I always struggled focusing I always struggled you know getting work done in time nothing works better than that I don't care what supplement I've tried all kinds of great supplements that help or aid but nobody was talking with everybody's locked in yeah the first time I tried brain FM I remember taking my headphones out and saying holy shit I thought I worked for two hours it was only 30 minutes you just found the most downloaded fitness health entertainment podcast in the world this is my pump today's episode we have the CEO of brain dot FM on Dan Clark so he gets on the show and explains how this how this stuff works it is literally like magic so these are sounds that you listen to that induce states of mind and they've done studies on this they've proven it with FM our eyes it works I mean the guys and I use them on a regular basis and it will make you feel focused or it will make you want to relax fall asleep it's pretty remarkable stuff he gets on explains it and then if you go through our link brain FM forward slash mine pump you get 30 days for free so you literally try it out see for yourself pretty wild stuff today's program give away his maps power lift to enter to win leave a comment below this video in the first 24-hour period subscribe this channel also turn on your notifications that enters you to win those episodes brought to you by a sponsor Legion they make high performance supplements or pre-workout powders protein powders supplements that can help recovery supplements that can help with sleep Lunar very effective sleep supplement go check them out get yourself a discount go to buy legion commas be y l e g i o n dot com forward slash mine pump use the good mine pump get 20% off your first order and double rewards points if you are an existing customer for using that link also this month's program sale maps anywhere and maps hit both 50% off if you're interested just click on the link at the top of the description below all right back to the show Dan welcome back thanks it's been a while 2018 over five years since you've had you on the show so you're running brain FM I have to be honest mm-hmm when we first started working with you guys it has to be no it is it was the weirdest product by far that I never used I was more skeptical have there's been some products have been skeptical of and that have like you know kind of blown my mind and I've changed my mind yeah but you're your guys' company your product I was so skeptical like whatever okay let's see how this works and it's really weird yeah it's actually strange how effective it is in fact we've talked about you guys probably more than almost any other sponsor without being paid in fact it was just us bringing you guys up because of its impact I want to know what's happened since over the last five years because a lot's changed and you guys have grown quite a bit yeah totally so let's talk about that for a second yeah well first I just want to say thank you guys because when I was here last the company really just started and since then we've actually grown significantly which we'll dive into we've had more than four people four million people use brain FM since I've been on the show wow and it really all started here and you guys really saw the potential for it you saw the wacky idea and it's so cool to be back here and you know talk to you guys about all the updates speaking of four million people using it what is the stick rate on something like this I imagine you know like us people probably are skeptical they experience it then they probably get hooked is it higher than a typical app or like how do you compare it to other apps that people would download and pay for like is it something that majority of people stick around or they only stick around for a little bit what does that look like yeah great question so our biggest challenge is getting people to try it because it does like even when I tried it the first time I thought it was BS right and when people do try it in during the trial we give you know someone a few days to do it without charging them right and the more they use it the more their conversion rate goes up of course right so this is about three times sticky as a comparable product wow so if someone listens to an hour for of trying brain FM then their conversion rate doubles wow right and it just shows that if someone actually tries it and experiences it you know how it's intended to you can feel the effects on your first time now because of that have you guys you know modeled it different or marketed it different because you're learning that man if we could just get these people to listen to an hour the conversion rate so high so have you guys throughout the since we've seen you last have strategies changed on how to encourage people to do that a thousand percent yeah it's really been about one is making sure that when someone comes in we're explaining to them what you know that the music does but more importantly is matching them to the music that's gonna be effective for them right and there's so much stuff we can get into versus you know how someone has extroverted or introverted right if someone has ADHD all these kinds of different things so we're really trying to nail the first experience because just to get to them to that point can be challenging you know you're like oh this is just music how is this gonna be much different yeah and it's really hard to tell or show someone the science because we're trying to disguise the science in right and when you actually get to that point and you say oh wow okay I I'm gonna try this for 30 minutes I'm gonna have work in front of me and all of a sudden you hit you like clicks and that's what we're trying to give that aha moment in the first yeah I got it so I gotta tell I have two experiences with Brent FM that were profound and then I was like so the first one when we first started working with you guys I put on focus and at the time I was doing a lot of our writing so we have like marketing material that goes out blogs and what called white papers okay three thousand word whatever documents and I put it on and I played it and I remember it's about five or seven minutes in I got I got really in the zone yeah and I remember questioning it like was that really yeah that or was it just that I got in the zone and then I tried it again and it happened again took about five minutes each time it was like oh my god this is really weird then the second big experience was one of the most terrifying flights I've ever been on in my entire life we were flying from you guys remember that one can yeah from Spokane to I don't remember where and we were on this propeller plane a little puddle jumper and it was I get anxious on planes anyway but this flight was like if you didn't have a seatbelt on you hit the ceiling of the yeah like that's scary oh yeah people were crying and people were praying out loud and you know it was really scary yeah and I had my headphones on and I was playing meditate yeah and I was sitting there with my hands like this listening to meditate and I was scared but I lose my mind and if I didn't have that for sure yeah that would have been a total panic attack so that was that was those are my like some of my first like experiences where I was like okay this is pretty insane now you started as a user and that's what got you to work yeah company how did so what happened there do you have similar experience yeah so the first time I tried brain FM I remember taking my headphones out at the end and saying holy shit like what is this right and to give you context my background right I always struggled focusing I always struggled you know getting work done in time and what happened was I was always looking for that edge I was looking for that you know flow state right which we call it now right the zone and for me it's this magic zone when it's like two in the morning you've had two cups of coffee and you have a project do tomorrow and you just like it's just effortless you can feel like you can work forever right and I remember coming into brain FM having similar feelings like this probably isn't gonna work but I'll try this in the stack of all the other things right and I remember taking my headphones out and being like whoa I thought I worked for two hours it was only 30 minutes and I got so excited I was like all right this like actually almost like you I was like this might be too this may not work right let's try to break this and I remember staying up for like 24 hours I remember changing my diet I remember trying to like see if I could make it yeah exactly not effective anymore and it worked every single time and from then I was like I just need to be part of this rocket ship yeah so let's take a step back for a second yeah because it to someone who's not familiar this does sound like if I'm listening right now I'm like what do you guys magic okay but but here's now if we go with the logical side we know that music has or sounds have profound effects on the human brain we know that music can improve a child's ability to learn we know that we memorize things far more effectively through music if you were to say the ABCs right now you'd sing it because that's how we learned it that's how we end up remembering things music lights up the entire brain improves our ability to do math and to comprehend things and to think abstractly so it's not out of the realm of you know what we already understand in the sense that yeah sounds can definitely have a profound impact on how the brain operates you guys took that to the next level right what do we what are we dealing with what do we are we literally trying to induce states of mind that we've identified as this is what Delta waves like when somebody's focused this is what it looks like when somebody's asleep is that what you guys are working with because we found this in classical music forever you've heard that and this is why we've played it for like young kids and it's done something significant in terms of them remembering things and being able to study more effectively but somehow like you guys were able to figure out the science behind that and really like hone in and and get to a level that we hadn't seen before what like how did how did originally how did they get to that point like where they could really fine tune it to where your brain responded even more aggressively yeah so there's a lot to unpack here right first is why does music exist right and obviously music like you know Rihanna or whatever is entertainment but music in the beginning was actually functional only teaching so it was for lullabies right it was for war drums it was to accomplish something right and then as you know free as music got more accessible it started going into an entertainment focus right and then now merging this with the studies of the brain we're able to recognize like you said brain waves right beta alpha theta right and understanding that when you're in beta you're having that's what that's what a focus mind looks like right so what we started doing is seeing all of the science that exists in the world right and different attempts of trying to elicit that you may have heard of like binaural beats or isochronic tones right which we can get into later but it's really brain FM is the encapsulation of taking all of this stuff with functional music and all of this neuroscience this bleeding edge neuroscience we have today and combining them together to elicit this really strong response and what's happening is we're able to apply not only things that sound like you're focusing right like basic stuff like no lyrics in music having no salience which is the the difference of noise like loud bangs and stuff right that are distracting but we actually go a second level or a third level where we're actually adding modulations to the music right and modulations are these patterns that when your brain is decoding music from you know sound to electrical impulses what's happening is your brain is reorganizing to those patterns delta theta all those right and what's happening is blood flow in your brain is responding right so for work for example what you need to have to be more effective at work is have more blood flow in your prefrontal cortex right it's pretty well known okay and what we're doing is we're putting patterns inside of the music that then turn into patterns in your brain that redistribute blood flow in your brain wait so you're okay so this science is based off of brain waves and blood flow correct yeah so brain brain waves and blood flow are are the same right so if you have a certain brain wave pattern you have blood flow as a result right so a lot of the times in you know like pharmaceutical medicine they're doing things that change blood flow so it changes the electrical got it and we're changing electrical so it changes blood flow wow yeah and how are you how is how is this uh looked at is it fmri technology is it just yeah so it's fmri eg right um we actually have this really cool paper in pre-publication in a leading academic journal right now um and it shows what happens when people are listening to brain fm versus spotify versus white noise pink noise versus you know all of these different kinds of things and we can you can see the brain in real time start redistributing and realigning to this this effect so what are some of the similarities that it has with some of our favorite music like what's what's the same and what's different like is there obviously there's there's things that you guys have added to it because you've enhanced it or whatever but what are some of the things are there are direct correlations like is there a reason why there's certain music that I I listen to is it also because it's it's also subconsciously getting me more focused or yeah it really depends so at first it depends on the function like what are you doing are you working are you working out right you probably already listen to different music depending on what you're doing right we're aware of that so the some of the the starting points are like no lyrics right because what's happening is it's kind of um it's energy management so let's say we're working out right what we want is we want to distract ourselves from the pain we're putting on our body right we want to um create like high salient songs so a lot of people when they work out they listen to like rock and roll or heavy metal or EDM right because there's a lot of structure to that music that's taking um that we're not in our in our mind we're kind of like out of it right but when you're working you kind of want the opposite you want to have things that are less distracting so no lyrics right you want like a steady beat um a lot of music today is three minute tracks because they're not made for extended sessions of 90 minutes they're made for really still entertainment purposes so you know on one level we're doing all the the more obvious things where all of our all of our songs are 30 minutes plus right um where no lyrics in the songs they're um they like fold into each other so they sound similar but they have you know these qualities that bring you into focus right yeah yeah like heart rate for instance like an excitement level and all that so you kind of factor that in in terms of like which one works best for like you said working out versus like trying to be calm and focused and study yeah so like you can kind of think of sound to have all these different characteristics right um one of them could be um you know bpm which everyone knows is how fast the song is moving right but then you also have other things of like texture right um and i'm not a musician right but it's more of like the complexity of how much music is going on so how many instruments are playing at the same time yeah exactly layers yeah i was gonna ask about that because like you've heard and we brought up classical music and uh but too you guys have like a section for focus which has that uh classical music on top but there's under underlying layers i'm wondering the modulations yeah yeah so what's happening the modulations um you know maybe it makes it makes sense to take a step back and actually talk about like the first time this was attempted right and those are binaural beats or isochronic tones so in i think the 70s right they started becoming very popular where you can listen this music and zone in it was basically what we promised with brain fm today the challenger or the way it works right is you play one frequency in one ear and one frequency in the other opposing frequencies and what happens is when you're listening to them in your brain stem they combine and they make an amplitude the difference of those frequencies right so if you have 150 in one ear and 140 in in the other you'll get a 10 hertz amplitude in your brain stem interesting and then what happens is that um through a process of entrainment goes from your brain stem just throughout your brain right and um hopefully that helps you get into focus or relax or sleep or whatever the challenge though is your brain stem is like one of the reptilian parts of our brain right and it doesn't have like the highest resolution basically right so what happens is that could take 30 minutes to work sometimes or maybe even weeks to start using this to get into that and then when it's studied it has sparse results right in double blind studies so so placebo plays an effect etc right and what we're doing is we're taking the same idea where we're adding like delta waves or um beta waves or something like that but instead of doing it through binaural beats through those different tones we're actually pre-processing it we're doing like a monoreal beat and then we're hiding that beat in a bass frequency right so what's happening is it doesn't go to your brain stem throughout the whole brain it goes right into your prefrontal cortex when you start listening to it in 10 seconds and it starts ramping immediately it's like a more bioavailable correct than binaural beats that's a that's a great metaphor yeah so it works immediately and it's the as fast as you know you hear your favorite song you start wanting to dance to it that's the effect so we're passing a lot of the ancient technology or can you guys patent that can you we have it okay so you are so that formula is patent so somebody else can't come and figure wow yeah it's the production of music um so we have a like I think we have like 14 patents today um a lot of them are in production of music a lot of them are on biosensors and and things that we're working on in the future which we can get into later but yeah here's a question I have um memory and experiences plays a definitely a role in how music affects us in the sense that I can listen to a certain soundtrack of a of a movie yep because I have immediately thinking rocky yeah um and it can it can get me motivated like nothing else because of the memory of the movie when I watch as a kid and I have this kind of like experience that it kind of brings up on me the reason why I'm bringing this up is I noticed that when I listen to a brain FM track and I find one that I like and then I listen to it again I listen to it again it works better and better and better whereas it might have taken me five to seven minutes to induce the effect that I'm looking for whether it's meditation or sleep or focus and I literally have them on my phone saved I can pull them up there's certain ones that I might go to and it's like 30 seconds yep is that effect in my in my describing the effect that that I'm experiencing is that what's happening yeah so that what's really cool is you're actually describing a psychological effect called priming right so um some people before they go on stage they'll smell like cinnamon sure right to get them pumped and to get them into that zone and what happens is you're basically queuing your brain that you're about to work you're about to do something okay so what's cool about when you use brain FM you're actually you can prime it two ways one is the same track right playing but then also you're always using focus you're always having the same pattern so now you're more sensitive to that pattern that focus pattern that we put in all of our focus music so you're much more likely to get into flow state and to get into that zone quicker and then stay there so in essence uh you're training your brain both ways both psychologically through experience and then maybe even neurologically so you're developing new neural pathways that can respond a little faster yeah and then there's a physiological response because of listening to music and how your brain is responding to the environment that you're in wow yeah now are you able to um you know adhd or add is a big topic these days um you know it's quite common you brought a statistic i think it's one out of four people might have add or adhd so not adhd but like attentional disorders okay either like adhd or subclinical adhd got it got it so it's quite common it's very common in entrepreneurs i don't know if you know this oh yeah but it's something like 80 percent of entrepreneur everybody in this room yep uh to some extent i'm the winner by far i would say i probably have the worst case of it can you see an adhd brain or can they identify it through the the brain waves or are they able to identify it without having to test you for your focus and then art and then how does brain fm affect an adhd brain yeah good question so i'd have to chat with our science team to figure out if you can see it from a brain scan but i do know that we do a lot of studies with people that have adhd right and the you know the stat is basically five percent of people have clinical adhd where it actually affects their life negatively so they have to go get prescription drugs to manage it then you have 15 to 20 percent of people that have like subclinical adhd and one of the telltale science for that is you ever see someone bouncing their leg yeah right um does anyone do that here yeah so you're probably in the subclinical setting right it's not a bad thing but what's happening is your brain is seeking stimulation right so what you're trying to do is you're trying to figure out how can i do the things that i need to get done but give it stimulation and the magic of brain fm is that you're able to actually provide that that hurt tone that we're adding to the music the modulations it's an on and off pulse that's kind of like both entertaining and distracting your brain it's kind of like a fidget spinner in in the form of audio yeah the way i've heard heard explained is your your your an adhd brain or distracted brain is looking for something to keep it present so this physical feeling you know uh is is keeping me present are you are you guys working with schools or or with parents uh who are yeah last time you're here i thought you said that you guys had been able to have a breakthrough in terms of being accepted as an alternative to medication medications is that is that true uh so we definitely are used by people that um are trying to like lower their medications or use us before they're going on medications we were going to go down the fda route and get approved and try to look at that but as you can imagine it's very expensive yeah and we said hey you know what we can definitely go down this route um you know we have some really great scientists on our team and we've done a lot of studies um but it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of money and it would be better to figure out how to grow this thing and make the product better and then go down that route later but with that being said we do have a ton of people like if you if like we said 25 of the population right now has some kind of adhd like tendencies but our users have like 60 percent right and then what's really cool is not only it's good for adhd but actually people would like autism or people with anxiety or all these other kinds of things that they are trying to normalize they use us a ton and it's really recommended by a few different organizations to support that so um you know focus meditation sleep relaxation deep sleep have you guys delved into looking at creating a anti-depressive state or a happy state or anything like that or is that or are we getting too close to things that we don't necessarily want to touch because regulations and all that no i think we're open to anything um to be honest and this is this is kind of or better words be blunt right the thing that the brain FM needs and the thing that i need is the focus right and when i came on here last with you guys i was trying everything i was like this is going to change the world let's be let's do this let's let's do stuff in medicals so we we're doing things with anesthesia we're doing things in enterprise we're doing things all over the place and unfortunately you can't do everything at the same time yeah so what it's it's kind of ironic right we're doing a focus company right and at the same time we need to focus but we made the strategic decisions say hey you know what let's make a consumer product first let's help a lot of people right and then let's grow this thing so we can invest more resources but along the way we found some really cool things so we did an anesthesia study with people getting colonoscopies and endoscopies and we found that by playing relaxed music beforehand and and wake-up music which is like a very much more intense focus mix we actually found we could wake people up and discharge them 15 faster what right and i was there experiencing that like watching people get these surgeries right with their permission of course and they would wake up and they're like i've had this done once a year every year because i have you know something that has to be watched and every year i wake up and i'm crying or i'm like have you guys ever got anesthesia it's a nasty experience it's it's crazy a lot of people yeah right and people would come up out of surgery and be like completely fine and they'd be like what is what is this this is crazy what they do is put headphones on while they're asleep and then turn it on and let's see what happens yeah we would put on bone conducting headphones on them right and uh put it on when they're getting like the um the purple ball the the anesthetic and then they'd fall asleep to it and then when they're done surgery they would switch it and turn on the wake-up music whoa and then what's happening is during anesthesia your brain waves are basically separating like they're not commute your layers of your brain are not communicating right and when you're waking up what's happening is you're kind of like loopy you have to reintegrate right yeah they have to reintegrate so what's happening is we're giving it a a leading pattern to basically like um yeah to follow you know and we help organize the brain so it it can be more coherent faster so you're not drunk for like 30 minutes wow um so that was really cool and we found um a lot of you know opportunity there and uh we're still in the process of that but obviously there's tons of red tape and we want to make sure we do the right way yeah if you've ever i mean for parents who've ever had a kid that's gone under it sucks yeah come out because they're just inconsolable for a while and it's the integration of the brain waves which i didn't know i thought it was just they're just disoriented but i guess of course that would make you feel yeah it makes me think about coming out of like a an ebreated sort of state like in terms of anything like you know if i'm drunk or if i'm you know under the influence of somehow to kind of bring me back in i wonder if there's something there there might be i've never personally tried that but i'm sure some people obviously i'm not like you know what i'm saying that's yeah have you guys interesting have you have you guys done anything with like uh intimacy have you have you experimented with that or done any studies on that because Adam has well i mean i don't know if you know this or not but not long after we had seen you last time i shared on the podcast one of my experiences with it well it's become i've done it many times now but one of the craziest coolest things that i've done is put focus on with my wife before sex and it's like the intimacy level is like and what i what i attribute that to and maybe you you can add to it or whatever explain it better is i think we all are we live in a very distracted time with our phones and tv and stuff like that and i think it just kind of drowns all that out and then it becomes just her and i having great conversation and then and then when you're in the moment it's just i don't know it helps it helps with that even tighter and closer have you heard anything or know anybody yeah yeah so um that's you nailed it that's exactly what's happening we're so distracted what's happening it's making you present and you know that could like our primary focus is for work right but there's a lot of these really unique experiences and um for a long time one of the highest referrals for brain fm was actually a tantric sex blog right because because a blog that would send people to you because it said listen to this yeah there were their number one resource for helping people like connect right and there's a lot of again there's so many things that's the hard part um you know leading the companies there's so many things that like this story yeah let's help you let's help all the people like you yeah but for right now we're like okay let's have this primary focus first low hanging fruit for exactly and then grow into it um that's that you know that's a really cool story this other really cool story um we have and this is more on the focus front but um there's this one woman that contacted us and she's like hey i just want to thank you for the last five years and her story was that she was a student trying to be a lawyer and she couldn't focus and she was in a she's we're worldwide right so she's in a country she couldn't get at all it wasn't legal for her right and um she said she found brain fm and all of a sudden she could get her work done right and then she became a lawyer and she was a lawyer for several years and she's like but then i wanted more and she she's like i'm writing this to you as a judge in my country and i owe it all to brain fm and the thing that you're able to give me wow that's remarkable yeah it's it's really cool it's it's it's something that i never imagined yeah and then on top of that what's what's also really cool compared to like new tropics or all these other um consumables that are like coming up is that a lot of those you can become um normalized to yeah you know like you drink coffee and all of a sudden you need two cups and stuff but because this is a bylaw like your blood flow and how your brain works you can't normalize to it it's something that actually just strengthens in time rather than gets weaker that's my experience yeah you know when you use a stimulant or a supplement that helps induce focus your brain down regulates receptors and changes its own catecholamine production to bring it back to where it was before and like you said you need more and more and more this the more i've used it i've used it now for years it works faster and easier every single time and so it's almost like i think it's right to make you and creating neural pathways yeah you know through that process we've we've been mostly talking about the focus but i feel like the most profound one is the sleep i mean what's going on there because that's something that i use that more consistently than the others because we travel so much or we have speaking engagements where my adrenaline's going like crazy one of the hardest things to do is to be you know away from home in a hotel after a long crazy day of work to be able to like settle yeah settle down and actually go to sleep nothing works better than that i don't care what supplement i've tried all kinds of great supplements that help or aid but i think nothing helps more than the brain what is going on there is it is it mostly helping with deep is it helping with ram is it helping with all the above like what's what's going on that's helping me yeah so uh it's similar process where we're taking music that sounds you know is slower is it is bringing your heart rate down things like that there's all these wonderful studies to show that um you can take regular existing music and change someone's heartbeat right um and you're not changing it wildly right not a hundred percent but you can change five to ten percent which is a significant difference right so we're doing things that sound you know like like peaceful right and then we're adding in our technology to it right and um as an effect you're getting these really long slow wave delta waves that we're adding to it right and when we started we did um a lot of research and sleep our main thing is a really driving focus right now but um we saw that we were able to increase um slow wave sleep which is where you get you know the deep recovery and have spin electivity in the brain um so the idea is um you're actually getting more restful sleep um and you're listening to this um in two ways either one to help you fall asleep or the entire time you're sleeping yeah um and we find that like some of our most dedicated fans um they're they're like using us for sleep every single day or they're using us for focus every day and it's really interesting that people gravitate towards one or the other yeah you know i you're i want to just this conversation is make me want to go Doug and i have been like really diving into our our sleep and like with our oar ring and trying all these different things to keep improving the score and i actually what i haven't done is actually consistently done it for my sleep at home i always use it when i know i'm like gonna need like i have to have it because i can't i use it on the plane yeah like stuff like that i'm using it where i actually haven't tried to see like oh what happens if i actually use this every night at home and see if i can improve my sleep score i'd like to see what that would do we've had listeners uh talk about using it on their pets yeah so they'll play it in the room because their dogs are you know yippy or whatever it works on the pets yeah which is kind of weird not that your products made for pets but yeah we we get a lot of really interesting use cases for that um you can also do some really cool stuff when you combo the activities together so um we're we're actually building this in our app because we've had so many people that listen like focus and then relax and then focus again oh or they do they do they're listening to sleep and right when they start in the morning they put on focus to wake them up like a sleep and wake kind of thing um and it's very interesting because when you have maybe more depth of control over guiding your brain into certain states now you can start playing with it and personally when i do focus and i'll do relax and i'll do focus again i can reach a level that is entirely higher than i can normally do so we find a lot of people will listen to relax first for like 30 minutes while they're like brushing their teeth and they're doing their thing and then they put sleep on yeah and it's like a really nice interesting downstay and then regulation into that yeah that's interesting are you these studies that you're talking about these are you guys put these together and fund them and and say okay how are these working um so we are we're not funding them all by ourselves because science is incredibly expensive yeah that's why i'm asking because i know what the cost is it's insane yeah so um like uh so our study that we're doing right now that we've been working on for last several years is actually funded by the national science foundation so we got a very large grant from them um i think uh a quarter of million dollars from them to help fund so that was um a huge chunk what's that looking at can you say that's for yeah that's for ADHD that's that's the specific ability to see is this a not a cure but it's more of like is this a viable treatment correct a viable treatment yeah um and it's that's the thing that's allowed us to do fmuri and and do partnerships with uh northeastern and and really look at the brain on a um a level that you can't do commercially yeah off air you were mentioning something about dementia and Alzheimer's can you talk about those yeah of course so we're not doing these studies um but it's the same technology that we're using which is um modulations or amplitude modulations and what's crazy is at mit a doctor doctor sigh right she's been doing a lot of studies on dementia and Alzheimer's right and what they're doing is first they would do this in actually rodents where they would play um a 40 Hertz modulation they put light and sound and they were able to show these rodents brains that are built to have basically Alzheimer's um it reverses right and then they did this on humans and to be fair they did this with a only 15 people right it was a it was a starting of a study um but they saw that 15 out of 15 people that went through this and were listening to modulations like an hour a day were actually reversing Alzheimer's and dementia um and you know crazy and just today because something came out where they are um for cancer patients that are going through chemo a lot of them experience brain fog and disorientation obviously it's a very intense treatment and they're doing similar things where they're playing modulations to them and they're seeing that that reduces brain I don't know if you know the answer to this but are they testing the Alzheimer's and dementia and showing it's reversal through symptoms or through looking at the brain itself and saying okay it's looking different yeah so they are doing like in the the reason why they do rodents and things like that is so they they can actually dissect the brains right and they can see differences in plaque and all these kinds of things um it's really interesting because the I believe the theory and again I'm not the scientist but I believe the theory is you have these neurons in your brain right and then underneath your neurons you have something called microglia and what happens is that microglia um kind of gets blocked right and that's where plaque build-up happens and things like that and the microglia um they basically um they function on a 40 hertz modulation they turn on and off right like from a wider thing all of our body is just on and off our muscles our brain everything right and if you are um playing a 40 hertz modulation the microglia kind of start um activating and start pulsing at the same time it will actually like clean off that plaque right that's probably not as technical as it needs to be but the idea that's an interesting theory yeah the idea is that this basically is is kind of like almost like um like a plunger for a toilet like pumping a muscle or flexing a muscle things move in and out of muscle every time you flex and can you know relax or contract and relax a muscle very interesting yeah what is your typical user look like you you mentioned one stat you said about 60 percent of your people would say they have ADHD like symptoms are there any of those statistics in terms of what the typical user looks like yeah so we have um I guess two types of users one are people that um are trying to deal or not deal but like better manage maybe anxiety or trying to perform right at a at a level where they're like okay I have I'm anxious about you know all the work I have to do or I'm anxious for this so I'm going to use this for planes right like um in addition to your story we get stories like that all the time right so we have a lot of people that are trying to like um look for almost like um a pain medication to solve an ail that they have right and then you have other people that are looking for like pure performance so they're like all right I'm already working eight hours a day how can I work you know 15 hours in eight hours you know how can I stuff as much as I can how can I lift 10 percent more you know um so we have these really two different archetypes of people um some of them have ADHD some of them um have anxiety some of them have sleep problems um you know but in the end we're we're able to be it's it's really unique because whether you have ADHD or some kind of neurodivergency or you're more normalized it works on everyone right to different levels of course um and our paper that I was alluded to earlier we found that people with ADHD that that share that they do this um this modulation is kind of like a dial we can actually turn it up or turn it down and if you turn it up on someone that doesn't have ADHD it will it will give you a headache right too much it's too much but so if someone with ADHD that can handle more stimulation in their brain you can dial it up even more and they can perform to a higher degree for longer so actually in the product we respond to that and we have like neural effect level and that's what that is so you can gauge it right yeah so you can pick your intensity of the effect right wow any any um sports teams using this do you know that you know of like that are implementing it into like their training routine and stuff do you know um I don't know about full sports teams I know some athletes have reached out to me and said hey I use this all the time for an individual basis um I've had a lot of I have had more conversations with like billionaires than I ever thought I would because people are like I use meditation every single day to go on a walk and it's the way that I can just focus and clear my head and do the things that I do um and I've had probably four or five people just reach out and they're like I just want to have a conversation with you is is the technology being used is it similar to are you familiar with like halo did you do you know the halo technology it's like the headset that you put on for training and it's supposed to help with like training patterns and to help solidify do you know if that's similar the science that you're that they're using in that compared to what you're doing do you know yeah so um I'm trying to think of the acronym I think it's like tcps or something it's it's basically like it's transcranial uh yeah yeah simulating something thank you yeah um little little dyslexia on my side um but like uh it is different so what's happening is that is doing that's kind of stimulating um through electrical impulses in a different way right where you know we're doing it you know through sound there's there's so many different ways you can you can you know stimulate the brain you can do it through magnets you can do it through um transcranial stuff you can do it through touch through light through sound and the reason why we pick sound is because it's one of the senses that you can always um basically we all already are already listening to things it's the easiest thing to it feels more organic to me yeah exactly and the interesting thing right um is that there's really no harm in it right if you put your music on too loud it can hurt your eardrums but when you talk about all the different ways other ways you can stimulate it actually can get dangerous and even just like light there's um I don't know what the the exact number is but I think it's like one out of 16,000 or something have epilepsy right so if we were doing this through light which we could do the same effect yeah we that's dangerous right plus it's also with sound I can do other things exactly so if I have to focus on something on my eyes I can't write or read whereas if I listen by the way last time you were on we asked you if this worked through speakers and not just through headphones yep and you were like no put on headphones and I gotta disagree with you I put on speakers and it works fine I have I well now now I have an answer to that yeah better because I that's what I thought that's what I was told okay because when you said that I'm like I wonder if he has to say yeah because all of us are trying in through speakers yeah and it works just fine so I think last time we were here we I didn't have the the five years of people telling me the same exact thing you did okay and what happens is all of our studies are with headphones that's okay so so I can say hey 100% like if you use headphones you're gonna have the optimal experience but you can still use it over speakers and it actually just depends on if you're listening to focus relax or sleep because focus is really high fast modulations so you can bounce off things in the room and things like that but relax and sleep are really slow so a lot of people that use us for sleep they just put us on their phone next to their bed yes or they put speakers on like a bluetooth yeah exactly and they have wonderful effects it really comes down to your environment like if you're if you're in a noisy environment the best thing you can do is put sound cancelling headphones on put some you know focus on and go but um it's it's really for everyone like however you want to use it get the effect is how you should use it so you are getting a lot of people who are saying it works with three speakers not just us I mean I did as an experience just my kids yeah and putting it on while we were all kind of doing our own thing and they were studying and doing their homework yeah and it was like nobody was talking with everybody was locked in yeah and it was just it was humming and I'm like there's no way that this is just coincidental you know and we did it again in the same effect so yeah it was just broadcast over the bluetooth yep and we're used a lot of like teachers reach out to us and they're like we use you in your in our classroom to help people study and focus um and yeah there's a lot of really cool things so with something that's this uh strangely effective um I'm always thinking to myself like how is this technology how are people are you are you know wielded for evil yeah like yeah yeah yeah like isn't wait isn't didn't hitler do something with sounds in order to like didn't he I don't know I don't know didn't you know that he did everything no he did something like the cadence of his speeches and music that he would play you guys never heard that how do you guys you guys are well I mean I don't know but I do know that there are certain cadences and certain frequencies that we've identified as like I know that the catholic church has identified certain they have certain weapons and things that they broadcast into crowds of people to even like preachers are known to have like some of your best well-known preachers are known to have a certain cadence yeah but my question is with this technology because this is like another level um do you know of any of how it's being used outside of this or is it because it's patented they can't use this tech because I would imagine like an advertising company would be like we want to make people feel a particular way when they see our commercial or a movie or something like that yeah is that is that crossed your desk because anybody asked you I've had many interesting theories crossing my desk yeah so we I mean so one is is uh the technology itself is patented right so um so they wouldn't be able to unless they went through this I mean yes but people could do it anyway and then we have to like you know police and stuff like that um but the interesting thing is this isn't an effect that is like brainwashing right or or anything like that so this is kind of like um if you listen to a song if you listen to an ad it one it doesn't work immediately right it takes you know a few seconds but it's also like remember that dancing analogy where it makes you feel like you want to dance if you hear a song can you still stop yourself from dancing yeah yeah right so it's more depends because footloose this guy can't stop so I could see that yeah put it on it's over yeah so you know it's it's one of those things where um it's something that uh we you know it's it's more of this continual progress it's an aid it's I think of it more as when you're running and you have a wind on your back and it just makes it feel easier and you're having a great run um but it's not necessarily going to pick you up and carry you on your way we can't play it make you a zombie yeah exactly yeah subliminal messaging is actually something that started in like the 70s this idea and subliminal messaging has been largely just proven because you have to be a willing aid to like want to do it you know um like some hypnosis that exists you have to want to be they have to select actually I've actually looked at them they have to select they take a crowd and then see who's most susceptible yeah and then they'll pick that one person like this person's most likely for it yeah whatever um are you guys using AI technology to fine-tune the sounds and how it works uh either to the individual or just to just as a general product yeah so we're we're spending a lot of time I mean AI is really great it still can't make music yet um all the music it makes you can tell an AI made it um so we what we do our process right now is actually like humans that design all the music they make it sound like we have an amazing music team right and what they do is they try to find diverse sets of music that they can build and create like a soundscape and then we put that into an algorithm and that basically helps us make a soundscape that is 30 plus minutes and we actually have this really cool pattern that we just got and it actually can take any piece of music and loop it infinitely without ever repeating so we have seven hours of backstreet boys bye bye bye um we don't have it on our platform it's called my personal hell I'll send it to you guys but but like the idea is like um our thing is like how can we make humans focus on art and how can we um have AI and all these different kind of algorithms focus on all the science making sure all the things are tuned correctly and then um making the experiences um match what you're looking for yeah I had a question so like in terms of like your data and user base and all that stuff do you guys find that certain I don't know I guess different areas of the world or are listening or prefer certain songs versus others and like you know what does that look like yeah so we have probably the most population density in the major cities um you know I told you what before I told you that people are looking like what the person looks like as far as anxious or looking for performance but how they look like you know as a regular person is we have a ton of entrepreneurs right we have a ton of people that are really trying to optimize their time and perform at their best daily because they need to right um so as you can imagine you know tons of the major cities have that um as far as you know who's using focus first relax or sleep um it's very interesting because when you kind of go into suburbia you're finding a we find a lot more people are using relax um and now those are people that are you know relax or sleep those are people that you know those are people that have more fast pace people have kids yeah most like yeah relax yeah we had this one moment actually that reached out to us and she's like thank you thank you thank you and she's recording a video for us and um she's like I haven't slept in like 15 years and I've tried lunesta I've tried ambien I've tried all of the things and I'm actually really upset that I just found out about you guys last week because I've been sleeping like a baby the entire time she's like thank you so much and please like tell more people about you because I shouldn't have to find out after you know um and yeah I think a lot of people like you know they have these struggles and they're like how can I find something that's safe something that's effective and something that like you know there's not really a downside do you so you guys have musicians that because when people when you listen to this if you have an experience this is music underneath that are the modulations that you're talking about that inducing the effect but it's music that's playing and you can hear you can kind of you know hear the modulations but but there's there's so you have musicians that make the music and then do you have musicians that make the modulations or is that computer derived based off of a formula those are computer derived yeah so so to dive into that we have all different types of genres because the genres aren't really the important thing it's actually the science the modulations you got it so we have like nature music you know like all the things you'd hear we have um lo-fi classical like all that stuff so what we look for when we hire musicians are people that just have obscene talent like most of these people tour the world with some of the greatest right and they're like listen I love being a musician but I don't want to go on a plane anymore or tour bus I just want to have a family right but I still want to make music that that can help a lot of people right or a lot of people enjoy um we have this this one guy on our team his name's Derek right and he used to he's he's this guy right he's he's an amazing musician and he and I were just doing a yearly review and he made this year over 150 tracks for Brain FM wow right and he's like this is more in this year than my entire music career ever right because he's just like in the zone and and creating these things so he he and other people on the team are making these really amazing pieces that you would find like scored in a movie or something like that like a really good quality and then you're right we're basically making all of the different kind of brainwaves and patterns that we're putting into it's derived from a model or derived from you know ephemeride data or something like that and that is baked into the song so it's like a line to the beats per minute so it's disguised in there and you can still hear it a little bit you you can kind of need to hear it still so you gotta find that balance but then basically we're we're checking all the boxes where it sounds good it it it's something you actually want to listen to which is really tough and then it also has these effects that we know from all of our papers and all the science that we've done and other people have done that is going to drive that effect so are the are the are the modulations then this like it's fine listening to sleep and I one day I listen to the rain yeah and then the next day I listen to the ocean and the next day I do the forest one are the modulations the same on all those and it's just what's layered with it that's different or do they change also they change too oh yeah so they have to fit inside of the sound right because sound is the carrier way for the modulation you like for example let's pretend that you have a a deep a sleep song and it's probably like I don't know like a hundred beats per minute or something like that right maybe less and what's happening is if you have the modulation for a hundred beats per minute versus 90 beats per minute it has to stretch and it has to transform into that thing otherwise it sounds distorted sounds computer-y so that's one of the reasons why we don't take like a popular song and just put modulations in it we have to make our own music because otherwise it would sound choppy yeah like you know when you know the helicopter effect in the car yeah right it's kind of annoying that's kind of the effect that we're hiding and where the work is like that's what's driving it it's a little bit more rhythmic and pulsing but if we do it wrong it'll sound like that that's palatable yeah it has to be palatable you know it's something that like like healthy food is healthy for you but you have to you can't force yourself to eat healthy you have to find that balance you know and that's what we're really trying to do interesting so um where are you guys based out of by the way uh so we're remote actually yeah pandemic changed the whole team yeah whole team yeah how big how big is the staff uh we have 15 full time and a bunch of contractors and that's made of developers um designers musicians neuroscientists um and marketing you uh before we started you were we were talking off air and you said something I think is really interesting fact I think would be a fun single topic episode for us and that was that your morning routine is making you less productive yeah and I think that's a real controversial statement with you know all the books that are out I would imagine you get really into the science of productivity because of the product that you make so what did you learn about these morning routines yeah so you know the whole study of flow is a really it was like a new evolving um study that a lot or a lot of interest there right and flow is this finding the zone right um and there's this idea of um of uh flow proneness right which is the susceptibility you have to switch into flow state right and if you look at your brain when you're sleeping and you look at your brain when you're in flow it's actually pretty similar so this idea that your morning routine you're doing a red light therapy and you're you know having smoothies and you're going on a walk and all that stuff the it's actually taking you further away from being able to drop in a flow state instead of waking up and sitting right down and immediately it's crazy how obvious that is to me that I never thought about that because I mean you've ever seen too like the the studies like on your like super athletes like a Steph Curry when he's at the line for a free throw it's a it's the game is on the line he's got two free throws he's got to hit both to make it they and they or the downhill skier who hits the jump it has to do six flips or something crazy yeah they measure their heart rate and their heart rate is like they're sleeping that actually goes down that's what makes that's like the biggest difference between us and then those super athletes is they have this ability in those moments to be so calm and so focused uh and in flow state like that and yet here we are doing all these things like cold plunges and we have all these things that jack us up in the morning thinking that's the better way to get us focused for a day of work yet it's probably going the opposite yeah I mean I think the secret is actually finding the balance between them right so personally I do that I wake up and I grab a coffee a protein shake and I sit down I immediately start working right and the way I can do that is before the the night before basically plan out my day so I can go right into it but personally if I do that every single day and I just work for eight hours and you don't have any recovery relaxing relaxation time you're going to burn out sure so I think the secret is actually starting immediately trying to get into the zone immediately trying to work and then working for like 90 minutes and then doing the cold plunges and then and using those as recovery modalities to be able to then go back into it afterwards because if you don't have you guys know this like if you don't have recovery you don't have anything no you know very that's it's an interesting way to look at it I know for me that's definitely true I can get into a very quick flow state but then after that I'll go work out and then I'll come back and then I feel amazing yeah versus just you know I know what for one thing social media upon waking is a terrible idea yes that that for sure I've identified is not a good way to get the day started there's also really interesting studies I'm not sure if these are academic studies or just things so I won't quote anything but there's this idea that when you are adding anxiety to your system what happens is your brain is starting to like prepare for it so if you wake up and you start scrolling social media and you're spiking your cortisol what happens is it's starting to train your brain on waking up earlier and earlier and earlier so that you can actually be prepared ready for that exactly so a lot of people that are are doing that are actually you know if you find yourself waking up earlier and you have that pattern it's probably from the social media what you do in the morning definitely affects what happens later in the day I mean the data on consuming protein upon waking and how your blood sugar is affected later with the same foods everything is controlled is much better sunlight in the morning affects your sleep in a positive way so this makes perfect sense so do you think upon waking playing relax and then focus or focus and then relax I think right into focus so personally I'll wake up I'll I try to it sounds crazy but I try to sit down in my desk and in literally two minutes so I try to get out of bed I go in I grab water I grab protein I put headphones on I put brain if I'm on and I just trying to get into it and you know I think it's interesting because when you look at people that are really successful and they they're doing this they're not you know Elon Musk you know love him or hate him he's not screaming about his morning routine every day you know he's getting stuff done you know and I think it's just interesting so I encourage everyone to to experiment try it yourself if it works adopt it and if it doesn't that's okay any future studies you're looking forward to potentially conducting so there's a lot of really interesting things that we're doing with wearables you can see I have two of them on right now um and we're we're still I think you know when we first started here we're telling you that workout music was coming right yes it's still coming but it's it's tough right there's a lot of things I have to do there's so many different people that have different kinds of workouts and different kinds of bodies of things like that of course um and we found that the only way to really effectively do it is actually hook up wearables so so you can see in real time what's going on yeah so what we're actually trying to do is build better neurofeedback through music so we'd actually change them like right now the basis for music is is all you know um pitted in all this research for you know people across you know what all these brains look like and focus relax or sleep but the next level of brain FM um is that we are able to look inside of you and see your HRV and your GSR how sick that would be and be able to yeah to imagine getting a learning from your or ring that's it's like hey you should probably meditate for or just adjust in real time yeah yeah we would change in real time yeah that would be sick yeah so we've we've we've been playing with a lot of that there's some really cool stuff um that we've been able to do um that is probably too early to say but um it's it's something we're still working on and i'm really excited to see that turn in because like the vision is being like imagine someone that you know they want to perform at work right they have kids at home and they're like okay i want to i want to get this done and they're trying to sit there trying to work and all of a sudden they click brain FM and they they get in the zone they have a great day between you know on time and relaxing and they're heading home in the car they put on relax and they're and we're we are knowing this person needs to be down regulated and we're we're looking at your your um HRV and your GSR and those are all really good indicators of you know your mental state they can all be determined from that and then imagine that you arrive home and your kids come out and you're like fully present and you're recharged and you're there or you're with your wife and you're you want to be intimate and you know it's so hard to shake off all the things that happen in your day and you can actually just be fully present and fully aware and enjoy all the different parts of life that you know we're here for you know what i mean that's the vision that we're trying to do so you said over four million people have have used brain FM how many are currently active are you able to say that uh so we keep these numbers uh like kind of like as far as current subscribers and things like that but we have more than 300 000 people that are using this per month and it's all over the world how do most people find you guys uh is it through marketing or word of mouth right now it's word of mouth um and we're transitioning into marketing um and that's that's why we're back here we started here with you guys and now that we're jumping into marketing the first people we wanted to sponsor was this show because of where it all started that's awesome yeah well like i said i wouldn't if i didn't try it i wouldn't believe it it's really weird but yeah you guys have an option where people could try it out yeah like it's totally themselves it is it's it's not effective it's strangely effective and i say strangely because you're in disbelief when you use it the first few times like really is it really that oh my gosh what's going on so we definitely advocate for it and like i said we've talked about you guys so many times even without being sponsored so appreciate it yeah love it thanks for having me back thanks for coming awesome great


Welcome to the Asian Review. I'm your host Bill Sharp. Our show today will there be a renaissance of the KMT, the Chinese Nationalist Party. Our guest is Mr. Eric Wong, formerly the head of international affairs at the Nationalist Party of Taiwan. Welcome to the Asian Review. It's good to have you here. Thank you, Bill. Glad to be here. Great. Well, I guess everybody knows that next month there's a big election coming up in the Nationalist Party of the Kuomintang. And the point of that election is to select a new chair. So can you give us a little insight on that and maybe tell us a little bit about some of the candidates? Right. So currently, Ong Xiu Jun, the sitting chair, is still fulfilling my angel's four-year tenure. My angel design in November 2014, and Miles took over by Eric Chu, who also resigned by January of last year. So the election we are hosting in May 20th, that person elected will have a four-year term, a full cycle term. A full cycle term. Okay. And currently we have six candidates. Okay. It's a record high. The other tag of not having candidates running for chairperson. And this time that's not an issue. We have six of them. So now people can group them into two groups. The first camp, the top three, is chairperson, Ong Xiu Jun, former vice president, Wu Dunyi, and former mayor of Taipei, Haolongbei. They are believed in Camp A. So it depends who you talk to. Different people will tell you who is the leading candidate among these three. Okay. There's no consensus there. But the three that you can come up with. We have Steve Zhang, former vice chair, and we have former legislator, Pan Wei Gang. And we have, was also a former legislator for a long time ago, Han Guo Yu. So these three are behind. And personally, I don't think these three will ever have a chance of catching up. So you think it's going to be the person that ultimately becomes the next chair will be from group A? Definitely. So within that group, do you want to make any predictions? So as people might know, the largest voting blocks within the KMT are the Huang Fuxing, the veteran faction of the party. So this faction is supporting Ong Xiu Jun. That's majority of them. Okay. So that's her strength. Wu Dun Yi's strength is the local factor, factions of the KMT. That's his support. Would you say local factions, you mean like the branches, the party branches throughout Taiwan? Right. So the, so for example, the CD councilor level, their people, tonguesmanship, file and rank KMT members. So these guys, especially in central and southern Taiwan, that's where Wu Dun Yi has more stronger supporters than Ong Xiu Jun. So if I would have to put my money on this, which I'm not, I would place it on Ong Xiu Jun right now. That's very interesting because, you know, one gets the impression that she wasn't a terribly popular person. Seems to push cross straight relations to somewhat of excess. So I'm a little bit surprised about that. But I suppose that in her own way, she's a very sincere person. Well, you're right.  But Bill, I think you point out something that worries most of us. That is, KMT's base, its voters, its party members are out of touch of mainstream Taiwanese opinion. I think that's true. And I've had the opportunity, while I was in Taiwan, to talk to a lot of mayors of Taiwan. And some of them were, you know, in your party and other people in the Central Committee of the party. And I can't say they always said the most complimentary things about her. And so I'm just a little surprised to hear that she's the leader. You know, it does seem to me that the Kuomintang has suffers from this is a lot of people perceive the Kuomintang to be a party that cares only about cross-strait relations, cares only about big business, and doesn't really pay too much attention to anything else. And that that perception, rightly or wrongly, is hurting the Kuomintang. It is hurting the Kuomintang. So you look at, for the past eight years, okay, how did President Ma won the first election in 2008? KMT, the Kuomintang, promises voters that cross-strait stability means economic growth. So these are the two pillars of our party. And what's missing now is that people believe that we are talking about economic growth. We are talking about for big companies and not for the middle class. That's a good point. That's where our party need to rebrand our images and convince the Taiwanese people that we are for economic growth and we are for the middle class. And how do we achieve that? We need cross-strait stability, not the other way around. Oh, that's a very interesting point. I'm glad that you pointed that out. Just a kind of a side question here that popped into my mind. The mainland, of course, is always interested in cultivating Taiwan and, you know, persuading it to unify with the mainland. And they come up with various policies to win the hearts and minds in Taiwan. And one policy they had was if a county or a town was ruled by the Kuomintang, then they would give that particular sien all kinds of advantages, pump mainland tourists into that particular sien. But if it was a sien or a municipality controlled by the Democratic Progressive Party, the mainland would not allow any mainland tourists to go there. There would not be any business. There would not be any economic benefits. And I'm wondering what the position of the Kuomintang was on that? You know, Bill, I can't speak for the party in my capacity right now since I have already stepped down from my position. But I can give you my analysis on this. First of all, if you look at eight years ago, there wasn't this divide. Eight years ago, the Chinese communists dealt with the Kuomintang-led cities and the DPP-led cities. So that's when they bought a lot of fruits from southern and central Taiwan. So why are we having this problem here? We need to ask a question. The reason this is happening now is the Chinese are trying to force the Taiwanese because President Tsai wouldn't accept or acknowledge the 1992 consensus. That's the essential problem here, right? So now we need to ask ourselves. So the Chinese is proving to us that they can do this as a means of sanction. And maybe in the future, they can even escalate into a higher sanction towards the Taiwanese. So we need to ask, is this in their favor? If the Chinese wants to maintain peace and stability with Taiwan, would this play in their favor? The answer is no. From my personal perspective, I think if the Chinese were to offer Taiwan any economic benefits, they have to offer it to everybody, not just to a certain region or certain places that's left by a particular party. I think that's a good point. When I go to mainland China, I like to converse with, talk to, exchange views with China's Taiwan experts. And I find them very divided on this policy. Some think it's a great idea, some think it's not a very good idea. So there doesn't seem to be much of a consensus amongst China's Taiwan experts on that particular policy. What this is, is China has truth to the Taiwanese. If you don't accept one China principle, what we could do to you. But what this does not do is, it doesn't make unification any prettier to the Taiwanese. It almost like holding a gun to one's head, isn't it? I don't think that's the way for them. If the mainland wants to really unify with Taiwan, I don't think that's the way to go. They are not making it any more attractive to the Taiwanese the way they are doing it. And on the contrary, they are pushing the Taiwanese away. Yeah, I think at a time when the Taiwanese sense of identity deepens and deepens almost on a daily basis. That's really, I don't think that's really in the mainland's interest to pursue that sort of policy. Yeah. But let's see here. Well, maybe this is a premature thing to ask. But does the KMT have any strategy for the future or is this all going to depend on who gets elected as chair? Largely, if you were talking about short term, largely will depend on who the next chair is. Short term being four years between, I've got four years, between now and 2020's presidential election. But in the long term, I think KMT's policy platform are pretty straightforward. Okay, we are a party for economic growth. We are a party for educational reform. We are a party for the middle class. And we are a party for, excuse me, and we are a party for redistribution justice, right? And as part of all these different policies, we need to be able to maintain a healthy cross-train relations as well as a healthy US-Taiwan and Taiwan-Japan relations. That's what we stand for. And is the policy going forward that can bring Taiwan the best outcome and the best interest? That's an interesting point. I think this would be an ideal time to take a break. So we'll be back in about one minute. You're watching Asia in Review. I'm your host, Bill Sharp. Today is Eric Wong. He used to be head of the International Section of the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang. And we'll be back in one minute. Aloha. This is Kayleigh Akina with the Weekly Ehana Kako. Let's work together program on the ThinkTakawaii Broadcast Network Mondays at 2 o'clock PM. Movers and shakers and great ideas. Join us. We'll see you then. Aloha. Hi. I'm Cheryl Crozier-Garcia, the host of Working Together on ThinkTakawaii. Join us every other Tuesday from 4 p.m. to 4.30 when we discuss the impact of change on employees, employers, and the economy. My name is Mark Shklov, and I'm the host of Law Across the Sea. And Law Across the Sea is a program that brings attorneys who have traveled across the sea and live in Hawaii or are staying in Hawaii for a time to talk about their travels, where they're from, where they're going, and bring it all together because really we're all connected some way, although we travel across the sea. So I hope that you'll tune in and watch our program. Thank you very much. Welcome back to Asian Review. I'm your host Bill Sharp. My guest today is Mr. Eric Wong. Mr. Wong, formerly was head of the International Liaison Section of the Nationalist Party, the Gwomidong. Right now, he's a graduate student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, a really great place. Fantastic school. Okay, let's see here. As I see it, the DPP, the Democratic Progressive Party, has always been accused of being a very factionalized party. But as I look at today's Gwomidong, it's pretty factionalized itself, isn't it? I mean, you have the Bung Tupai, the local factions, and then the Ma faction, and I think the Nanjian faction, and the young and the old, the old sort of die-hards and the younger people. I mean, it's a party that really could use a little more unity, isn't it? You know, unity is the word in the past that the KNT would use whenever there is a discourse policy front. And unfortunately, Bill, the factions you describe within the KNT now, which they do exist, and I see that problem as well. But what I'm pointing now is, these divides within the KNT are not from ideology differences. Okay. They are just for either personal factions or under different personnel, different leaders, for example, President Ma, or former Chair Lee and John. So this is different from the divides you see within the DPP, where they would debate and argue on the ideology from the party. So within the KNT, I see this problem being even bigger because a lot of people would argue that KNT doesn't really have a strong foundation on ideology. But I do want to point this one thing out. Chair Hong Shou Zhu, her cross-strait policies is now totally different from the rest of the party, what she believes. That's a very interesting point you just made. And I think that's something we better slow up on and talk about a bit. You say her cross-strait policy is different than the mainstream of the party. My guess is she is a person that wants unification now. She wants a peace treaty with the mainland. But other people, it seems to me like Hao Long Bin, they're saying, well, there's not a consensus in society for that sort of approach to China. So before we can do anything, there needs to be a consensus. Am I on the right track there? Well, right. The only part that I would maybe talk more about is, I'm not sure if Hong Shou Zhu wants immediate unification. But she wants some form of unification in a foreseeable future. And versus others, they still work under the framework of the 1992 consensus, which they believe that no matter what happens in the future, even if there will be unification, that will be done through the democratic process by the Taiwanese people. That's very interesting. Do you have any notion of what she would like in a peace treaty? I briefly worked on her presidential campaign in 2016 before her candidacy was replaced. And then I want to work for Eric Chu's presidential campaign. I believe the treaty that she proposed with Beijing is that she wants to sign a treaty under three constitutions. One frame constitution, PRC's constitution, ROC's constitution, and there will be peace between Cross Strait for 15 years. Let's revisit what you just said there. She wants a treaty that's based on three constitutions. Did I get that right? Okay, the ROC, Republic of China constitution, the PRC constitution. And what was the other one? And a constitution that's above both countries. So different people might read this differently, but the way I always understood is it's like European Union. So this is something bigger than both countries. That's very interesting. I always felt that if there was a peace treaty between China and Taiwan, the mainland would insist, the China would insist on the obligation of the Taiwan military. Is there any sense to that? Well, I believe that's what Beijing will want. But I think what Hong Shenzhen is saying is basically everything else in Taiwan should remain the same, except that under this constitution, framework is roofed, you will, that Taiwan and mainland China are uniting. Taiwan remains its function of everything. To me, that sounds like a long shot, but maybe I'm just pessimistic. You know, it seems to me when you're talking about the base of the party, and for a long time, the Guomindang ruled on the basis of the support of the military, the bureaucrats and the teachers. But I think the last election showed that that, so we call it traditional power base, is beginning to erode, and it's not nearly as strong as it used to be. And in fact, some of the members of those three pillars actually went and voted for the DPP. Does the Guomindang have any ideas or strategies to reformulate that base, the three pillar base? So what we're looking at is, I don't think there is a systematic change in voter behaviors, the voter blocks that you just mentioned. What happened in 2016 was that these so-called public servants were very deceptive, especially when government, when President Ma tried to push reform in their pension system. So in a sense, they voted for a DPP or they decided not to go in punishment of the KMT. But if you look at public pollings now, and some of the reasoned public movements, the people you just mentioned are pretty much still against the DPP government. So these traditional KMT voters in the future, I think, might very well vote for a KMT. They will come home. Okay. That's very interesting. Well, there was some talk before in the first part of the show. You mentioned factions, and it seems to me when you talk about factions in Taiwan, it can be interpreted in a whole lot of ways. It can mean factions within a party. It can mean factions at a very local level of politics in Taiwan. And traditionally, it seems to me that the KMT has done pretty well with these factions. But as I heard your comments, I think you're suggesting that these factions are not necessarily as loyal to the KMT as they used to be. Is that true? Yeah, I think it's definitely true. So let me walk you through this. So the traditional factions of the KMT are what you would call the people that cling onto the powers, the people of bandwagon. So when KMP was in government for a long time, it makes sense for these factions to stick to the KMT because that's the party in the court. So as you can see, these so-called factions go smaller and smaller as Taiwan becomes a democracy. So the problem KMP is facing now is that the party lacks a central ideology to drew everybody together. That's a very, very good point. I'm sure our listeners will appreciate that. There is a lack of a central philosophy within the party, isn't there? And I don't believe these factions are the key points for KMP to return to power. What's essential for us to do is to find that central ideology that can drew the party back together. And that is what I talked about earlier in the first segment of the program. That is economic growth, middle class, and education. That's very interesting because I think most people would not associate the Kuomintang with the middle class. Which is not true, Bill. So in the Jiang Jingbo eras and the Li Denghui eras, that's when the middle class has grown in Taiwan. That's when the KMP has had its highest popularity in Taiwan ever. Good point. You also mentioned transitional justice in the earlier part of the show. And it seems to me transitional justice or the pursuit of transitional justice by the DPP is really hurting the KMP. It is, and I'm afraid that I have to say that DPP is using this as a political tool rather than let history be history. I have said this in the past that KMP is in the best position to deal with this past issues. But if Taiwan were ever going to achieve true transitional justice, KMP is the party to do this. So in other words, you're saying that the DPP is using transitional justice for political ends. I am afraid that is the case. Okay. The transitional justice for the benefit of the listeners deals with the, how should I say, the straightening out of what are perceived to be excesses of the past. But that also brings up the question, and we're getting down to our last couple of minutes here, about party assets. And this is certainly, some people might lump that in with transitional justice. I tend to see this a bit different. And it seems that the DPP pursuit of the party assets issue is really hurting the KMP as well. It is. But Bill, just for you and for our audience to understand, the new generation of the KMP, we do not wish to keep the party assets. Okay. We do believe that one, even though Taiwan had its history, and there are reasons why KMP have these assets, we believe now Taiwan is a full-fledged democracy. And we should give out these assets so we can compete fairly with other parties. But the question is...  And that clock is very unfriendly sometimes. And I think it's a bit unfriendly to us today. But I want to thank you for joining us. It's 11 o'clock at night in Washington, D.C., where Eric is joining us from. And we really appreciate him for staying up maybe a little bit late or postponing his bedtime. And thank you so much for joining us and giving us some insight about the current situation of the Chinese Nationalist Party. And thank you. Thank you for having me. You're quite welcome. And thank you for viewing. We'll see you the next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.