Hello, everyone, I'm James Milan. Welcome to this episode of your Arlington dollar, which is a, we have an annual ritual on your Arlington dollar of speaking with our deputy town manager Sandy pooler about the upcoming budget at around this time of year. And that's what we get to do today. So first of all, I just want to welcome you. Thanks so much for joining us, Sandy. We always appreciate talking to you. Always a pleasure. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, really, I know. I know this is a very labor intensive time of year for you so very nice for you to carve out the time to sit and talk to us about what's going on. Well, the topic this year is the FY to 2023 budget. And we find ourselves talking to you in early February this year, sometimes we talk to you in January, sometimes in February. And that means for our purposes today that we're about three weeks or so out from the mid February date at which our town manager has to submit the budget for that then various bodies will review and give him put on. And all of this leading up to town meeting, which starts in two and a half months or so right. I'm sure it seems like a comfortable amount of time away now and it will all be surprised when it gets here. Anyway, I just want to ask you to start by in a place that we've started before and I do want to tell our audience, we're not going to go into the kind of exhaustive detail I don't know if that's good or bad news for you we're not going to go into the exhaustive detail we often have in the past but I'll refer you to the fact that on ACM is YouTube page you can find as much information as you want as well as of course you can do that out the town's web page etc. But on ACM is YouTube page you will find budget 101 which Sandy did with us a few years back and which is still pertinent and all of the details in terms of how the cycle works etc. So we're not going to be doing that today but let me ask you to start with just a brief overview of what that budgetary cycle looks like over the course of the year and where we find ourselves now. So in October we really started by doing our initial forecast for our revenues. We sent letters out to department heads and gave them monetary allocations and then started setting up meetings with them to go over both what's in their budget now already, and we allowed them to make requests for additional money. That took us pretty much through early December and then at that point we decided what things we could add and what things we couldn't. Overall this year I think we had something in the order of about $2 million of extra asks from people. And when it came right down to it we were able to fund a couple of them. But most of them we had to say no to. And I will get back to that in just a second. That all culminated in a manager's budget which under the town manager act our town charter is due on January 15 to be delivered to the select board in the finance committee. We put that all together and now the finance committee and the select board are going through their processes of meeting with department heads reviewing the manager's requests and getting ready to make their recommendations to town meet. So let me talk a little bit about the numbers. We have a long range plan here in Arlington which scopes out our budgets are revenue and are spending over a five year period. And in that plan, it allows the town side of the budget to grow by 3.25% per year. It also forecasts when we're going to need overrides in the future. So looking at that, and we've realized that we have to have an override, I think an FY 24. Because of that we've sort of constrained some of our spending on the town side. This year, we've gone up only 3% instead of 3.25%. That's in line with the previous year we went up only 2.6%. We've really tried to constrain some of our spending. The town side of spending isn't really going to make all the difference for how much an override we have because I'll show you some numbers in a minute. But I do think it's part of the town manager's effort not to add a lot of new positions these days and try to constrain some of our spending because we know there's going to be another need for an override. Can I ask you, Sandy, excuse me for jumping in, but can I ask you whether the 2 million that you had said that, you know, in cumulatively the department heads had requested. And you kind of, I think you said it was an extra 2 million and some you would be able to respond to and the rest not. Is that was that part of what you're talking about as well where you're trying to constrain spending in these years leading up to a potential override and so that's why that happened. Yeah, I'd say there's two things that are going on one there are needed increases that are just just basically have to be funded probably the biggest of which was changes to our trash collection and recycling collection contract. We had just ended a, or just about to end a 10 year contract that we have with a company that picks up the trash from your sidewalks. Over the past year or so there's been a lot of back and forth between trash collection companies and towns about major increases have been imposed in other communities. We kind of held back kept our powder dry and negotiated. And what we ended up with was a first year increase of 8% in the overall excuse me, 9% in the overall costs, but then 2% for the next two years for a three year contract. We also kept the system where we have where we don't pay a per tonnage rate for recycling to be picked up to pay per tonnage for trash but recycling is just a flat fee. And we think that's a good thing in terms of encouraging recycling here in town. So there's, there's a few things like that that we just had to put into the budget. There are a lot of other things where departments have recognized more and more demands from the public for services or more staffing needs or more funding needs for things. Most of those only in one case did we add any staff we added somebody to help the zoning Board of Appeals with all its work because we've found that the number of permit requests that have been coming in have outstripped the staff's ability to service the Board of Appeals and the Historic Commission, both of which, you know, have to review a number of different plans that people put forward. And then we added a few dollars here and there for things like upgrading our internet connection for the town that increases the speed of our internet our new it director thought that that was really essential to meet the growing demands. And that we didn't really add much of anything. So those are the kind of things that people asked for and I think they asked for a lot of things again because I think they see demands from the public. I tell them, it's just a truism of budgeting that there are always more demands than there is money. So that's what it was. I apologize again for for the fact that I tend to interrupt you and I might really mess with your train of thought but if you can get back to what you were saying before that. Please. So, yeah, I think what I thought I do at this point is just talk a little bit about the numbers I think I'm going to share my screen a little bit. That would be great. I think you see this moving. This is the manager's budget. And we're going into FY 23 here. So, you can see that overall, we have a revenue budget that's going up that originally is going up about 3% 2.96% The school budget that's going up 5.42%. This is one of the reasons we have a structural deficit in town because some of our expenses grow faster than our revenue. One of the things that we did with the school budget that will be important to people this year is because they had a decline in enrollment. Instead of adding money as we have every year for an enrollment growth factor, because they were down 189 students from their previous peak. We cut $1,397,700 out from the growth in the school budget. So you can see this number here it's in parentheses which means it's a negative. We did our usual increase of 3.5% for the regular cost plus adding in the previous year's enrollment numbers and everything. 7% in sped spending. We added $1,030,000 which is the last tier of the amount we had our last override that we said we would fund for the school's strategic plan. And then this year, we're proposing added $970,000 as a one time infusion into the school budget to deal with some of the costs associated with COVID. There are kids who need remedial help tutoring some of them for their emotional needs. And we know the school department has to deal with those things so we added that. Just sticking with the schools for a second because we've talked about this in the past. I recognize those outlays and those classes of outlays. Of course the general education and especially the special education costs and noting as I look across the table just to confirm for people that the special education costs. They go up by 7% a year and that's partly because they're treated differently in terms of how we can raise those costs, right? Well, on the one hand, it's true that any money in the school budget like this is just taxpayer money. It's all just money. And if we have extraordinary special ed costs, the state will reimburse us sometimes they have that kind of what they call a circuit breaker if we particularly have to place kids outside of Arlington schools and which gets to be very costly. The state does share in that. Guys, it's just a trend that was identified a number of years ago. We look at it from time to time to make sure we're still on track and there's still conversations in the long range planning committee about whether this is still the right number. And we'll continue to talk about that but that is more expensive than regular education and that's why we account for here. Thank you. A couple of other things I want to mention that as I said there's that we have other education costs the cost for a minute man, regional technical vocational high school which have gone up fairly substantially partly because a lot more Arlington students are going there than have in the past. We have the town budget at $40 million, which is going up at the 3% by mentioned. We have the MWA debt shift so that there's no more. There will be no more tax dollars supporting the water and sewer fees that will all be in the water and sewer. And so people's property taxes will see reduction because of that capital is still 5% of the budget. And then we have other fixed costs like pensions and insurance and assessments from the state. A few other things here to get us to the bottom line. One of the things I want to point out one is that by FY 25 in this version of the budget, we were projecting a $9 million deficit. The other thing that I want to point out is on the revenue side. $5 million of revenue in FY 23 and $5 million of revenue in FY 24 from ARPA, the American Recovery Plan Act. And that is one time money that the federal government gave us to make up for the revenue that we lost during these years of COVID because we've had losses in motor vehicle excise tax, hotel motel tax, meals tax, permits. I mean, various things went down. So we are using that's $5 million is going to plug that hole and make up for, for some of those losses. So that is a big change in the budget and really helped us out a lot. It's something we only found out about for sure in December. So the feds kind of kept changing their rules. I wanted to keep up with it. Unfortunately, it's worked out well for us. This is the budget that we presented the finance committee. And if I could just say one thing I was going to talk about how we have an updated forecast but if you have any questions about this before I go to the updated forecast. Let's see if there are any other questions. I wanted to just point out a couple of things. So first, it looks like the red comes in on the bottom line there as you as you already pointed out in fiscal year 2025. And so therefore, right now, according to your best guesses and estimates. And that's when we may be looking at, you know, a structural override being necessary in order to address that deficit. So just, you know, folks, just say one thing about that I think it's likely we would ask for an override to start going into the fiscal year by 24 budget to sort of build up our override stabilization fund in this year, so that we could ask for a smaller override if we do it a year early. Then if we waited till the next year with when the numbers start to get pretty enormous. If we asked for an override will be at a number that we think voters would support so probably in the spring of 23 is my best guest today as to when you would see an override. Thank you so much for that clarification Sandy that's exactly right in such a good illustration of the kind of, you know, really reliable thoughtful fiscal management that this town is known for. And, you know, just, just understanding that yes, doing the ask earlier. It's nobody ever wants to hear that news, but obviously it just makes a lot more sense to try and get out or stay out in front of these building numbers in the way that you just described so thank you for that. The other thing I wanted to just point out is how rare it is, but nonetheless you just have to make accommodations for these things. You, you had a little while back pointed out that the growth factor, it was actually it's in parentheses in that first column as you said, the growth factor for student population in the schools, which happened to go down. Probably a corresponding somewhat corresponding number of additional Minuteman students as you said before. But nonetheless, we are used to those numbers going up and up and up on the enrollment side over these last number of years but just kind of shows you that you can never tell for sure what the trends are going to be right and that you just have to make the adjustments as you go along. Absolutely right and I think we think for example Minuteman may be attracting more students because they have a brand new facility school there. I think it'll be interesting to see is our high school opens up. We have the new wing opening up this month and we construction is continuing. It's going to be a beautiful school when it's open so it will be interesting to see what that does to enrollment to. Absolutely. All right so you said that that you have more updated bunch of numbers to share with us I guess that is true so I want to show you this, which is now are updated forecast, and you can see the number out in FY 25 has gone down for $9 million to about $6.8 million so we had a decrease in the size of the override and the deficit, and that's really because our state aid here in FY 23 went up. Instead of going up $178,000 it went up $1.4 million because we got a lot more state aid for education aid. That's a reflection of our previous increases in enrollment, which under the state aid program sort of take a while to catch up. And some increases in general education aid, and excuse me general government aid at 2.7%, which matches the state's predictions of its increases in revenue. We will continue to look at state aid numbers as the legislature goes forward with its process and will make adjustments to this as we go forward into town meeting. But I just wanted to point this out for the viewers at home because you know they may have heard news about increased state aid. We did not increase any of our spending, we're just then using less money from our override stabilization fund and putting more often to the future to reduce the impact on taxpayers. That makes a lot of sense and I just want to point out something that I have done in the past. But again it continues to, as I was mentioning to you before we went on, it continues to fascinate and puzzle me. And that is you've just given us updated numbers. And obviously a lot of work went into the first set of numbers and then you had to update them and the reason why you had to update them. And that is of course good news in a lot of ways because the, the, the governor's budget and state aid in the governor's budget was higher than we might have anticipated or certainly than was in previous versions of our own town budget here. And that that goes right to something that I just would love to hear your thoughts about and that is every year, as you said, a town, the town mandates that the town manager's budget be submitted on January 15th. The governor's budget for the state is always just a little bit after that. And it can change things fairly fundamentally or dramatically I've noticed at different times over the years. So, you're the main person I would think that this falls, you know falls on. Is this just just something you just kind of shrug about and just say well that's just the way it is this timing is, you know, it makes more work for all of us here. Is there really much we can do about it or do you wish we would. I think it would make sense to have the manager's budget submitted after the governor's budget so we have more certainty as to state aid which is really the biggest variable that we try to predict. I know there have been discussions with the select board and the finance committee about this issue and there's a variety of opinions about this. I would say it, we want to make sure there's enough time for the finance committee to consider the budget. But I also think it would be wise to put it off probably toward the end of January or something like that so that when we submit a budget. It's really based on more solid evidence so that would be my recommendation. I just have to say I would second that I mean as a person who on whom none of the burden of this falls but nonetheless, it just doesn't make sense that every year, you have to go through all that work and then, and then just do some more work. And so, I don't know to hear we speak about it hopefully folks who are in decision making roles will recognize it and and and take action at some point I think, you know, it would make your January and February much more sensible I would think. You know, speaking of the burden of doing this, there's one thing I wanted to add, which I didn't mention to you before but I'm going to mention now. I am the deputy town manager and finance director so I oversee this whole process. And I have management analyst, a woman named Julie Wayman was an Arlington resident who's worked in this office for about three years now. And this year I said to Julie, alright Julie, you've really been doing a good job. I'm throwing you into the budget waters. Swim. So she really did a lot. She really put the budget together and a lot of the details. We obviously work together a lot but I want to give credit to Julie for the tremendous work she's done to get the manager's budget to the finance committee. To work on the team here and really lead the team with the department heads. I think sometime in the future, you at home will probably hear more directly from Julie. It's been her first year doing the budget. And I think in the future, it'd be appropriate for her to be speaking to you too. But I wanted to make sure she got some credit publicly today. Great. We always like to be a platform for that kind of message as well. So I want to, you know, before we kind of wrap things up here, let's kind of do a little synopsis for folks. Basically, obviously there's some good news in that there is this 10 millions million dollars of extra infusion from the ARPA funds. Of course, those had been that that's something that I had been talking to Adam chapter lane our town manager about consistently over a whole lot of months now since it first became apparent that some money was going to be heading in our direction and then we found out how much etc. So obviously there's going to be an effect from this 10 million being taken out of what was an overall 34 million that had been at least provisionally allotted. So we just want to acknowledge that right I mean obviously it's good news for Arlington property tax payers, like myself and many others. I don't know what to do with that but you know also it is going to mean that maybe the largest does not get extended as far or as deep as it might otherwise have been so. So, initially, the town manager presented a plan to the select board allocating that 34 million dollars. I think that's precise figure it's about 35 and a half million dollars. As it got it's gotten tweaked over time. The federal government has tweaked things, but that's the final number. We will definitely continue to spend that ARPA money on some things that we said originally to the select we're going to spend on, such as the $4 million in premium pay to our workers who had to work in person. There definitely some money is definitely going to be spend on improvement of our water and sewer system. There's money going to public health programs and so forth. We've yet to spend money, all of our money on water and sewer all or much money at all on on homeless relief or affordable housing all those things are going to have to be looked at and presented again to the select board to get their endorsement as we've moved $10 million into the loss revenue column. We had really started at three. So now it's 10 so we're going to have to find 7 million from other things. The managers in the process of working through that he will present that again to the select board I think probably in the next month and then it will be publicly available for comment and and and vote on the select board. Undoubtedly, there will be public comment about that no doubt. So you have also though during our time today mentioned I just want to again summarize that there is a there is a new DPW contract related to trash and recycling. And that that in general is good fiscal news because I think you like the the structuring of that it's a bigger cost up or bigger increase upfront but then followed by really minimal increases over the the next couple of years so that sounds good as well. There will be more money going to the schools as as seems always to be the case. And of course is I think very few people in the end, argue with because Arlington schools and their excellence are a big part of what makes our community tick. And then finally you were mentioning really kind of minimal staffing changes. That's exactly right. That pretty much sums it up. Do you think that we, you know, should have mentioned or covered more extensively. Do you think or or are we good. I think we're good I think people will see this come forward to town meeting be published in in April from the finance committee. And I think the experience at town meeting is that we do a very thorough process ahead of time so the budget is one of the least controversial things at town meeting and I hope to keep it that way going forward. Here here exactly to all of what you just said yes it is traditionally one of the least controversial and thank goodness right and let us hope that you continue that streak. But low drama is what we're looking for from this year's town meeting if possible. All right. Thank you so much for your time again and best of luck with seeing this through to the finish line which I know you're, you're still working on. I have been speaking of course with our deputy town manager sandy pooler who is in charge he's had able assistance from from Julie as he has mentioned. He's in charge of this whole process, and it's a big one, and it matters to all of us so thanks again for coming on to explain some of the major elements of it. We really appreciate it we'll see you next year if not before. And again wish you good luck. All right, thank you. That's sandy pooler our deputy town manager I'm James Milan this has been a conversation about our fiscal year 2023 budget upcoming. And this is your Arlington dollar thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate Sandy's time, and we appreciate yours. We'll see you next time.


If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump, with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Did you know that years ago, when movies started getting popular in movie theaters, they had smello vision? Right. At one point, did you know that? What a terrible idea. Did you know that? Smello vision? Yeah. So what they would do is they put these little things on your chairs. That would squirt out a spray. Mist of air. Yeah, so like you're watching a movie, and then they're going through a jungle or something. And you'd be like, oh, I could smell it.  They did all these experimental things with movies because they were so new and so cool. You know what I mean? I did not know that. That must have been so annoying. There was another one where they would vibrate your chair if something happened in the movie. Well, that's cool. Well, that still exists. They brought that back. They have those. Yeah, D-Box seats. Yeah, D-Box. That's annoying. I tried a D-Box seat. And I did that with my kids. I think we watched, I forget, it wasn't Star Wars, but it was one of like a big epic movie. And the whole time it was like, I was like all over the place. Yeah, I don't even like 3D. Yeah. I didn't think 3D is distressing. Yeah, 3D is too much. What they need to do with Avatar, what I want them to do with 3D is I want goggles instead of glasses because it's really annoying to me that I'm in. You can see the outside. Yes, I'm 3D here, but then on the outside, I don't like that at all. So I think goggles and then a screen that comes further around so you really feel inside of it. You want to hear my idea? Absolutely. Yeah, because I mean, I know somebody's going to rip this off and do it way before me anyway, so might as well put it out there. You might as well just be the first one to say it. I'll be the first to say it, OK? I was going to like, if I was to develop a movie, just like you kind of got glimpses of it in Avatar where you put three dimensions, but it basically puts you into the, not the foreground, but the background and it like gave you more depth. So you remember that one scene where they're kind of floating and you see like people like in the distance and you see little drops kind of coming down? Like you can see a lot further. OK. OK. So think about that. Like so you have kind of an adjacent story happening in the background, but like only if you concentrate on it. So you could see like depth wise. Well, Ready Player One is kind of like that, dude. Two movies within a movie. Yeah. Ready Player One is kind of like that. Pretty much. You like that's a little distra- are you sober? No, I'm saying that would make you want to go see it again because you could see how like things were happening in the background. The best movies are like that though. Where like, you know what movies are like that? Fight Club was like that. The Easter eggs. Yeah, it's been done on different levels. I'm talking about the matrix perspective.  Ready Player One was like that. It is. You're watching it and I know I missed five different. That's why I could watch it again. Okay. Because there I like even the opening scene was so I mean as soon as the movie started, I looked through it because you know, I'm like, Oh, this is going to be great. Yeah. Like I was right away because you know, I'm right away without ruining the movie, right? The opening scene, I'm like, it's 2045. I'm like, this could be what 2045 looks like.  They did a good job with that. They did a very good job. Actually, they did a good job of showing what a dystopian future, but also you still in the characters are still endearing and you still kind of like it. So although it's like, I'd hate to live in this world. It's also like, well, that's kind of cool. Yeah. You know what I mean? I could see this actually happening. They did it.  Yeah. Of either one. They did a phenomenal job. They did a great job. I can't wait to see it now. Yeah. No, you need to go see it. They stole my idea. Fine. So we can open the top line. Speaking of breakthrough technology, because that's what they show in that movie so much. Brain FM. Yeah, we got them here. Oh man. Of all the products and stuff that we've been introduced to through Mind Pump, that's the one that I think all of us use consistently. More than anything else. Consistently. More than any supplement I take, more than any drink I use, more than any, well, coffee close could be close. Yeah, pretty close. We do drink. They're competitive. We do drink a lot of coffee. Dude, coffee in focus. It's like boom, boom. But you can get almost coffee anywhere, right? Well, the science behind it is crazy. And what they're doing, what's in the horizon for them, which we hear in this episode. We talked to Dan Clark, who's the CEO of the company, and what they have on the horizon with Brain FM. And they're, I guess, patented the way they do their sounds and stuff. It's exciting. It's actually, did he talk about, can I talk about? Yeah, the government grants and all that stuff. Did he say that on the show? Yeah, he talks about it. I know it's not happened yet, right? No, no. There's a lot of, there's some research going into how to use some of their focus sounds to treat ADD and kids. Which is super exciting. Oh my god. To have alternatives to that instead of medicating all the time? Dude, the medication rate among children with ADD medications is exploding. Well, he talks about the success rate in here, too. It blows my mind. Oh, it's staggering. I know, I feel it. Like if I put on focus within, and I've tested this many times, or I'm like, OK, I need to write a blog or something. Like I am not in the mood. I am not focused. There's no way I put on the headphones. And about five to 10 minutes into it, I find myself kind of enthralled in what I'm doing. It legit works. I mean, there's not a lot of things, like supplements, things out there that get me excited. This is one of those, it just, it works. Like I use it time and time again. It's like, it so surprises me how effective it is. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's one of the products, too, that when I turn somebody onto it, it's not whether or not it works or doesn't work for you. It's the level of what it works to. It's like, oh yeah, I tried it out. That was really cool. You know, it helped me sleep, or oh, it helped me meditate cool. Or it's like- You probably use it occasionally.  That was a game. Like for me, it was like a holy shit, because it was- Yeah, it was the same. Yeah, that was such a game changer for me. I mean, we use it every time we travel. Especially when I'm away. I don't sleep as well in other people's beds, or hotels, or things like that, than my own. And so it's a must that I travel with that. The sleep one for me was the one that I use the most at first, but then focus became, like I use focus a lot.  And it's easy for me to pay attention because we're having conversation. I can only imagine if I had to sit down on a computer screen and do like, dedicated work all day long, and how beneficial this, you know, the focus songs- I always use it when I'm on the computer. Yeah, I find the opposite. So I'm like, I started with focus and now I'm like totally into the meditate. Really? Yeah, it's been helped me a lot. How do you use the meditate? You just put it on and- So I'll put it on and a lot of times I'll do it on my walks with my dog. And I'll take it out, yeah. Well, anyway, we talked to Dan Clark who's the CEO of brain.fm. And we do have a hookup for you through Mind Pump.  And then it's $7 a month, which I think the price will be going up soon. And you get five free sessions. So you can kind of try it out and see if, I mean, if we're lying, see if it doesn't blow you away and you don't have to, I guess you can just cancel.  But like try it out for yourself. I have yet to have anybody try it and not really like it. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's legit. Also this month, what have we got going on this month? Oh, we're giving away the NoBS six pack formula. This is a workout specifically designed for your core. Normally, I think it's $57, but we're giving it away for free if you enroll in any maps bundle, including our super bundle, which is our one year of exercise programming program.  So if you have any questions on any of our maps programs or if you're interested in the bundle and the promotion with the free NoBS six pack formula, just go to mindpumpmedia.com. And without any further ado, here we are interviewing Dan Clark, the CEO of Brain FM. Dan, so how long have you been running things over there at Brain FM?  I am new. So I've been there for about seven months running things, but I've been in the company since 2016 for two years now. Oh, what were you doing before? So I was head of engineering actually. Oh, okay. So give the long story short is I was actually working in digital advertising, an advertising agency in Boston, Boutique, and decided that I wasn't really contributing to humanity and started looking at different options and Brain FM came actually up in an early newsletter email, right? One of their earlier blasts. And I tried it and I was like, whoa, this is gonna be huge. So. Which one did you try? Yeah, was it focused? Your first? Focus, yeah, I know. So I started playing with it. And I mean, to be completely honest, we're always fighting against people with binaural beats and people that claim things. And the reason why I tried this company was because of the science. And that was the aha moment. This is gonna be huge.  And they were like, no, we're good. And 12 times later, kept following up, following up. And I said, no, we can help. I ended up bringing on working for free for a little bit and moving up to head of engineering. And then the XEO ended up moving on and I said, I can do it. And I jumped in and we've been rocking ever since.  I've used binaural beats. I've also used brain FM very different. Both in the sound. So you guys actually play songs and stuff. And it's kind of, and the effects are clear when I use brain FM, like very, very clear. In fact, we travel quite a bit. Last month alone, we traveled to Los Angeles and Tampa. And on the plane, I usually use the meditate or the nap songs that you have. And it's legit. I mean, it really works. I don't like flying. I'm not a big, I tend to be an anxious individual. There was one trip that we did, where was it when we were on that little propeller plane that was just- Well, up to Seattle. Yeah, Seattle. It was, okay, it was no joke. I've never experienced that much turbulence in my life. It was totally a roller coaster. People are praying next to you and people are throwing up. And I'm already not a big fan of flying.  I had that in my headphones, closed my eyes and it kept me from wanting to jump out of the airplane. But it's really effective. What's the big difference between, like how do I explain the difference between binaural beats and brain FM? Cause I always have trouble telling people like the difference between the two. Yeah, so that's a really good question. So binaural beats is kind of leftover Popsae, where it became really popular and it was this thing that was gonna revolutionize the world and everyone was really into it. And later, even the person that kind of started the papers went back and was like, well maybe there's not the same amount of evidence there. The difference is we don't use binaural beats. We use something called neural phase locking. And if you wanna probably look for more information, there's on brain FM slash science, we go into it in detail. But basically we use music differently. So we're using our AI and that's why we have it to re-sequence the music, to change the phase variations, to change the different kinds of sounds to just have your brain lock onto it and then by entrainment and through that neural phase locking, it rises to that level that we're trying to train on. So I don't know if you can share this, but it sounds almost like you have test subjects measuring brain waves and we know brain wave patterns strongly correlate to states of mind.  So it sounds like you hook people up, you have AI which is measuring their brain and as the music's going and it finds something positive, it does more of that, something negative does less of that and it builds out sounds as it goes along or something like that. So the AI we use is actually, we know the mental state we're trying to achieve. We know the oscillations, we know how the brain has to behave through all the scientific research and then the AI is more of a composer. So it's the thing that our composers work with in tandem and that's why we have just not crazy sounds, we have actual really good sounding music which sounds something you'd listen to on Spotify. Right, describe that too. How many composers do you have in the company and how does that work? Like do they have a musical background and what is that like? Yeah, so a lot of, we have three full-time composers right now. Some of them are award-winning video game composers so they make music for video games. We actually just hired a composer who's helping us with some of the music we'll talk about in a second, the workout music, but we'll get on to that in a second. We're playing with that right now. But yeah, there's kind of a dichotomy between the music people and the AI, right? So the composers know what they wanna make and it's a very iterative process. It's not just, hey, this is a song, let's feed it through it, right? It's, they work together so the AI has the, this is the top level, this is the bottom level and it's been refined. When Adam, who's the founder of the company, he started this 16 years ago, it took six months to reach the level that you feel when you use our focus product and he was able to refine that and he actually built a previous business that licensed software out to different companies. So we have, some of the other competitors of stuff, they use it and it works, but it's not as effective and he saw them doing it and he's like, no, we can make something better. And he sat down and three years later, that's where Brain FM came from. And that's why we have the science behind it, but also you can feel it in 10 minutes and that's our whole claim. Give us 15 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes, try focus, you're gonna feel the effects of it. And that's why we're so confident in saying it.  Yeah, that's their secret sauce.   It's everyone's gonna want to do it. Because you're right, 10 minutes because I'll put focus on in my ears. There's one song in particular that I saved that's got like piano in the background, it's my favorite one. And you're right, it takes about, if I put it on and I'm kind of tired and spacey, it takes about five to 10 minutes and then all of a sudden I feel motivated, it's not the right word. I guess focus is the right word, but it's kind of different. I don't feel speedy, but I do feel very singular in my, so if I'm trying to write a blog or write an article or figure something out with one of our programs, if I'm listening to that, I find myself very determined and again, focused, but it does take about five or 10 minutes to kick in. Now, I do have a question about, I've wanted to ask this for so long, you guys recommend putting on headphones, listening on to it through headphones. All of us have experienced similar effects on speakers without having it on headphones. Does it work that way too, or are we just tripping? No, that's a great question. Yeah, so it does work on speakers, right? We always recommend headphones though, because it's a lot easier to control the sounds. So what happens, especially with focus, is there's a lot of vibrations going on, right? There's a lot of different frequencies, it's a better word, and when you're in a room that doesn't have great speakers or even just your laptop speakers, it can bounce off things. It's not really created for that. We are actually rolling out and creating products for speakers, so sleep effectively, like I can't sleep in headphones. I've tried every single headphone for it, and I travel just as much as you guys, especially now, and I can sleep on a plane because you can't fall over on your side, right? So we're working with different speaker companies to produce specific sleep music for it. Now, I use it in my bows almost. Adam's the biggest one. Yeah, I'm a big fan of the sleep component of it. I use the focus, but I use sleep more than anything else because I was already rough sleeper, I have a hard time settling down, and that's just because I have bad habits of being on my laptop or being on my phone all the way to the last minute, and then it's hard for my brain to settle all the way down and then fall asleep. So when I don't do, and I have a little protocol of my lights going down and turning my phone and stuff off, that if I do that, I can get a really good night's rest. If I don't, then brain FM has always been my go-to, and we've actually got to a point where my girl loves it too, where I originally was putting it in my headphones and then sleeping with it, but we started playing it with my bows portable speaker, and it just pointed right at us, right by our headboard, and we both just get it. I was curious with that though, playing it over the speakers about the regulations with FCC and what, is there any kind of restrictions with that as far as music or something like that that influences your mind? Sure, so before we go into that, I just want to highlight real quick for the sleep. It works really great on the bows because that's a high quality speaker, right? And it is different than focus because sleep is slow wave, there's a lot more longer sounds. So if it bounces off places in a room, your brain can decipher that. But for focus, because it's moving so fast, and if it bounces off something weird or it's not as good. It slows it down and changes it. Yeah, it's not as good. That makes sense. It's kind of like, some things will still work, but not as to 100%. And when you're trying to focus, you want the best you can. So that's why we always say headphones first. Got it, got it. As far as the playing it in a space and things like that, It sounds like a sci-fi movie, right? Like I'm in a shopping mall, and they're playing sounds that are like, we're gonna put everybody- Imagine like you played over at school and everybody's on focus and they're like, Well, haven't they already figured that out with grocery stores? I mean, awesome. The music they play in grocery stores has already been- But they're not measuring brain waves. I like these guys out there. I think it's a little bit different, right? So, you know, this kind of goes into pop side too, as far as like subliminal messaging and things like that, right? You can make, the way that music is designed is to enhance what your brain is doing, right? So it's, again, that neural phase locking. And if it doesn't phase lock, then it's just like regular music. So you can play music of, I don't know, cars screeching and gunshots and things like that. And it can make people really frustrated, you know?  So it's not mind control. No, there's no mind to bother. You know, it's really interesting. Because I ordered like five years of Brain FM after listening to the first one. I was like, what's going on here? Weird. No, it's kidding. You know, it's really interesting. So one of the things that I love about, you know, working here is we're on the bleeding edge of this audio neuroscience. And one of the things that we've learned, or specifically myself, is that your brain is always listening. So if you're sleeping, and I say your name, you're gonna wake up, right? Why? Because back, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago, it's built for listening to danger. There's a lot of people, especially people listening, if you listen, or if you're going to sleep and it's raining outside or the thunderstorms, you sleep better usually. Reason is because predators don't hunt in thunderstorms. So just evolutionary, you're building into this thing. I'll tell you something right now, as a father, 100%. Let me tell you something. I could sleep through anything, but if I hear a noise that sounds suspect or from my kids, some choking noise. Dude, this actually happened to me once. I was at home and I had a patio set outside in the backyard. So I'm on the second floor. So this is downstairs out in the patio and I had an umbrella coming out of it and it was really windy and it knocked the umbrella over and shattered the glass in the table.  I woke up or I should say, I became conscious of being awake. Already when I was halfway down the stairs with the sheets torn off the bed following me with this rage like God for me. I have to protect my family. I would have run through whatever was in front of me and I wasn't even aware that I was awake. So what you're saying is any parent knows exactly what that's like. So that's actually, it's funny. That's how our focus music is designed. So the reason why it blocks out distractions is because of all these different things that we're doing with the music because your brain is always listening for distractions and it's really not distractions because back, again, 100,000 years ago, it was alert, right?  Right now it's a distraction, but back then the ping on the phone was I have to protect things. So we live in a different kind of world today and that's why the music is so effective. Yeah, literally the opposite of being aware and alert of your surroundings is being extremely focused. If for anybody who's ever been hyper focused on a particular task, you lose sense of time, you lose sense of space, you don't know what's going on around you. And I mean, in nature, it's probably not a good idea to do that, but in a situation where you're trying to accomplish something, it's actually a pretty blissful, awesome feeling. I mean, I absolutely love it. In fact, I know, and I was funny, I had a doctor tell me I have adult ADD a long time ago, which I think is hilarious. But as when she told me this, I did a bunch of research and found that people with ADD and ADHD also have the ability to hyper focus. So not only do they're distracted, but they have the ability to hyper focus. Have you guys worked with your sounds on helping people with other conditions, other than the average person just wanna get more focused and relaxed, but have you done stuff with like insomniacs or depression or anything like that? So a few different things, right? So actually, we won a grant from the government from the National Science Foundation that is basically all funded to help us prove that we can compete with different ADHD medications. That's crazy. Holy cow, so that's a big deal. Yeah, it's a huge deal. That's massive. So how does that process work? Do you have to send them studies and apply, and then they say, okay, this looks promising. We're gonna give you guys X amount of dollars. Yep, so there's different phases of the grant. We have phase one. But that's exactly so here's the papers, here's the stuff that we think, we have a theory, right? Here's all the data that we have collect. Help us prove the theories correct, right? And the whole National Science Foundation is basically help to help improve science. And this is one of the leading edges of science. So we did win that. The next phase is another additional funding for grant, but it also sets us up for RX classification. So right now. Prescription, wow. Yeah, so right now we're going through FDA approvals and we're getting that all set and we're looking through that. But Brain FM is a consumer product. It's been built for consumer product, but it's a plus one product. So if you have ADHD, it can help you. But if you wanna use it as a tool to get in the zone, even if you don't have it, it's still gonna help everyone. And we realize that some people may need even more than the consumer grade product that we have. So that's why we're going through this. So in five to 10 years from now, you could be in the doctor and your doctor could say, here's these medications you can take that are drugs or you can listen to this music that's gonna have the same exact effects of it. Well, it is now, is this public knowledge yet? Does, do people know this, that you guys are working on this? I'm not sure if we've actually like went out and screamed from the rooftops yet. I asked because I just, I mean, I sooner or later, Big Pharma is gonna come slashing your tires.  I can't imagine you're gonna, you're gonna get a lot of lobbying against you guys. Yeah, so I guess to address that real quick is it's, you know, I'm not here claiming that we're gonna replace things, right? I'm saying that this could be a step before, right? Or in combination of, Well, it's just like marijuana, marijuana wasn't gonna replace all the drugs out there, but we are seeing that it's helping some people that were on medication also. Yeah, like, so that's just for focus, what we're just talking about. And that's kind of our spearhead into it. But we do, you know, we do have the, also the intentions of doing anxiety and of doing like, which we call it sleep and different kinds of insomnia. We have a love letters channel on our internal communications and we get thousands of love letters every single month, right? And a lot of it has to come with people that PTSD and insomnia, and they're like, hey, I haven't slept well through the night for 20 years, you know? And then they come to us and they're like, I finally got a good sleep. I finally slept well through the night. There was one time where our service went down and we have, you know, we have a lot of people that use our service and we went down for one night for like six hours, right?  We're much more sophisticated now, but we had like 20,000 emails saying, hey, I don't care what it costs. I can't sleep right now. I want to sleep working. Yeah, exactly. And I think that, you know, not that we ever wanted that to happen, but that was proof. And that's one of the reasons why I get up every single day because, you know, and that's why I'm here. I want to share this. Like I came part of this company because I wanted to help humanity. And that's like reflective in our pricing and things like that. But we think we have something and we have a responsibility to share this with people. I agree with you 100%. I do have a question on the long-term efficacy of your product. Now I know when, and this may be totally different. So I'm just asking this question because I personally want to know. I know that whenever you do something or take something that has a actual effect on the body, whether it's positive or negative, the body aims to adapt to whatever that is by, you know, down-regulating receptors or this is true for exercise, drugs like sunlight, my skin will start to adapt. All the body just tends to adapt. Are you seeing any evidence that it loses efficacy as people, if people use it for a long period of time consistently every day? Or are you seeing the opposite or does it not make a difference? Sure. So there's a few things that we actually have and it's one of the reasons why it's so effective. So we have 3D sound in our music. So next time you hear it, you'll actually hear the focal point of the sound being in front of you, then above you, and then left, and it's randomized throughout the track. So it's really hard for your brain to lock on and to normalize it. And that's one of the reasons why it's much more effective than white noise or binaural beats is because those are just- It's not the same sound over and over. Yeah, there's no pattern to it, right? Or sorry, there is a pattern to it, but your brain can't figure it out kind of thing. All this distractions and stuff that your body would normally or your brain would normally be paying attention to is it's trying to figure out the different kinds and where the focal point of the sound is. Now is that to prevent what I talked about and potential adaptation or the- Basically, yeah. It's to prevent the adaptation or normalization of it. And then we've actually found something different. So as far as it being less effective, we've actually find it's kind of like that pathway in your brain. So we say 10 to 15 minutes, but people that listen to Brain FM regularly actually doesn't take them 10 minutes to get in the zone because they're already kind of exposed to it.  And then five minutes. It's kind of like training your brain to actually zone in. So I've experienced that subjectively, but do you guys have any- Like when you guys test these sounds on people, do you see that as well? Do you see that? They're in that brain wave pattern faster now because they've been doing it consistently? Or is that something- Yeah, so with the science, there's just so much. And unfortunately, science experiments are so expensive. So we're predominantly looking at people that have never used Brain FM before rather than, and seeing different applications for that rather than power users that use it. So that's something we want to do down the road. But yeah, we're kind of in the preliminary research of testing our own users. When you guys are like doing research on these people that are hearing it for the first time, is there a lot of discrepancy between each individual or does everybody seem to have the same response? Everyone I turn it on to, I've never heard a negative feedback.  Like you typically will use one of them if not all of them. And most people have all fallen in love with it. So are you seeing that across the board or do you have some people that just, it just doesn't work for them? So I'm not the director of science, right? I was just talking, we have a few PhDs on staff that work with us. But from my understanding, from talking to them, people get it differently. So we have seen across the board, it helps everyone. Some people get a really great effect in the first three minutes. Some people get a really great effect in five minutes or nine minutes or whatever. But it does go across the board and helping people. And that's why we have that 15 minute mark too because some people, it works in three minutes, some people works in 15. Let's just say 15, give us 15, right? As far as going beyond the 15 minutes, that's when those effects start to stack though because there's a certain kind of, that level that we have, we want to get someone to that mental state and the whole secret is not getting you there, it's keeping you there the whole time you're listening to the music. Does that make sense? It does. When you're testing these songs out or when you, for example, submitted your studies to apply for the grant from the government, did you compare it to like placebo? Were you like, okay, here's people listening to us and then here's people listening to, because music and sounds for sure affect people. We've known this obviously for forever, right? Thousands and thousands. That's why we listen to music. Music invokes emotion. It's been used that way for long forever. Movies use music for that. The radio obviously when we buy music to change it the way we feel or whatever. Are you guys, could the result just be because people are listening to music or are you comparing it to music that doesn't have what you guys have versus yours? Yeah, so we listen, we tested against a few different things. We've tested against placebo music. We've tested against Spotify, just like focus music. We've also tested against silence, right? And Brain FM beats all of those. Silence is actually usually better for focus anyway, for just working because a lot of music, even though, a lot of music has sounds, a lot of music has, well, sounds, but they have a lot of voice, right? And your brain is actually, even if you're not paying attention to it, it's still working hard to say, what is this person saying, right? So silence is actually better usually than most music. And because our music is designed to be more effective than silence, we do have that stuff, but that's actually on our science page. You can check that out. Do you personally use it with any sort of meditation or float tank?  I have tried it with float tanks before. Oh, you have. I'm not, just, I mean, to be completely honest, I wish I could do it more just because of just traveling so much and going all over. We have a few cool things coming up for everyone. But yeah, it's very interesting. I've done float tanks before or without it and with it. And it definitely, you know that feeling, you're in a float tank and you're there for an hour and you know it's a good session if it was like 20 minutes, you know what I mean? And then you have others that feel like four hours. It's just, it's very, very different. I would let people do it. I'm not gonna recommend or not. I think it really depends on what you're looking for. Specifically, we're focused, we do have meditation, we do have the relax, but our bread and butter right now is focused and sleep and that's what we're actively going into. A while ago when we first started working or using your product, Adam comes in one day and he's like super excited to have to share this. Yeah, go for it. He shared it on the show already, so it's not a secret. Super excited and he's like, dude, I got a hack. I'm like, what? And he goes, listen to a book with your girl so you guys get nice and connected. And then put focus on the speakers and have sex. He's like the best sex ever. And he talked about doing it a bunch of times. They just tested it. I actually vouched for this process. Yeah, so have you guys had anybody tell you, hey man, this song is not only good for this, but I've also used it. Yeah, yeah.  Sex music would be awesome.  It's really just, again, it's that mental state you wanna be in. And because we have, I mean, we have just, between last time and now, our music that we're producing now is crazy compared to the music just two years ago. Just more effective. Yeah, we have piano music you can go to and now we understand the level. So we can control the music to actually get you in the zone in five minutes and work three times as fast, but it's like getting on an elevator and just falling. So we have to do it gradual, but... Now why is that? Because here's something I do notice. When I listen to focus, I put it at the right, it has to be at the right volume. If it's too loud, it almost makes me feel... It overpowers it. Well, it just feels weird. I don't feel right. If I listen to the right volume, it's perfect. Is that because it's too much? Like you said, like I'm falling down an elevator? I don't necessarily know if it's volume sometimes. I mean, it could matter on your headphones too and just what's comfortable to you. Because that's usually with volumes, how your brain is absorbing the sound. But we have different kinds of speed or different kinds of protocols too. So we don't just have one protocol that the AI uses. We have many different ones. So some tracks because of the way they're designed, like for example, our EDM tracks or electronic tracks, they have different protocols and they have to based on our piano tracks. So sometimes if people are in a section and they're like, oh, I get a headache or I don't really feel it or don't like it, I just suggest using a different kind of music. Is there a way to, because I have the app, is there a way to say I want focus electronic, focus piano, or is it just the random? No, so you can go to the Explorer section and you can actually see every single thing we have divided. Oh, I haven't done that yet. Yeah, we're working on actually updating the app, the design and all that stuff. Unfortunately, it takes a long time because we have to make sure it's stable. But eventually we'll have something. So if you predominantly use just electronic, it'll just adapt to you. So we do, based on how people skip and use the tracks in the app right now, it does it just to yourself and everyone, but we're gonna be doing a lot more redefined. So now you can select the experience you're doing and you're saying, hey, I wanna focus, I wanna crush emails today or I want to study for a test and it'll play a playlist design for you and then it will adapt to you as you use it for other things. What are you guys doing right now as far as marketing and advertising? Are you getting on? I know way back when, when we first met Adam and all them, they were doing something with one of our buddies, Kyle Kingsbury. They had started a podcast and that didn't really turn out. Are you guys advertising on podcasts right now or any other places? Like how are you guys getting out there? Yeah, so I mean, part of the thing when I came in and kind of reshuffled things as far as leadership, I wanna make sure one that we focused on getting our product stable, right? So when we first, we have, you know, iPhone and Android apps, we've stabilized those and made sure that we could kind of make things inside the company so we could grow really quick. So to answer your point, I guess directly is we're not doing a ton of marketing right now, but that's what we're focused on this half of the year.  So far you guys have grown pretty organically. Yeah, we actually have over 600,000 people in our database.  They've tried us. Wow.  Now, do you guys have multiple membership options? I mean, how do all the memberships work? Sure, so we have monthly, yearly, tri-monthly and then on our web, we have lifetime as well. We're actually getting rid of lifetime. So I don't know when this podcast comes out, but we're getting rid of it because we know how fast we're growing our... It's worth it to get lifetime. I feel like you guys are gonna be so much more expensive later on because it's quite effective. Yeah, I mean, the whole price, like honestly, I've had people, I've had, you know, other people that have similar businesses, they're like, you could charge $25, $50, $100 a month for this because it's a tool and people will pay for it. But our whole mission is to help change the world through music and redefine what that means to people. And that's why we're priced affordably. So we may go up a few bucks, but that would only be because the service demands, you know, more things from it. But when you came in here, you kind of mentioned that you guys are working on new stuff, like even before this, you mentioned that, you know, there was plans for a workout. Can you walk us through what that looks like and what your plans are? Sure, I mean, we have, so not only do we have workout music, but we have some really cool other stuff that we can kind of mention or talk about, stuff that we're experimenting with so we can talk about it if we have enough time. But as far as workout music, yeah, I mean, the plan is to make music designed to get you in the zone and whether that's weightlifting and you want that pump or if you are running and you want that runner's high, being able to get that.  I have a black belt, as I mentioned to you guys.  Or it's different degrees. And what if we could make music that you listen to and every single rep or every single workout is the best workout you've had. That's the whole premise. So we actually, we've been playing with this for a while. It sounds too good to be true, but shit, if you get that, that's like, can I invest? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I know it's gonna be worth. No, I mean, and that's what's exciting. We look at the success we've had so far. And if you look at it, a lot of people listen to music when they're working and sleeping, right? But everyone listens to music when they're working out, like everyone does. So our whole thing is like, how can we just help augment people in what they're already doing? And workout is a no brainer if we can figure it out. I just started listening. So internally, we test everything ourselves and then we have, you know, some pilot stuff just to make sure because we are science first and we wanna make sure that every product that we give out, we have a stamp of approval. But the stuff that I was listening to just this morning when I was getting ready, it was like taking a shot of coffee. It was, it was crazy. Yeah, I haven't, I mean, you guys gave me some of your coffee, but this is the first cup I've had today. Do you have pro athletes or anybody? Like you're experimenting with this or like? For as far as workout, not yet. It's too, it's too early, but with that's something we're probably gonna push for. I mean, we have a lot of pro athletes that actually use our focus product. I'm not sure if I can name them, so I won't, but... Michael Jordan. I didn't say anything. But, you know, for the further workout stuff, that's something we can do. You know, I think it'd be great to get professional runners or professional cyclists that not only can say, oh yeah, I actually feel it, but actually show it with results, you know? So if you said, like, you know, I have a lot of, so I cycle myself. And if you said you could listen to music that could take five minutes off my 20 mile ride, no brainer, you know what I mean? And the same exact thing, like with working out, for some reason, even if it's something that it gets you in that state so you can push more and you get more out of it, that's really the name of the game. Like, we're not gonna make music that's gonna make you lift 20% more because that's your body. But if we can get your mental state there, that's gonna get you stronger and motivated. Sounds better than pre-workouts. And this is not, and this, by the way, this is, it's obvious, now if you can do it, that's awesome, but it's obvious. Music for sure impacts athletic performance. They've done studies on this, left and right. Yeah, tons of stuff. I know if I'm about to do a heavy lift. Everybody has that PR song, right? Yeah, you put Celine Dion on, I'm not gonna be pulling 600 pounds off the floor. So basically the whole thought, though, is what if, because a lot of people, they know what mental state they want and they search for music for it, right? What if you said, this is the mental state we want, here's the music? So that's the whole thing, right? Like a lot of people, like what Tom Brady has is his pre-game playlist, right? What if you said, okay, I want to listen to this kind of music and I want it to get in the zone, I want it to keep me there the whole time I'm working out? Like that's the whole theory behind it. So we know that music impacts the brain as far and like you said, there's tons of studies for it. But our whole thing is we want to make it so every single time. Yeah, I think a large part of the reason why just regular music does that to people, it's just the associations, like I can play the soundtrack to Rocky IV, okay? I watched Rocky IV, so Rocky fights the Russian, by the way, for all you people under a rock.   But what you're saying is the music that you guys are producing doesn't have to have an association, the music itself creates a state. That's because it's not only association that makes you do that, there's many other factors that give you that. That's because of all the neural phase locking and the things behind it, the mechanisms. So what if this, though? Imagine, again, this is all, we're working to prove this, right?  So you had a, yeah, so you had five songs that you played you listened to before you jumped in the pool as Michael Phelps or whatever activity you need to do. And you had the associations built there and you trained with it and it was also designed to get you there. I don't know if you guys talked about this last time or if this was afterwards, but the last Olympics, so the summer Olympics, we had wrestling. Did you guys hear about this? Yeah, I think they tried to eliminate wrestling. Oh, well, no, that wasn't my, so we actually did a pilot with Olympic wrestling. Oh, you did? Yeah, and they listened to music, some of the focused music before their sets of what they do and they'd also use their sleep at night. And I believe, and it could be wrong, but I'm almost 90%, 100% confident. No, but really the youngest male competitor for the US won gold and he used their product every single day. So that we know that there's something there because that was just, that was focused music. That wasn't specifically designed for working out. Or designed to him, right? It wasn't, yeah. So now we're building on that premise and it takes a long time to do it, but if you had workout and it got you in the zone, it made you work harder, it motivated you, you got that runner's hire, that pump we talked about and then you use their sleep product to sleep and you slept through the night. You know, what's that gonna turn into? Is it, no, is the AI you guys are building into it? Is it like gonna be kind of like Pandora where I thumb up if it was like, I enjoyed it a lot or a great workout? Yeah, there's two parts of the AI. There's the composer that is, you know, our backbone. It's our secret sauce. And then the algorithm of how we sort music, how we, you know, put buckets of personas together. So yeah, exactly. We're gonna build out that kind of thing. That's cool. What has surprised you the most so far working with Brain FM in terms of how people are using it or reacting or responding to what you guys are doing? Good question. You know, so I fully believe in what the company's doing and that's why I quit my job to come here. And I think the biggest surprise is how many people this can actually influence. Because it doesn't matter if you speak English or Chinese. You know, it doesn't, like, we're all very similar, right? As far as how our brain works and things like that, right? And I think I'm just most surprised on how many other people are getting it now. You like, how many people, I'm like, you know what, just try it.  Like, we have people that call me up to time and they're like, I wanna work for you too, you know? And I wish I could hire everyone, but like, I think that we're almost setting a whole new space for what music, different kind of category of music, like an enhancement on top of things. So it's really, really great to see how many people support us in the journey and then wanna help out, you know? That's cool. You had mentioned there's some cool things that you guys are looking into. You talked about the workout one, but what other categories? Yeah, so there's a few different things. Some things there's way too early to say and some things are still wicked speculative, right? That's my boss in coming up. But yeah, I mean, so we just had our head of operations actually just had a baby, right? Shout out to Aaron. And he, so one of the things because this is mine altering and so is caffeine, you know, same thing. We do have a warning that says, you know, legally you have to be 18 and use the product. Oh, I didn't know that. So I'm just gonna say that before I say this, right? Cause I'm not saying to anyone to do this, right? But a lot of people, they use like white noise and stuff for their kids, right? And that's actually shown in studies to actually not hurt the child, but not be great for a developing child. There's a lot of scientific research on the million brain and things like that. But imagine if you had the best lullaby created by science for your kid. So your baby fell asleep. You want to talk about game changer, bro? I'll send you parents that can actually have kids. So they keeping me from having kids right now, bro. I can't have six months of no sleep. There's stuff that we're beginning to look into. It's way too early. And again, I do not recommend this to anyone legally. Just want to put that out there. But we believe that we could do something like that too. It's gotta be less scary than what Artie's out there, right? I know, it's my baby and it falls and dies. There's a lot of sound machines out there and white noise. A lot of people use that in busy cities. And again, there hasn't been studies on, I don't believe in babies for that, but there's been studies on like 24 hours or like rats and things like that. And it does affect growth. It'd be interesting how that would influence our mind going forward after that. I'm reading a neuroscience psychology book right now. And one of the things, it challenges the classical view of what we believe before where like, you guys kind of mentioned earlier about this primal instinct to react. And what they're saying is that that's kind of been disproven that it's not just that there's so many different variables that make the brain decide or certain neurons fire. And it's a cluster of them. It's not like this exact pathway that every time you hear that rustle in the brush, you go to flight or flight or like you said earlier, well, part of what really makes that happen is it's a multiple factors. Lots of information.  And it's not a direct flight or flight response. And so if you start to get those sounds, the baby used to that at early age, I wonder if that would just set him up or her up for later, like to just fall right into it. Like I wonder how that old fluence is. Yeah, we don't really know. I mean, the one of the coolest parts about this is parts of the brain, we still don't know how it works. We don't know what consciousness is even, right? Yeah, right. And we're on like the leading edge of figuring that out. The founder, he's still, he's very confident that we've only figured out 2%, that there's so many more things. So down the road, I know you were joking and we talked about sex before and stuff, but like, maybe, you know, I'm not here to say yes or no, but like there's a lot of really, really interesting stuff.  So our whole culture has been able to build from communicating through sounds. Absolutely, Ari White's done it, right? Yeah, I was just gonna say, back in the day we used to give girls mixtapes. It's gonna be totally different now. Yeah, man. Hey, babe, listen to the song. It's my sexta. Oh, weird, you horny. Okay. But no, I mean. Beauty mix. I am not saying that. Our ability to discern sounds and inflections and it's just, it's mind-boggling how cute it is. And we're built with that. Because of communication. We're built with, a baby can hymn back a song to you and they can't, they don't even know what mama is yet. You know, so we're, you know, we're leading the edge. There's so much more that we can do, but you know, right now we do have a product that we're very proud of that has shown to work on a wide variety of people. You know, again, for people that are looking to become a better individual, right? And use it as a tool. And then people that are looking to normalize and not use tons of medications for it. The two most exciting things for me that you talk about are the ones, the sounds and songs that can calm anxiety because statistically speaking, right now anxiety is the number one mental health issue. It's exploding. Kids are getting it now, as kids used to not get it. And the other one is, you know, attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactive disorder because the percentage of children that are on methamphetamine or methamphetamine like drugs is actually quite alarming. It's extremely alarming and it's scary. So if we can find an alternative to those things, then that's awesome. But my other question with that is side effects. I have yet to notice any side effects for any of your products, but are there any side effects that you need to warn about or anything that you guys have seen? There's only one that we've encountered and that's just headaches if you are dehydrated. So the whole product and the whole way these other ADHD medicines work is they take blood from your extremities and they pump it into your brain basically like redistributes blood in your body. Our music actually does the same exact thing. So that's where we can see the blood flow and that's why we feel like we can change it and redistribute it maybe for the workout stuff. Oh, I see to the muscles. Maybe.  No wonder you said that. Yeah, so. But wait a minute, redirect blood to the extremities. I can see the sex one now. There we go. But yeah, I mean, as far as our product, we just say if you get a headache, drink some water, or try something, try a different kind of music because some people, they really like the piano stuff but some people like more of the electronic or some of the background, it just, it really depends on, there's still some fine tuning.  Not yet. Yeah, that's something that we'll probably going in. I mean, I think part of it too is behind motivation is being happy too. So I think that's something that could be interesting but we just don't have enough science on that yet.  Excellent, man.  Almost two years. Almost two years, yeah. And it's, it's one of the. Oh, we all use it every day almost. Yeah, it's one of the products I use still to this day. So we'll just mention it organically because we still use it. So, I mean, I totally vouch for its effectiveness and it is exciting that you guys did get that grant and that people that they're maybe looking at this as a, either an adjuvant or an alternative to medications for treating things like ADD. So, exciting stuff, man. It's great. Yeah, appreciate you coming on and talking to our audience about this kind of stuff. My pleasure. My pleasure. I hope to come back someday. Very cool. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. 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