced while serving in the military. Today we have a get great guest with us today, Tony Crescenjo. He is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Intelligent Waves, a service-disabled veteran-owned company delivering advanced cybersecurity systems integration and mission-critical technology solutions to the U.S. government and defense sectors. He's a U.S. Marine Corps veteran with over 30 years of leadership experience in federal contracting and high consequence environments. He is recognized, he is a recognized advocate for veteran transition and support, actively mentoring service members and supporting the veteran employment ecosystem through organizations like Warrior Ethos. Simultaneously, Tony is the founder of Peak Neuro, a cognitive performance and neuroacoustic optimization platform. Inspired by his own journey navigating the challenges of PTSD and post-service transition, Tony launched Peak Neuro to bridge the gap between complex physiological data and actionable real-world recovery. Welcome to the show, Tony. How are you?

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Thanks, Dan. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

So tell us

Undercover Marine Corps Counterintelligence

SPEAKER_00 1:28

a little bit about your background. You served in the Marine Corps. So give us some background of your service and your experiences.

SPEAKER_02 1:38

Yeah, I had a what I would call a very atypical uh Marine Corps career. Um I uh I was in the Marine Corps in the um in the early 80s um and spent uh three years, uh just about three years undercover uh as a counterintelligence marine working for I think what you see on TV is NCIS. Back then it was called NIS. Uh and unlike the cool TV show today, back then I think NIS agents were the guys who washed out of the FBI Academy. So it wasn't the most uh wasn't the most fun assignment. Um and in that uh in that tour, um, you know, I think in uh in eight years I'd had uh five different permanent change of duty stations. I um I was assigned uh after rotating back from uh 3rd Land Battalion in Beirut to uh to work in an inspector instructor staff where um there was some uh uh early uh before before we really even had cybersecurity, uh computer fraud, there was an uh uh a gunnery sergeant who was the the administrator of that organization, creating people who didn't exist in the manpower management system and cashing checks. Uh so I was assigned to uh to go there and figure out why they were bleeding uh budget. Um had a just a lot of a lot of red flags back in that day. And after about eight months of um of working on that, he and I uh went to go cash some checks at a bank that was, I think every teller was an NAS agent. Uh and as I was getting ready to check out of that assignment and go back to the fleet, I was instructed that I was gonna have to stay and go through a drug and fraud investigation, which uh, you know, as a as a young corporal at that time, everyone uh who was a target of the investigation was senior to me, both senior enlisted and uh and officers. And um, you know, back then the the Marine Corps was very, well, it's still very small. Everybody in the Marine Corps knows everybody, it's 175,000 of us. Um and and when when the people who were getting charged got relieved, and it was literally everyone but three people out of a 12-person uh uh inspector instructor staff, the the commanding officer had been relieved, uh, the first sergeant had been relieved, the entire staff had been relieved, pending a court martial. And rather than move me um or place me into uh uh a different kind of uh working environment, the Marine Corps in its wisdom just decided I was going to stay there. Uh there were four witnesses uh in that trial. Two of them had uh uh met an untimely death before the trial. Um a couple of attempts on me. Um so you can imagine if you're if you're a veteran listening to this, the Marine Corps is a little bit different organization, right? Sempre Fidel is always faithful. We never leave our dead or wounded on the battlefield. And yet

Retaliation And Feeling Abandoned

SPEAKER_02 4:40

I was left by the organization that never leaves anybody. Uh, I have written letters to the uh sergeant-major of the Marine Corps, the commandant, my congressman, and uh there's uh a lot of retaliation, obviously, for my testimony, since uh Marine Corps is small. The first sergeant that was charged was replaced with a friend of his who spent most of his time trying to find ways to impeach my testimony, um, which included eventually a court martial where I was convicted of being 20 minutes late to work and fined $20. Uh, lost all my security clearances, they made me a clerk, sent me to another unit where I sat in a room with no windows for eight months because everyone knew where I had come from, which was this unit where almost everyone had been court-martialed. Uh and basically I just sat alone for eight months in this in this room, where you know, basically essentially working under a stigma. Um, eight months to the day, uh, the aide to the commandant of the Marine Corps walked in with a uh meritorious promotion, uh, a check for $20, having overturned my court martial and a copy of the four-page letter of apology he had written to my mother, along with a letter. So that went a long way toward um, I sort of writing the wrong. But at that point, the damage had been done and didn't really know, you know, as a even as a Beirut veteran, I didn't think that bothered me very much. But um I had no idea, uh, especially after I got out of Marine Corps, just how angry I was. I think everybody has met that veteran that you don't want to get in a car with them because if somebody cuts them off or gets in front of a man, it's on. It's punishment time, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:18

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 6:18

Uh I think when I was 55, my second wife told me that I had been in more fights uh than all the men she'd ever dated combined. Right. And I would say, Yeah, I never started a fight in my life. And she'd be like, Yeah, I know. I I watch you. You poke at them, poke at them, they swing at you, you knock them out, and then go, Oh, I had no choice.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:37

Um, my first wife, my daughter, and my second wife would all tell you that um I had some anger issues. And uh throughout my career, I thought I was able to deal with them pretty well, especially since I've been in leadership positions for the last 32 years. Uh, but clearly it was having a negative impact on my health.

Anger After Service And Its Cost

SPEAKER_02 6:55

It was having a negative impact on my ability to relate to people, on people who love me and who I love. And I uh threw a fluke, literally, uh a misgoogle of directions to one of our customers at Intelligent Waves, landed me at um uh on a document that was produced in 1983 from a nonprofit research institute not too far from Washington, D.C., where there were some very interesting things going on with uh with neuromodulation. So I went down and uh without really an agenda just to understand what the mechanics of it were, um, after about 10 days of experiencing the technology, it just changed me completely. Uh people I had not seen since the pandemic, uh, my first wife, my daughter, uh, everyone who knew me just sort of stopped for a minute and said, wow, you know, you really seem a lot different, a lot more centered. And it

A Misgoogle Leads To Neuromodulation

SPEAKER_02 7:50

changed, really changed the trajectory uh for me of both my uh my focus and my career and and how I thought I would spend sort of the the second half or the late innings of my life, which is really around addressing the same issues in veterans today. You know, I think I have uh I spent 42 days in combat uh off and on in uh in Beirut, and we have folks at Intelligent Waves who've done seven tours in Iraq and Afghanistan before their 30th birthday. I just can't imagine the kind of damage that does. So, you know, the the the creation of Peak Neuro uh had really two uh two origins. One was at the Air Force Fighter Weapons School, which was a customer of ours, who asked us to look at uh dealing with issues uh around um high stress transition. So uh you go back to like World War I, uh Civil War, World War II, uh when someone went off to war, they didn't come back till the war was over. And they fought with the same unit the entire time. They had a you know relatively good transition. Fast

Why Modern War Breaks Transitions

SPEAKER_02 8:55

forward to Vietnam, we're doing 13-month tours, you're going home alone, you're losing your identity. Um, right, a fighter pilot who's uh who's flying missions in the Middle East might take off from Dallas Air Force Base in uh in in Las Vegas, uh, fly a 15-hour mission in a seat that's smaller than the one I'm sitting in right now, two tanker refuels high stress, uh uh high stress mission, lands the aircraft, gets off the plane, and their uh their spouse calls and says, Hey, we got a PTA meeting tonight.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:28

How do you how do you how do you shift to that? It's not just transition out of military, it's a transition from that kind of frame to a frame that says I could be a mom or a dad or a husband or a wife, and that's very difficult. Uh you know, the war is war is becoming episodic, not necessarily something you're immersed in for years or decades. Um and just that that transition switch creates a lot of uh I think trauma. So uh assembled a team of neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, and uh built out the technology which has now become Pete Neuron. We've had a lot of success with veterans today.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Yeah, and there's a similar situation too with like drone pilots. Um they step in a trailer, kill some people, step out of the trailer, go to soccer practice, you know.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Yeah, I assume, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:17

Soccer mom, drone killer, you know. I mean, it's it's and so we've interviewed people that are having that difficulty with that transition, not to mention things like, I don't really know what I'm killing, I don't really know what I'm taking out. Is it really an enemy? I'm told it is, but you know, and then some information has come out about the way targeting was done. Um, it's sort of like you've heard the six degrees of separation. So by the time they do the the targeting, and then now it's well, this person knows this person who knows, and that you know, you've got the cousin three times removed, is all of a sudden like you're targeting who doesn't it's it's questionable whether they actually had any involvement in terrorist activities or whatever. You know, people know that, and people are told, you know, people told us like they're they're told to target or to pull the trigger or whatever, but they know the calculations that happened, and they know they're they're doing sketchy, you know, and then they have to leave that to go to be with their family or whatever, and those kind of transitions are in a similar way, just very difficult to make for a pilot.

SPEAKER_02 11:36

That's right. That that's why they have the highest suicide rate in the Air Force. Yeah, and you know, the interesting thing is if you're a fighter pilot, you're flying over a target at Mach 2, you're not hanging around to see what happens. But a drone pilot sees it all.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Yeah, no, it's it's really um, I think you're right, wars become episodic. We're we're very much removed from it. Um and you know, my concern too is like the better technology gets, the more we'll start removing humans from the equation, saying we'll send a bunch of robots out there to do our war and whatever, and then then then war will be never ending because you don't have the human equation, you don't have people humanly invested, the cost of it becomes, you know, so but that's could be a conversation for another time. But the point is that you're making about transition is is well said. There's people think about transition as often being like out of the military to civilian, but but you're talking about combat to to family, and and um and the other thing too, sim in a similar vein, I have a friend who's a retired operator, um, and was spent you know 80% of his career actually deployed. Um and and in his later deployments, he had a sat phone, he had a you know, he had all the technology, so he was he could sit there in the in the S3 shop or the the command cell watching this, you know, taking part in in uh um seeing the destruction while eating a ham sandwich, and then when it was over, he could pick up the satellite phone and call his wife. Right? And the problem was the more he did that, the more distant and disconnected he felt from his family. So even though he had all that technology, he could email her, he could call her, he could talk to her. He did less and less and less of it because he couldn't mentally and emotionally transition from being a Stone Cold killer to trying to be a loving husband and father. He just couldn't do it, so he avoided her and his family for often weeks at a time, right? And because he was a special operator, it's not like she could figure out what's going on or ask what was happening or whatever. She was just in a communication blackout, really. So it was uh incredibly difficult. Um and it it just shows like it's not about technology, that's the emotional uh transition that you mentioned that's really hard to do, um, however you look at it. So

How Neuroacoustic Entrainment Works

SPEAKER_00 14:40

so tell me about like what is the technology you're talking about? How does it work basically?

SPEAKER_02 14:48

Um so if you uh if you've ever watched an old western and you've seen the Indians beating a drum, or you've seen a shaman beat a drum on a in a movie or a television show, uh, you might see eight, it's eight beats a second, right? Eight beats a second as they're drumming is a theta wave. And that's literally an early form of brainwave entrainment. Uh theta is uh uh more of a meditative uh access to subconscious state. Um neuromodulation is is uh modulating uh how your brain functions, creating states through sound. So embedding um the modulation patterns inside of uh white noise, blue noise, brown noise, music, uh, ocean surf. So what you don't uh what you don't hear, what you don't hear is any uh is any of the modulation. What you do hear is just a very pleasant, relaxing sound. What that does is it creates um uh two things. You have these, you have three systems in your brain, basically. You've got the oscillatory system, the electrical system, which are your brain waves, delta, theta, alpha, gamma. Um, and then you've got a regulatory system, which is how your brain works together. Uh both uh hemispheric uh symmetry, left and right brain. We've all heard those terms, someone's right brain, someone's left brain. When you when you're using more of your brain, when your two hemispheres work together, that's uh sort of imagine walking on deep snow without a snowshoe. When you do that, you walk right up, go right down to your hip. When you put on a snowshoe, you're putting all of that stress on top of a larger surface. So emotional stress balanced across both hemispheres of the brain, connected with high coherence, which is all the different, think of your brain as a number of neighborhoods that all talk to each other and work together. So improving regulation, improving coherence. Um a lot of veterans are, especially those with PTSD, have a combination of things, including uh uh hypervigilance, which is essentially an over an overactive uh prefrontal uh cortex. So the the front of your brain is where all of your rumination, worry, um, cogitation, cognition, logic all happen. Um, in particular in uh in traumatic environments, right? When the the challenge for a lot of veterans uh more than anything else isn't just uh the issue of uh trauma or PTSD or TBI or concussion. Uh often it's about having to rehash a traumatic event and relive it over and over again. Oftentimes with someone who hasn't who doesn't have that background, right? If you haven't chewed the dirt that I've chewed, I probably don't want to talk to you about my experience. And the, you know, the VA is uh not necessarily peopled with uh uh combat veterans, right? There's a lot of uh health professionals in there, but you know, people want to talk to people who have sort of the background that they have or understand that. And the other part of that is when you think about it, uh reliving the trauma reactivates all those bad parts of your brain, not bad parts, but it reactivates your limbic system and it creates this emotional flooding. And

Evidence, Sleep Gains, Trait Change

SPEAKER_02 18:10

um we're where we're able to have real progress with um, you know, we've had uh kind of you talk about Air Force, we did a 161-person six-month longitudinal study on sleep, relaxation, uh, threat recognition, and neuroplasticity. Um, one of the participants in that study was the retired deputy surgeon general of the Air Force, which is where I got my suicide statistic from. Um and what we found over those six months is that sleep improves by 16, 17%. That's restorative sleep, the sleep that actually helps your body and your mind heal. Um, uh, uh, uh, in essence, what the technology does is it it helps you create a frame that is uh appropriate to the state that you find yourself in, and it gives you the ability to change those frames uh at will. So, what do I mean by frame, right? If you if you want to if you want to study, you have to be in a frame of mind to study. If you want to go to sleep, you can't be ruminating and chasing things around in your mind.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

No, right, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 19:14

So creating the frames, uh, creating the the the the the neuro uh the neural pathways and the the a neuromodulation that mimics certain brain states and trains your brain to achieve those states volitionally, is what Piquinure is really about. So what what we do in essence is we take a uh a baseline uh set of readings from an EEG. You put on this little this little hat that uh makes you look like a Russian cosmonaut for about uh 10 minutes, eyes open, eyes closed. We give you a reference uh uh modulation to listen to. It's about a half hour. We can actually see the changes in your brain as this is happening. So what we're really doing is you're we're training your brain to go back to the healthy state, right? Kind of funny. I mean, you're a you're a uh a doctor. Um what I found interesting when I first started to look at this work is that uh every every therapeutic modality designed to treat PTSD is designed to do one thing, and that is to uh get the the the patient, the subject, the client uh within one standard deviation of their age, gender, and cohort mean, right? In other words, average. I want to make average, but how about how about we we optimize rather than create an average? So um what we do is we take that initial uh EEG and we create a neurological fingerprint uh that's unique to you. And then using uh we've got a very sophisticated uh AI, ML, uh uh trained local LLM that is specific to this task that processes all of the data, uh creates an image of the, you know, sort of a starting image of the brain, and then creates a protocol with waveforms that it generates, sound that we can uh administer. And so basically you get uh you get an assignment. A protocol is a sheet of paper that says for the next two weeks, twice a day, for a half hour, you're gonna put on a set of headphones and listen to these sounds. And at night, when you go to sleep, you'll put a speaker on, and in two weeks you'll come back and we'll take a look at where your brain is. And what we're finding is that we're slowly, if you're here and you need to be here, we're gonna move you in two weeks from here to here and then here to here. And what we're rather than make what I would uh what's known as a state level change. So you go you can go to a hundred different uh app store uh downloads and get binaural beats and calm and headspace. What they will do is make you feel good for 30 seconds, or sorry, for 30 minutes or 10 minutes or five minutes. But they don't last beyond the uh uh the the 30 minutes that you're listening to them. This is Is a state to trait level change. So over the course of about six months, uh the average user who has now uh PTSD is um diagnosed through a couple of different psychometric instruments. One is a PCL5 test, that's the sort of field test for that. So uh we can correlate uh PTSD, uh your PCL5 score, which is a clinical diagnosis. Um what we can do is look over those 30 days of uh exercises that we give a subject. And really what happens is you come in once, you put on the headphones, it takes about an hour, and then for the next two weeks, you just take your phone because we have an app that delivers the signals right to your phone. Wherever you are, night or day, you can do it in the privacy of your own home. There was a study done in 2022 by uh an Air Force colonel and his some peers at the 7th, 11th human performance going around, how you treat trauma and PTSD. And the um the outcome of the study was the farther away you go from your service members or veteran's home, uh, the lower the probability of success until you get so far away that it's basically 17%, 18%. But if you can do this closer to your primary care or provider or your residence, uh the uh the success rate goes way up. So it allows you to do this without stigma in your own home. So you do it for two weeks or a month, come back, get another reading, and we just adjust the signals. We can we can read those signals, we can create a new set of waveforms, kind of like working out, right? You don't you don't start lifting 100 pounds, you start lifting 10. And we move you very gently over time. Um, and what we found is uh we've got uh retired Navy SEAL, 21 TBIs, um uh 13 years in the Teams. There's actually a movie being made about this guy, and he's uh he's written a he's signed a release, so he comes to a lot of our events. His name is Mark Green, wrote a book uh about his transition that was just awful. And I remember the first time I went to his house to do his intake, I was uh 15 minutes late. And boy, you want to piss off veterans? Be 15 minutes late.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 24:14

The six foot three, 220-pound ex uh Division I football player wants to fight me in his driveway, right? The first time I met him. Um, and in about six months, he is clinically uh uh diagnosed without PTSD. So a PCL five from like an 80-something to I think a 30-something. Um he was so uh uh so moved by his transition and uh the how it the way it improved uh his entire life, including things like helping recover memory. Uh, he introduced us to a retired Delta Force sergeant major who uh uh has 24 years in Delta Special

PTSD, TBI, Moral Injury Use Cases

SPEAKER_02 24:55

Operator. Uh wasn't uh when we first talked, and he was having a lot of the same issues, sleeping in a different bedroom than his wife, not really talking to his kids, couldn't be couldn't be more than five feet away from a gun, uh, lots of anger issues. And in about three months, he's pretty much back to normal. And these are uh these are folks that are uh indicative of a number of our clients. We also work in elite sports. We've got an Olympic gymnast whose uh doctor was Larry Nasser, uh, who had a lot of uh a lot of those challenges. So across the spectrum, what it does is it trains it trains you to be able to achieve a state appropriate to the situation you're in. So if you need upregulation, you need to get up and go, we can do that. If you need focus and concentration, we can do that. And so the goal is to give you a broader selection of states to choose from and the ability to move in and out of those states with very low metabolic or emotional cost. So if I'm getting activated by a memory or getting activated by, you know, anybody that's had PTSD can tell you it's the smells or a sound or something that just you know triggers you. Right. Uh the ability to sense that that state is changing and either stop it or move to a separate state is really the essence of what Pignore does. So it's um uh it is a platform uh we're testing now with uh clinicians, uh psychiatrists, psychologists, licensed professional counselors are using it in their clinical practice, adjunctive to uh uh uh talk therapy, CBT, family sisters therapy. It's adjunctive to any of those things. Um and essentially the mechanics of it, talk just specifically about PTSD for a minute. When all of that front of your brain is getting lit up, your uh your heart rate variability is going down, your heart rate goes up, your breathing increases, your limbic system gets activated, you get a lot of uh chemicals that flood your brain. So I said three systems in your brain, right? The oscillatory, regulatory, and the chemical system. And they all impact each other. And so the term burnout really is appropriate because as you're ruminating, as you're as you're worried, as you're replaying the same thing over and over again, uh, as you're emotionally activated, you're consuming all kinds of fuel for your brain, GABA, ATP, acetylcholine, right, and glucose, which is where the word uh uh burnout comes from. So the uh the the ability to stop, understand your state, and change your state is essentially what we're doing for these uh uh for these men and women. So we've got uh literally just starting in a couple of weeks uh working with a client who's struggled for years. Um we talked about moral injury, raped by her commanding officer in Iraq twice, uh couldn't has not found relief at all, whether through drugs or uh alternative therapies or going to psychotherapy. So sort of, you know, uh referred to me by a friend that uh was very concerned about her. So we're we're really dealing with the outcome of uh uh of a number of different um factors. That's uh emotional injury, moral injury, uh physical injury, where you've got a traumatic brain injury, where there's a lesion on the brain. And what we're doing there is we're we're helping your brain create new neural connections uh in memory. A lot of veterans have memory issues, um or brain fog, where your brain really slows down. We see a lot of very slow delta waves at wake state for a lot of veterans, and the ability to kind of deal with that and adjust those into a more normal pattern. This is really what this is about is understanding the patterns of how your brain gets adjusted and then helping you um not just adjust it through the technology, but uh I'll give you a great example for sleep. Um uh three years ago, I started the sleep program. I was getting somewhere between 18 and 22 percent of my sleep was restorative, a combination of delta sleep and REM sleep, which is average actually for my age group. Um for six months I used the sleep technology. My average uh sleep score now on a Whoop or on an Oura Ring uh uh hovers around the 47 to 50 percent restorative sleep. So twice the the rest with half the sleep. Um and I haven't used the technology for 18 months because once you once you learn it, it's a little bit like neurofeedback without having to go sit in a listener's office, you know, get in a car, drive. Uh, if you miss an appointment, you miss a thing. This is something that you can do at home, uh and and really see results inside of about 60 days. People tend to see relief very quickly.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

Yeah, no, I I appreciate the uh providing all that description and talking through the different ways. I think it um that that's really helpful for people to understand. And for me, what I found is that state is so important because once you get in the right state, you can think, and then you know, we have these genius-like brains that we all have, we're only using a portion of them, and it's mostly because we're in all the wrong states a lot, and so like if I'm if I if I'm concerned about some financial problem, or I or I, you know, let's say you take finances, for me, that's always been one of the scariest things. I've been to war, I served 30 plus years in the military, I was in the infantry, a paratrooper, and all that, and I wasn't afraid of much. But the money piece, because the way I grew up, because of my experiences, I could get really frightened about where I was at financially, right? So so so I'll use that example because it's very real to me. But if I so the the problem is the state of being like frightened, uh adrenaline pumping, trying to figure out how am I gonna if you could clear that state, you could get in a calm state, all of a sudden the exact same financial problem is like this not an issue, I'll figure it out. I can figure it out. Well, I could do this, I could transfer this, I could sell this, or I could whatever, right? Uh I could, I could, you know, if it's a business problem, I can say, well, you know, what we haven't done or tried this, whatever. So that's a huge uh why state is so important is because like you talked about optimization, we have the ability and the resourcefulness uh to solve our problems when we're in a state where we can think clearly that calmness, or in certain cases, like you you may need to ramp up whatever the case is for other people. Uh like for my issue was all like over being overstimulated or or or anxious or whatever. Hypervigilant, other people might have the opposite, where they just they know, like I've counseled a lot of people. I know I need to do something, I know we're in trouble financially, and their troubles like just are like a heavy weight down on them, and they can't get out of bed because you know they they know they need to take action, but they just they're so overcome by like the you know the worry or whatever it is, whatever that is, that they um or they sort of like stay in bed or they stay disconnected. Um and so to me that's the the biggest uh advantage of this is you're able to clear your mind so that it can fully function the way it's intended to, and the way it the way it really works, um, by being in the right state of mind. Is that would

Cognitive Warfare And The OODA Loop

SPEAKER_00 33:00

you say that's accurate?

SPEAKER_02 33:01

Is that a good sort of uh yeah, not only accurate, but you know, I'm talking a lot about what we do with veterans and first responders. But in our defense business, this all started with a theory of uh or doctrine of warfare called intelligence warfare that uh China has developed, which is essentially, if you're familiar with the OOD loop, right? So it came from fighter pilots, observe, orient, decide, and act. If you're in a if you're in a dog fight and you can get inside your opponent's oodle loop, in other words, observe, orient, decide, and act before he does or she does, you go home, they get shot down. Um China has not really been in a fight even since 1975, and the Russians are having a hard time beating the Ukrainians. No one, no one on this planet wants to go kinetic with the United States of America. We're just too good at it. So, what's their goal? Their goal is to attack us uh on two separate planes. This is this is their doctrine, not something that's made up. Um and those planes are called the perceptual plane, which is the commander's ability to actually understand what's happening inside the battle space. So used to be until very recently, if the commander wanted to know what was going on in the battlefield, they just poked their head over the berm. Hey, there's the Russians, there's the Germans, there's the whoever. Uh these days it's all sensor-based, right? So uh it's not just about denying or degrading a communications network, it's about inserting false data. Uh, if you've ever seen the movie A House of Dynamite on Netflix, the technical advisors were Air Force generals working on real life scenarios. So part of the issue is you're going to confuse your, your, your adversary if you're the if you're a nation state. That's that's sort of job one. Number two is let's create multiple simultaneous cognitive challenges in the mind of decision makers to slow them down. Yeah. And when you do that, and you do that a lot of ways, uh, if you've looked at intelligent waves, we've got some interesting folks on our board. One is uh the retired Marine three-star who fought the largest battle since Vietnam, Fallujah, who talked about the fact that he didn't sleep for a year. And when he was a staff officer at CentCon, he didn't sleep for a year. And that pretty much turns you into a drunk, and it will degrade your ability to think. So we talked a little bit before about how the front of the brain gets lit up. What we're able to do is teach you how to suppress all the activity in the front of the brain. In other words, frontal beta and gamma, which are the brain waves that really create hypervigilance that you can't slow down, your heart rate, get burned out. We're able to slow those down significantly and open up the occipital and parietal cortexes where you're able to uh keep your rational brain, your thinking brain online, uh, while you're uh faced with very difficult or challenging circumstances, you're able to leave the emotion or suppress the emotion to keep the logical brain online and functioning. Uh, it was designed to do this under combat circumstances. So it's been uh we've been very successful in using it uh in in other kinds of uh of modalities and approaches. So uh, you know, at the end of the day, what we're really teaching you to do is have a more efficient and effective brain. And it's not so much about frequency forcing, you know, ship portion your brain into uh uh one configuration or another. It's about teaching your brain how to how to be more efficient, use fewer resources to accomplish the same goals. So that over time, what happens is you sort of become uh your your default state is equanimity as opposed to hypervigilance. Uh and what we find is there's sort of an unintended consequence that you get as we look through these EEGs over time, you get three or four months into this thing and you start to look like a long-term meditator because your brain is now under your control, not under someone else's.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

Right. Yeah, no, it's and what what's sort of difficult, one of the things is difficult for like veterans to do, for instance, is um when

Everyday Triggers And Staying Calm

SPEAKER_00 37:05

you're in the military, everything is treated like hurry up, hurry up, you gotta uh do things fast. It's gotta, you know, everything has to be in a hurry and blah blah blah. And um there's actually very few instances in daily life where that's a necessity. Um, you know, and that that's a difficult transition to make. Even I struggle with it. One of the biggest struggles I've had is just being on an airplane, being in the back of the plane somewhere, and watching people slowly get up, get their luggage, move out, and I'd be thinking, dude, hurry up, man. Even though there's actually no rational need for anybody for me to be fast. Like it's a two-hour layover, or I'm home now, or whatever. There's no reason why I needed people to hurry up, but I had been trained to you're always like hurry up, hurry up from from the first time you get off that bus uh at 10 o'clock at night, your first day of basic training from your entire career after that. It's like hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

Why do these people not have a plan? Yeah, because I have a plan.

SPEAKER_00 38:20

Yeah, exactly. And so so trying to get in that state of like there's no need to hurry, even if you're late for work, me being hurry and amped up and is only gonna increase the chances of me getting in an accident. I'm not gonna get there quicker, or I'll get a speeding ticket because I'm like ramming it, trying to like make up 10 minutes when who's gonna die if I'm not there on time or whatever. So so so being able to even in small ways can be really beneficial because in civilian world and 90% of life, there's really no need to be anything but in a calm state so you can function and think through. Um, I was I was in Kansas last week, first day on my way to teach a bunch of chaplains about moral injury, and so I was in the rental car, everything was going fine. I'm kind of out in the middle of nowhere because where the joint force headquarters was was in Topeka, which is slightly larger than the middle of nowhere, and so I'm I'm on this country road just thinking, ooh, doo-doo, I never met anybody there, so I was a little I was uh getting there very early because I wanted a chance to meet people, make sure the setup was right, all that stuff you do, you know, to make sure you have a good class. And out of nowhere, bam, my tire exploded. I think literally exploded.

SPEAKER_02 39:48

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 39:49

And uh looking back, I go, I was amazingly calm the whole time. I was pissed for a minute, but I never lost my cool. I never I just looked at this and said, This is not good, and calmly changed it, but I said, I haven't done it in years, but I know how to change the tire. And so I changed the tire, text the guy, hey, I'm gonna be another 20 minutes. I just had a tire blow, whatever, blah blah blah. Inside, I wanted to like scream, but I maintained this outward calm, and it was just another reminder of see, you don't need to be excited. I solved the problem easily and quickly by staying calm and keeping my brain, what's the next step? Okay, find the jack, find this back, you know, and I just took myself through that, and it was a good reminder of like I could have, and in my youth, I certainly would have gotten pissed off, I'd have kicked a few things, I'd have spent like three minutes, maybe five minutes, losing my mind, only in the end to do the same thing, change the freaking tire and get on the road and get to where I need to go. So it's like, why not do it calmly? And so so I could see like beyond the benefit of like somebody who's really struggling getting this. I could see like the average person who's not a uh meditation like monk or shaman or something going, I could be in better states uh most of the time and I could function better and be happier. Just it's only about generally happier. The same problems that you face when you're in a calm state, all of a sudden don't seem like that big of a deal. Uh, even if even if you even if you know the solution is difficult, even if you know you have to do a difficult thing to solve it, you can still do that fairly readily without a ton of like emotional uh suffering if you're in the right state. So I I see this as being, you know, you talk about optimization, and I I could see like almost everyone could benefit from from this kind of modality, you know, coupled with, I would say, you know, and plus if you're getting some coaching or or uh talk therapy or counseling where you're changing your mindset about how you think about things could could you know also in just increase the exponentially increase the benefit and and the you know like success you're seeing in life because of you know you're in a good state the vast majority of the time, or if you get out of the state, you're able to quickly get in the right state, and then you're have learnt skills and thinking that you've learned, you know, uh thinking processes or thinking mentalities. I mean, there's if I want to be a business person, I still need to know. I can be in a great state, but I have no business knowledge, I'm still gonna fail. So if you if you're coupling those together, you know, your learning plus your big staying in the right state, you know, there's nothing you couldn't achieve um in your relationships, in your in your business,

Wearables, Feedback, Whole-Body Progress

SPEAKER_00 43:15

your profession, whatever it is, I feel like.

SPEAKER_02 43:19

A lot of it is uh is providing feedback for our our clients as well. Um so if you've got a like an aura ring or a whoop or an apple watch, we can we can actually show you as you're as you're watching, uh, as you're doing the the programs, you can see over time how your sleep changes, how your physiological stress changes. So we have a lot of uh evidence based correlation, even things like um uh uh psychometric testing that you might go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist for and take a an MMPI or an ENT, uh a Myers Briggs, uh uh or any any one of the uh like a SART test. Or PCL5 for PTSD, we can actually, that all stays in the in the program. So all of those become evidence and data that both this the psychometrics, the physiological, and the neurological feedback allows us to show you at any given point in time how you're doing in every one of those planes and how they all work together. It's not just one thing, it's not just your brain. It's your brain and your mind. And it's your brain and your mind and your body all working together to put you into a state where you can be uh uh most effective, efficient, and frankly happy. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter uh what any of these things do to your brain if your lived experience doesn't improve.

SPEAKER_00 44:45

Yeah, exactly. So in terms of uh if somebody says, man, this is

Cost, Access, And Veteran Support Options

SPEAKER_00 44:50

this is really I really need this, um what what are the costs involved? Is there insurance? Is there like what are the different ways that they can they can access or how how much what does it cost someone to to do get in your program?

SPEAKER_02 45:04

So so as we have a number of different levels of program, right? So there's uh you can go to the uh go to our website or you can go to the app store or Google Play and just download the Peak Neuro app, which has um different categories of uh of what we would call general modulations, right? So um there are uh there are sleep, there's uh uh there's upregulation, there's downregulation, there's stress management, there's all these different categories, and you can download those. It's free to try for 30 days. You can try anything you want. If you like it, then you can sign up for the for the subscription. That's sort of the consumer level version of what we do. And then we have a program that we uh uh two things, uh we work with clinicians. So if you have a uh a psychotherapist, a psychiatrist, a licensed uh uh clinical social worker that you're seeing in a therapeutic environment, they have access to the technology. And that's where they can administer like an EET, they can work with you uh uh in the long term. If you are a veteran listening to this podcast in crisis or you have an issue, contact uh Dan and he will contact us. Uh we will come and visit you at no charge. Um, part of what we're working on right now is we're working with uh several veterans and nonprofits, including Warriors Ethos, um, to provide as much of this as we can to uh to veterans and first responders at no cost. Uh that's amazing. If you're if you're struggling, you know don't don't hesitate. If um you know if you're seeing a uh a therapist, ask them if they have you know if they can uh do the peak nore program for you. And they can reach out to us and we'll be happy to set them up for that. Um there are for for clinicians, it's a it's a pretty good deal because it actually is adjunctive to their practice and there's some economic benefit for them. Uh and it is in some cases covered by insurance. In some cases it's not, depending on what program you're in. Um, but it is uh yeah, the last thing in the world we would want any listener to a uh a podcast that deals with moral injury is for someone to think that they can't afford it.

SPEAKER_00 47:18

Yeah. Yeah, I really appreciate that. That's huge. And you know, many of the veterans, of course, that that we that we help are um you know in difficult situations financially and stuff. They need to help. Uh so I I really appreciate that uh tremendously. Give us your uh email your uh the website address.peakneuro one word dot com. Okay. Yeah, it's great. And we'll have this in the show notes too for like the YouTube and all. Uh, but just for people that are listening, if they're driving, how to do it, you know, how to get in touch with it. Um so yeah, this is great. It do in in terms of your in terms of your work and and some of the organizations you're working with now, is there anything on the horizon for you or uh any evolutions that you all are looking to make um or the initiatives that you're working

Next Frontier: AI Tutor And Learning

SPEAKER_00 48:20

on?

SPEAKER_02 48:20

Yeah, well, the next thing we're doing, so it's kind of interesting. Um a lot of military folks, I'm sure, listen to this podcast. If you grew up in a military family like I did, um you probably did not have the world's best educational experience. When you're the new kid in a school, teachers are people too, right? They've got a bias for the kids that they know. And uh I I I had never heard the words autodidact until I was about 30 years old, but I think I've learned more from experience than I have from education, just because the experience wasn't very good. And you know, uh there's a lot of pushback around AI right now, and I can certainly understand that. But I would it's kind of interesting. Um the the experience of going to five high schools, for example, uh coupled with what's happening today in education. I live in Fairfax County, Virginia, and my sister-in-law is a primary school teacher. Class sizes are 3540 students. I think it could help. Um given that we can create, and we literally can, and we've done this in our study, increased neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to uh adjust, adapt, and learn. We can we can improve that with modulation. So we're working on the next iteration. I'm uh starting a fellowship at Columbia University this year to do the research on this, which is around building a cognitive tutor uh in AI. You know, and honestly, this came out of uh kind of the origin of the story is funny. Came out of an argument I had with my wife. My wife hates technology, she hates AI, she doesn't have a social media account. Um, but what we were able to do here at Pink Nora for even for ourselves is uh to learn some of the things we needed to learn to create the new technology that hadn't existed before. Um, rather than go try and read 100 neuroscience books, we built a cognitive tutor, fed it a series of psychometric uh measurements, uh lexical density, vocabulary, grammar, personality, learning styles. There's a term in education called the zone of uh of proximal development, which is really uh fancy words for saying if it's too easy, it goes right through you. If it's too hard, you give up. But if it's just hard enough, you'll remember. So being able to adjust that zone of proximal, of uh approximate uh development uh is part of the next iteration of our AI that will essentially be an adjunctive tutor, cognitive tutor for students who struggle in a particular subject. But the goal is not to keep the student using AI, right? It's not about AI writing your report, it's about AI answering questions and helping you with subject mastery and critical thinking. At which point it psychologically starts to pull away from you. So we don't make you dependent on AI, we make you independent of AI by accelerating your ability to learn based on your own personal learning styles. Um that's very difficult in a class of 40 students, but if you've got an internet connection, you can go home and you can work on this. I'm actually giving a uh keynote on a uh at Columbia in uh November for an education conference with a bunch of university presidents around that subject. So that will be the next the next thing that we tackle, which is really uh neuromodulation to improve learning and neuroplasticity.

SPEAKER_00 51:40

Yeah, that's exciting. I I'm uh I use AI pretty extensively. I I think there's a lot of great benefits to it. It's gonna continue to evolve. I think there's a lot of false ideas about it. Um and you know, and my AI is not at a place where it can really actually just write your report, write your story, write your book for you. Because if you try to do that, then when you read it later, you're like, what in the hell is this talking about? I I I experimented once. Um, I said, I wonder how quickly this thing could write a book because people are talking about AIs, da da da. And so, and so it was fun at first. I would gave it a basic plot and then said start reading it, and it was like it would write the chat. Oh, are you ready to go to chapter? The first couple of chapters like, actually, it's pretty cool. Are you ready to write the next? Yeah, write it by chapter four or five. This thing had totally lost the plot, it had confused the characters, it was doing things. I was like, what are you talking about, man? So so AI needs to be supervised and and edited and closely monitored, but it still has a lot of great ways of like connecting information, connecting, helping do research, helping, you know, like you mentioned, if you if you have to read all the books and the articles consciously, how much of our are you really capturing where um you know with AI can help you connect some of these pieces for people? Um, and I've heard of this educational experimentation and work where they're helping just prompt a student to think through things, and and I think all this should be embraced uh with the proper ethical guidelines and so on. I've seen AI help with uh grief, um grief recovery or grief processing and so on. So all that to say uh as we wind down, like I I'm excited about the direction that you're going. And uh I know there's lots of smart

Final Takeaways And Closing

SPEAKER_00 53:45

people on your staff and your group on your board that are that are carefully analyzing how you guys are doing this and moving forward and so on. So uh I appreciate that. Gives me a great level of comfort with what you're doing, and I I think the listeners can appreciate it. So um, Tony, I I appreciate you being on the podcast, and uh I look forward to to uh hearing more from you and seeing how things are going.

SPEAKER_02 54:13

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Dan.

SPEAKER_00 54:15

Yeah, it's my pleasure.