[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability and how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness.
Please consider the information in this podcast for your informational use and not medical advice. Please see your medical provider to apply any of the strategies outlined in this episode. Heart Rate Variability Podcast is a production of Optimal LLC and Optimal HRV. Check us out at optimalhrv.com Please enjoy the show.
Welcome friends to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. I'm Matt Bennett here with a very special guest today, Tony Crinzo.
I'm really excited to interview Tony today having done a lot of work in the military for our veterans.
Tony, I already thanked you offline but I want to thank you ahead of time for your service to our country as well. Found out a lot of you know of your story online before the interview. So thank you for all that and the work that you continue to do for our armed forces. So Tony, welcome to the show.
As always, we like to start out with just giving our guests an opportunity to introduce themselves to our audience.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Well, thank you for that. And you know, every time, every time somebody asks me or everybody, excuse me, every time someone says to me thank you for your service, my answer is always, you're worth it.
So I'm, I'm Tony Crissenzo. I'm the CEO and founder of Peak Neuro, a former Marine with some interesting experiences in my Marine Corps career. I spent the last 32 years leading companies, organizations, the last two, last three actually in the, in the federal market, in the defense national defense industrial base.
So I've been very much at the forefront of both active duty military in and out of uniform for most of my adult life and very active in the veterans community, having been through some of the issues that a lot of veterans go through.
It's been a journey for me.
One of the reasons why I'm here is to talk about that journey and how I think that relates and, and helps helps other people, not just veterans who've been through traumatic experiences or resolving different types of dysregulation that they may find in their life.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I would love to get a little bit of an idea because I've been with my work with optimal HRV and heart rate variability, been really exposed to a lot of the great resources that our military offers its members as far as cognitive performance that there, there seems to be especially in special operators, which the term I used to call special forces before I got re educated in this arena.
And I'm just kind of curious from your own experience, you know, as the years have progressed and we've really, we've gone through the decade of the brain and we've been really focused on neurobiology. I think we're, you know, PTSD has its own history.
We called it different things throughout, you know, history. You can look back and it's a fascinating thing as we kind of allowed us to focus on trauma for small periods of time and then we seem to forget about it until the next war and the consequences of war. So I'm just curious, I'd love to start our conversation with how you've seen technology, the brain, that connection to mental health, cognitive performance evolve with your history in a couple aspects of the military.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Well, you know, it's a great question, Matt, that reminds me of a George Carlin routine where he talked about, we used to call it shell shock and then combat fatigue. And then as we got farther along, we turned it into things like post traumatic stress disorder. And it sounds really nice, but it' basically shell shock and combat fatigue.
You know, back in ancient times when I was on active duty in the Marine Corps, the response to any kind of traumatic incident was basically to rub dirt in it and keep moving.
Which quite frankly hasn't changed very much in the 40 years since I enlisted in the Marine Corps.
And the available, the help that's available in the military is kind of a double edged sword. Right? There's the stigma that comes with. I don't want to go see Dr. John. I don't want to admit that I've got an issue. You know, the warrior mentality doesn't allow for failure. It doesn't allow for weakness.
One of our board members at Intelligent Waves, which is a company that I'm also involved in, is the retired deputy commander of Marine Corps Special Operations, a gentleman by the name of Scott Conway Way, who has lived this life in leadership roles for over 30 years.
And there are still issues with treatment and not because, not necessarily because of the availability of treatment, but because of the stigma that gets attached to it. I recently spent some time with Dr. Richard Sonic, who's a active duty Air Force colonel at the Air Force research labs, the 7th 11th human performance wing of the United States Air Force, who was involved in a study several years ago that looked at the efficacy of treatment relative to the distance from a service member's home of record. So if you go to a residential treatment center two hours away, 2,000 miles away, your odds of success are about equal to alcohol treatment, residential alcohol addiction treatment, which is very low. It's like sub 20%.
The closer you get to home, really it's the lower the stigma becomes. Now it's private, you're with a primary care provider or you're in your own home, the higher the efficacy of the treatment. So the military is really learning two things. One is that the success for remedial treatment is really relative to the focus, the location and the specificity of the treatment to an individual. How individualized can we make this treatment? Because while trauma is trauma and it affects the brain and the heart and the gut in very similar ways, unwinding trauma is a uniquely individual exercise.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had very recently with Joe Dunford, who is the retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Commandant of the Marine Corps, he's now the President and CEO of center for Strategic and International Studies. And I was telling him a story about a conversation I had had with some very senior people in a military service that wasn't the Marine Corps. And their focus was on pre deployment resilience training. Because their fear was that with AI and deep fakes and social media influence and psychological operations that their service members in that branch of the military would not want to deploy. They might get a video of their family and a hostage in a van that says if you get on the plane, we're going to kill your children.
And you know, my, my statement to, to General Dunford was, you know, it's kind of funny because that's their view in the Marine Corps. We just keep enlisted Marines so angry and bitter when we're in garrison that when it's time to go to war, they just can't wait to get on that plane and fuck shit up. And we never, we didn't have the conversation about language, but I hope that was appropriate.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: That's fine. Yeah.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: So yeah, so the, we want to do better. And trust me, Special Operators, Tier one operators, they get, you know, they're the million dollar guys, they get access to everything. But if that's so good, then why are the two most prominent folks that we work with, with our technology, a retired Navy SEAL and a retired Delta Force Troop Sergeant Major.
[00:08:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: Post their enlistment they went through some very, very difficult times and they're still dealing with it. So there is on the veteran side a real need for post active duty service care.
In my work with the Semper Fi in America's Fund where I'm on the advisory board in Warriors Ethos where I'm one of the fiduciary board members, we see this issue constantly. And most veterans don't want to go to the va. Right. They don't want a cornucopia of drugs. They really want to figure out how to overcome these issues permanently and without the scaffolding that psychotropic and other types of drugs do. Antidepressants, put 25 panes of glass between you and the rest of the world. There's no way to live the rest of your life.
So there is a real need, I think post service and will continue to be and even in service. Right. We're working in our National Defense Industrial Base organization with different organizations inside the military today to build resilience that prevents ptsd, prevents cognitive issues.
If you look at the National Defense Industrial Base, I'm sorry, the National Defense Strategy for the United States, there are four lines of effort and the fourth line is all about human resilience and human performance.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: That's amazing. So, so I'm curious. You know, one of the things that I've, I've always, you know, as I've got to know veterans and a lot of mine has been post deployment, you know, or you know, that they're no longer in the military. Occasionally I get a active military folks. It's, it's always been a fascinating transition.
I think it's an understudied thing as well. Of especially in a time it seems more and more with career military folks at least is that that next deployment, especially after, you know, the last several wars and whether we're in another one of those or not is yet to be known. Where it's. It's goes on for decades and there's multiple deployments. And that, that idea is you create a neurobiology effective for the battlefield and then that, that neurobiology needs to then adjust to family life.
Going to the grocery store, raising children, going to parent teacher conferences with the, with the full acknowledgement as you may need to go back to that battlefield in the short to medium term and you know, just from a psychology perspective, you know, how, how do you effectively make that shift with how your wiring needs to be for survival, which our brain always, you know, will prioritize. And I'm just curious with your experience and working with folks you know, is is there an effective way to go from a war fighter who's, you know, we want in a, you know, or the military wants in a, in a state to up to kill the enemy? And I know there's a lot. I've also learned that there's a lot of boredom in, in the war fighting situation. As well as peaks that transbat transitioning back to nor normal life with the acknowledgment you might go back to be in that, that battlefield. And I'm curious, have you seen the military at all evolve around thinking about those, those transitions for the folks in the military?
[00:12:06] Speaker B: That's an awesome question. And I love the fact that you actually gave a couple of examples that are real life examples. I'm going to give you two actual conversations that I've had with two different types of military operations and then talk about kind of how you address that.
So war fighting today is much different than World War II or Vietnam.
If you were a World War II veteran, you left home in 1940 and didn't come home till 1945.
If you went to Vietnam, if you went to Korea, you were in Korea basically for the entire conflict.
There wasn't these rotations.
Vietnam is where we really started to do, depending on the service, nine to 13 month rotations. And we've done the same thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now fast forward to today and the way we fight wars. We fight these very asymmetrical, long term, low conflict types of engagements. And I'll give you a great example. One comes from the special operations community. It's an actual conversation I had with a very senior person in a highly secretive special operations unit. And here was the problem as they described it today.
You get a young operator, just graduates from the operator course. He gets on a plane, flies to Italy, gets on a helicopter from Italy and flies to Syria or Libya, captures a high value target, has a high stress observation mission, or just kills a whole lot of people, gets back on the helicopter, gets back on the plane, lands at Fort Bragg, you know, gets home to his, you know, his, his unit in Fort Bragg at 11 o' clock at night. And on the way home, his wife calls and says, hey, can you pick up a gallon of milk? He stops at the convenience store, picks up the milk, walks into the house, opens the pantry and throws the milk in the pantry. Because that's where the fucking milk goes. Yeah, that's a quote. The other side of that is. And this, I'll tell you, this is a conversation I had with someone at the Air Force Fighter Weapons School, their version of Top Gun, where you've got pilots that are sitting and they live in a town like Las Vegas, which is right outside of Nellis Air Force Base, home of a number of F35 squadrons. They're going to get up in the morning, they're going to get in that aircraft they're gonna get a brief, gonna get in the aircraft and they're gonna fly an average mission time of 15 hours, which is sitting in a chair narrower than this. Right. And it's a tiny little seat that you're gonna sit in. And also that's why I came to understand that Air Force uniforms are called poopy suits. But anyway, they're gonna get in that plane, they're gonna fly, get two tanker refuels on the way to the other side of the planet. They're gonna have a very high stress combat mission, whether that mission is reconnaissance or attack.
They're going to fly back two more tanker missions. They're going to land that aircraft somewhere around six, excuse me, somewhere around six o' clock at night. And to quote you, then they get a call from their wife or husband that says, hey, we got a PTA meeting tonight. How do you make that transition? So it's not. The war fighting today is very different than it was for other generations.
I've got folks who work in my organization. We have 60% of our company is veterans and about 90% of those are combat veterans. And one gentleman who no longer works with us, he's moved on to do some great things in his life spent. He's 34 years old, but he spent seven years of his life downrange, seven tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. That changes your neurology, it changes your autonomic nervous system, your parasympathetic nervous systems permanently. Until you can change them back, you're in a constant state of vigilance.
And that is really the difference is it's very hard to do what I would term create. The ability to create state change, that is different states of consciousness where I might at one point feel equanimity. At the next point, I need complete and utter focus. So I've got to put ordnance and steel on target somewhere.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Being able to make those shifts is really the focus of what we at peak Noro do. We, which is essentially training the brain how to make appropriate shifts into appropriate states and shift out of those states volitionally without having an overhang. So you wind up in one state when you're in a social situation where that's probably not gonna do you very well.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: I love that. Let's talk about peak Neuro a little bit. And I'd love to learn more about the work that you do and obviously with our podcast, any connection to hrv, autonomic nervous system as well. But, but it's a, it's a fascinating program for what I, what I could learn about it online. So I'd love to kind of learn a little bit about your journey, where the idea come from and just sort of the science behind the work that you're doing.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: So I'll give you a little bit of history, my own history.
I'm, I'm a Beirut veteran, but I was not permanent personnel. I went back and forth to Beirut when I was with Third Land Battal at a, at a Cherry Point in the Marine Corps.
And I, although I was exposed to some things that I think most people wouldn't really enjoy, I don't think that is where a lot of my issues came to be. I was, I was assigned, when I was, I think, I think it was 23 years old to work undercover for what was then called the Naval Investigative Service and today, you know, as ncis. And when you turn on that TV and look at that show, see all the cool gear and the cool stuff. Yeah, that's tv, right? Back in the day, I think we used to say NIS agents were guys who washed out of the FBI academy, but very stressful years undercover, walking into rooms, I didn't know whether or not I was going to walk out of them.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: And the Marine Corps response to that, when all of the people that I was investigating were charged, the normal procedure there is to move witnesses out of the area. And three, three of the four witnesses, there were four of us.
Three of the four witnesses either died under interesting circumstances or were murdered. So I was the sole surviving, sole surviving main witness. There was one other secondary witness who, who survived a couple of attempts on their lives.
My reward for that was to be court martialed for being 20 minutes late. Because in the Marine Corps we're very small and everybody knows everybody. And this is back in like 1985.
And when, when the leadership of the unit that I was investigating got relieved, they brought in new leadership. But the new leadership were friends with the old leadership. And here I was, a young corporal just doing my job and their entire focus was to discredit my testimony since I was the sole eyewitness to these things that had happened over.
So for an organization whose motto is Semper Fidelis always faithful, we never leave our dead or wounded on the battlefield. Every Marine is my brother. They basically abandoned me in Trenton, New Jersey and made a negative example of probably the most ethical officer I had ever served under, who forced the court martial of certain Marines who were doing some things that were, that were pretty bad, that I had lost all my security clearances. I was convicted in a court martial. I wound up getting transferred to a unit where they made me a files clerk. I sat in a room with no windows, no friends, no one ever wanted to do anything with me. I had just come from a unit where almost everybody in that damn place was court martialed. And eight months to the day later, in walks the aide de camp to the then commandant of the Marine Corps, PX Kelly, with a medal, a certificate of accommodation from the commandant, a check for $20 because they overturned my court martial, and a copy of the four page letter of apology wrote to my mother, which then enabled me to go back to counterintelligence work. But the damage had been done.
It was pretty bad now. I didn't really notice it.
[00:20:32] Speaker A: Did you, like, was there shame in handing you a $20 check? Because that just seems,
[00:20:40] Speaker B: I don't know, I was.
[00:20:42] Speaker A: I know, I know that's not the most important part of this story, but like for, for all that they put you through.
Yeah, that, that just seems like a.
Yeah, the, the letter to mom.
That, that's heartfelt. The $20 check had to.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I was happy to get my 20 bucks back. That's a lot of money in 1985 for a corporal, you know, making a couple hundred.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: That's true, that's true.
[00:21:09] Speaker B: Well, they did actually meritoriously promote me as well, so.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: Well, good, good. That makes you feel a little better.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: But the news there, for those who are, you know, kind of pooh pooh in the Marine Corps is this. The Marine Corps as an institution is fabulous. It is an institution comprised of people who are flawed. But everybody between me and the commandant was kind of a screw up. And the commandant actually did the right thing. And that was hard for him. I'm sure at that time that was not a politically correct move.
Having said that, when I got out of the Marine Corps, I had a really fantastic career.
I was stationed in New York for the last year of my time in the Marine Corps. I was recruited by a company to work on Wall street for four times what I was making in the Marine Corps.
A company that then became the largest M and A transaction, I think, of 1989.
So I learned a lot, I made some money and I embarked on this.
What for me is, you know, a storybook career. I've run five different companies. I founded and sold businesses. I've been a management consultant. And I grew up in South Philadelphia in the neighborhood where Rocky ran when Rocky was made.
So it was a pretty big, a pretty big ride for me. A Pretty good ride. But I'm sure we've all and your listeners, I'm sure, have heard these stories of veterans who you cut them off in a parking lot and they want to cut your throat with their car keys. Or you don't want to get in a car with them because if someone's too slow or too fast, man, it's on. It's punishment time. Or maybe their wife told them when they were 55 years old that they had been in more fights than all the men she had ever dated in her life combined. Yeah, that was me.
I had no idea how angry I was. But my first wife, second wife and daughter would all tell you that and probably a lot of my friends.
[00:23:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: But I happened to stumble onto at a. I literally miss Google directions to a customer in our defense business where I stumbled on a document from 1983 that was really written from a physics standpoint. My wife and I are both physics nerds and when I read the document I thought, man, you couldn't know this stuff in 1983. This is amazing. And I wonder if that research institute is still around. And sure enough, it was. So I went there and I got a taste of the 50 year old technology that they were using which was more focused on altered states and meditation.
I went to the CEO of this organization and I said, I really would like to engage with you to build a program for veterans in a week. Literally.
It was transformative for me. It really changed me in ways that I'm still sort of trying to understand. In good ways. Right.
My ex wife, who I hadn't talked to for a while, couldn't believe the change. My daughter saw the change, my current wife saw the change, my friends saw the change.
It really made a difference. It was most transformative experience of my life.
And the CEO, that non profit, didn't return my phone calls for three times. So I went and I, I started to do some research. I worked with the director of innovation from that organization and eventually hired him into peak Neuro because he has a very veteran focused mentality. He's also done a lot of work with addiction and PTSD and addiction neurologically, they're not too dissimilar. They're two patterns that sort of converge.
So you know, he was building entrainment methodologies, neurological entrainment methodologies around meditative experiences that were very good. I mean they worked.
And I wanted to see if we could do that from a therapeutic standpoint.
And how honestly how it got started was he would say, well I'm Creating this modulation experience. And this is what it's supposed to do to your brain. And I thought, well, damn, I wonder if it works and how would I measure. And somebody told me you could measure it with an eeg. So I went and I bought one.
And that is the genesis of peak neuro is really just trying to figure out whether Bob was doing exactly what he said he was going to do. And now it's evolved into something so much bigger. Right. We. So it is not just your neurology, right? There are a lot of things that impact resilience. Trauma, resistance, equanimity, a good brain. And it's the intersection of physiology, neurology, biology and psychology.
So you can, for example, show correlation. We're not, I won't go so far as to say causation between neurological modulation and brain entrainment with sleep and HRV and. And breathing, which is a. You know, these are all oscillations, right? A healthy heart isn't a metronome. It's an adaptive oscillator. Yeah, right. And HRV is less like a score and more like a conversation your body's having with you.
Breathing is this bridge between voluntary intention and automatic physiology. So what I wanted to do originally in the original intent was to look at how all these things work together. How does the brain, gut, heart connection work in synchronicity to create the experience that we as humans have in the world.
We've got, you know, we've got neurons in our brain, we've got almost as many neurons in our gut, and we have a bunch of neurons in our heart, and they're all working together. They're not always working together. Sometimes they work in opposition. Right. But EEG and HRV are two different windows into the same living system.
So personalization doesn't begin with mythology of, you know, let's do meditation. It begins with measurement.
And what we've done is our approach is to measure a baseline, right? What is your respiratory rate? HR. HRV.
There's 91 different physiological measures, but HRV is a big one. So it's breathing, right? Because breathing is an oscillation.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: Huge.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: And all of these, all these oscillators in your body, the oscillations in your brain waves, the oscillations in your heartbeat, and it's not even so much. And I know I'm talking to an HRV expert, which I'm not, but HRV isn't so much about your heartbeat, it's about what happens in the space between the heartbeats, right?
So understanding how each of these things affect each other, I mean, just take the brain in isolation. There's really three systems in the brain. You've got the electrical system, which is your brain waves, alpha, beta, theta, gamma, delta. You've got the regulatory system, which involves things like interhemispheric coordination. Left brain, right brain, front to back coherence, how different parts of your brain interact with each other. Are you coherent in your thinking or incoherent? These are actually physical terms. And then there's the chemical system. If I change the oscillatory system, if I increase the level of electricity in your brain. Your brain, typically to create a thought takes about 12 millivolts. A lot of thoughts might take you 20. And those millivolts are powered by glucose, ATP, acetylcholine. They consume chemicals, which is why we have terms like burnout. So understanding the relationships between the different parts of the brain, how the brain affects the heart, how the heart affects the gut, is really the center of gravity for what peak neuro does. So we're not so much a neuromodulation technology as we are a human optimization platform that takes into account as many different variables in the human system as our measurable and gives us the ability to correlate them in ways to look for how we can perhaps raise HRV through neuromodulation or through psychotherapy.
We have some.
Again, I can't show you causation, but we see high correlation for people who go to a psychotherapist and have a session. We can take a measurement at the end of that session, before and after. And we can see key differences in hrv, breath rate, heart rate, resting heart rate. We can see differences in their neurology, in how their brain waves are working and how coherent their brain is.
We can actually see increases in blood oxygen.
As you relax, your capillaries open, your breathing becomes deeper and slower, and that oxygenates your body more efficiently when you're in that sort of relaxed state.
When we think about things like flow states, you know, the part of the issue with today's approach to solving trauma, for example, or dealing with trauma, is that the goal of every modality that I'm familiar with is to get you within one standard deviation of your age, gender, handedness, cohort, mean, right. We want you to be within one standard deviation of the mean. What does it really mean? It means we want you to be average.
Right. And special operations community. Nobody wants to be average. You've got to be optimized.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:30:34] Speaker B: So there really isn't a lot of research around how do you optimize? Because what is optimization? Optimization. If I'm keyed up, I've got complete awareness 360 degrees of my surroundings.
I'm totally focused on what's going on around me. That is one state of consciousness that is optimized for flight or combat, but it's not optimized for sleep. And it's certainly not optimized for having a conversation with your wife about the PTA meeting. Yeah, so optimization is really situational. And so our goal here is to bring people the ability to shift state relative to their need for that state and to identify and optimize each individual state for each person. So peak neuro now is able to create a neurological and physiological fingerprint that's unique to you. And when we create these modulation packages, all the math is based off of where you are as an individual, not as a general population. That was an awful lot to say in one breath, so I'll stop there.
[00:31:37] Speaker A: That's great. Well, I mean, I gotta ask this question because in the HRV field we talk a lot about recovery. And I'm assuming that you know what, what you're talking about to me is like, you know, partly at least do is having these incredibly intense, stressful, potentially traumatic experiences.
And you kind of mentioned then if you have to get on a 15 hour flight with no bathroom breaks, which sounds terrible to me, you know, and go right back to normal life. I'm curious how recovery is a term that probably gets thrown around a little too loosely in the HRV biometrics arena. But. But I'm curious as I love that idea of shifting states.
I'm just curious how you think of recovery for some of the folks that may be in the most stressful situations that you could possibly create for a human being to experience.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: You know, it's a fair question, but I would probably tell you that I wouldn't talk in terms of recovery.
I think of that in terms of resilience.
One of our many collaborators, not just in peak neuro, but in the community of scientists, academicians and business people who are attempting to solve this problem is a woman by the name of Xiaodong Lin. She's the Cleveland Dodge professor of Cognitive Behavioral Science at Columbia University and she is writing a book and has spent the last 26 years studying failure with people like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps and other people that you would know every day.
And not so much studying failure as an end state, but failure as a milestone on the way to success.
So when we think about things like cognitive resilience, what we're really talking about, you know, at a very sort of simple level, is your brain is a prediction engine.
It looks at the world and says, well, you know, when I look outside, the sun should be shining at noon and the sky should be blue and there might be clouds. And if you wake up at noon and it's completely dark or the sky is green, that creates trauma. Trauma is the. We can think of it as the.
The delta between your expected experience and the experience that you receive.
So the question becomes, how do we create elasticity in the physiological, neurological and biological systems in the body that can withstand those kinds of shocks?
And through a resilient neurological, biological and physiological system, not just withstand them, but absorb them and inculcate them going forward so they become part of, from a positive standpoint, your body of history, knowledge, experience.
Part of that devolves into sort of two, two pieces. In typical psychotherapy that almost everybody goes to, whether you're going to marriage counseling or trauma therapy, you're almost always going to get involved in cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT or family systems therapy or a variant of those. And all of those are about narrative building and meaning making.
And I can tell you, as someone who's been to the VA to talk about trauma, I had a counselor at the VA who is a Vietnam veteran, and I thought, man, this guy seen so much more shit than me. This is going to be awesome. And two sessions in, he fired me because he said I was triggering him.
Oh, and I can tell you stories from dozens, if not hundreds of veterans who go to the VA and they get. They talk to someone who's never been in combat, they talk to someone who hasn't lived their life, or they're getting a ton of drugs that just makes them feel bad.
So all of that revolves around narrative and meaning making. And narrative and meaning making take place in a certain part of your brain, in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, right up here. The executive network is where we make decisions, where we ruminate when, where we worry. All of that happens here. And when we're involved in psychotherapy, we're lighting the front of our brain up and we're reliving an experience that was a life changing, negative experience for us. And a lot of people don't like that. No, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do it, but what I can tell you is this is if you're able to, through neuromodulation, to suppress the front of the Brain, the executive network, to slow that down, bring it offline, and open the back of the brain where you have more access to symbology and there is no narrative. What you're really doing is you're allowing the body to digest and inculcate that trauma somatically versus semantically, the body digests it without you actually having to have a clear thought or relive that trauma. Now, it doesn't work overnight. It can take months, but months is a lot better than 10 years of psychotherapy and you're still telling the same story over and over again. And for me, it was many years of trying to figure out how to overcome this stuff through narrative and meaning making. And it was really just a week of very intense neurological entrainment that allowed my brain to process these things in a way that I hadn't really learned how to do before. Let me stop there. I don't want to dominate the conversation.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: No, this is great. And I'm curious, like, as your work, and I know there, there's others, you know, do it, doing similar work.
Have you really, have you seen the change in the military mentality to, to relook at how they, they look at the war fighters, how they look at the special operators?
You know, because it always strikes me in the military is you, you want somebody to be in fight or flight, you want them to, you know, to, to be a great war fighter is a very different, especially if, if you take that on as a trait to be a great war fighter, you know, and that's where I love. You talk about states and, and so instead. But you know, I think about basic training. I learned the other day that, and I think this is still true. If you know any different, correct me, but Navy Seals drowned as part of their training. Like they literally drowned. So they don't fear it as much. Which to me, I just hope there's a therapist on site doing EMDR right afterwards, because I, I like try to be empathetic to what that would experience would be like. And there's no way I would do that. Like, it's like, it just like, to me, it's just like, wow. So on one hand we're, we're drowning, safely drowning somebody, which seems like an oxymoron to an outsider. But I, I know they, they, they don't lose people to death in that situation very often. But I mean, that's just an example of you're kind of killing people as part of your training. And yet we seem to care then afterwards about their health, their wellness how many wounded warrior, type of. I mean, there's thousands of those, the VA around the country, and I celebrate anybody who's doing that work.
And yet it doesn't necessarily seem like we found a way to both create the ideal SEAL or Marine and, you know, also create the ideal person, once they're done with that part of their life, to integrate back in. And my experience is a little bit tainted because I meet those folks usually when they're, you know, struggling with addiction or experiencing homelessness. And I know that that's not everybody's experience by any stretch, but it's way overrepresented in those unfortunate pop. You know, populations that I've worked with. And I. So I just kind of wonder it. It seems like all this kind of fights against the traditional, you know, especially today, where machismo is what the military is all about.
And yet, you know, the. The vulnerability it takes to do what you did and ask for help. And it just breaks my heart that your therapist said that you were triggering them, you know, for both your therapist being where he is and you seeking help. And I just kind of wonder is, is this taking hold in any meaningful way?
Because it's hard science, especially with conflicting goals and objectives that the military, I think, is trying to hold and struggle with.
[00:40:53] Speaker B: Well, I will tell you from both personal experience and scientific background.
I'm sorry. Exposure and immersion therapies work pretty well. Remember I mentioned earlier that the brain is a prediction engine, and when something your brain predicts doesn't come true, that that creates more or less oversimplified, I'll admit, but more or less creates trauma.
So we have seals in our program.
But I can tell you about my own experience. I was involved in two trainings like that in the Marine Corps.
Remember, I grew up in the inner city in South Philadelphia.
[00:41:36] Speaker A: South Philly would probably prepare you a little bit for that. That experience, I would imagine.
[00:41:41] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
When my school's football team sacked a quarterback, then they went after their family. So it was.
But I would tell you I was barely a swimmer, right, Because I, you know, the deepest water I was in when they opened a fire hydrant on the corner.
So when you go to the. A new. A new command in the Marine Corps that, you know, they have a bunch of trainings available, and you make a list of these are the things that I'd like to do. And what you put on that list, they ignore and give you the thing that scares you the most. So what did they send me? Water Survival School where, you know, and I would tell you, everybody thinks these special operators are supermen. They're all £150 and 5 foot 9, 5 foot 10, because that's what it takes to run all night and run all day. Now, you know, I've, I've got a gentleman I work with now who's a 6 foot 10 inch retired Delta force guy. So, you know, there are exceptions to that rule.
But I remember going to that pool and part of that is, you know, you essentially have to be able to do all kinds of crazy things to be water survival qualified. One of them is rescuing someone who wants to beat you to death in that pool. And it took me three days of getting punched in the face before I could essentially slap that guy first and stun him so I could drag him to the side of the pool.
The second is I went to RIP school, which is Reconnaissance Indoctrination Program. It's not being a reconnaissance marine, it's just the program. And in that school, you go to a pool where you'll tread water and pass around a 25 pound weight, somebody drops it, you got to go down and get it. And at the side of that pool is a sign that says if you're still conscious, you're not trying.
So you will drown in that training.
And the third thing I did, this was an experimental program that I got voluntold to go do which was rescuing, excuse me, surviving helicopter crashes for ground troops. They wanted to teach infantry troops. If your helicopter goes down, how do you survive that? Because whether you know it or not, all the weight in a helicopter is at the top. It's the engine. So when a helicopter hits the water, it flips upside down.
So I go to this 60 foot deep pool in Cherry Point with a helicopter suspended over the pool on cables. It's a CH46 with two doors, it's got the two engines on it and there's 12 of us. And they put you in that thing with all your combat gear or rifle, Alice pack full of wet flight suits. And then they drop it in the water and everybody's trying to get out at the same time.
That's an exercise in futility.
And then they start to turn it and a little more and a little more until eventually it flips upside down. And you still have to find a way to get out.
And then they do it in the dark.
And by the time that weak program was over, no problem at all, you could drop me out of anything and I'd be able to survive it because I Had gotten used to it. Right. It's not a trauma anymore. It's just Tuesday.
So there's real value in that.
[00:44:43] Speaker A: Right.
[00:44:46] Speaker B: So update that to now where what we're really focused on is creating the Marines. Call it bloody training to fight bloodless wars. And I think that's a very valuable approach.
But I would tell you that there's a big difference in what happens to a big army infantry soldier or a marine. A marine lance corporal and a special operator. Right. Special operators are raiders. Their typical time on target is a couple of hours.
They're going to spend six months practicing an operation. They're going to build mock ups. They're going to do it 100 times in 100 different ways to solve for just about any problem that's going to happen.
So by the time they get in that bird to go land on that objective, the other guys don't even know what hit them because every possible scenario has been resolved. That one way to look at trauma and war, the other way is how most people experience war, which is you and your buddies sitting in a ditch for 12 months, eating cold food, not having a shower for three months, not being able to get on a phone to talk to your loved ones, getting a letter from your wife that she's, you know, having an affair with your best friend, getting your car repossessed because you're in, you know, you can't pay your bills because you've been in a, in an FOB in Afghanistan. Yeah, those, I think, you know, solving for that E3 lance corporal specialist is a much bigger issue than it is with the special operators. They, they do have access to all kinds of, of support structures. And it's those, you know, the dirty nasty grunts who, you know, are using toilet paper that's this big for a year, who don't get to go home. Those are the ones that we really focus on.
[00:46:36] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'm curious like, because there is an outstanding question for me is, is there a way to make a war mentally healthy? And I think that there's sort of a thing that war is traumatic like I. So it's like, it's a very fascinating world for me to have have, you know, got, I'll just say put a foot into. I had no, no way, shape or form would I ever compare my experience to someone like yourselves. But it's, you know, one of the things I'm interested with HRV in these environments because you just named two very, very different situation. And I'm, I assume every special operator mission is unique Every sorte is, is unique. Every deployment is, is unique. Whether you're trying to keep your car or keep yourself alive or pass hours and hours of time with nothing really to do. Like all those are challenges. And like, do you see the military like using heart rate variability?
I mean, it seems like the easiest one to measure to really understand what these experiences do to people.
I was working with some cognitive performance folks and I've learned I need to be cautious of even mentioning too much details about anything in your world.
But the experience that they put folks through, they have great HRV data in real time to not only show what the training does to people, which pretty much for most people, tanks their heart rate variability, but then over the time of their program, the heart rate variability baseline has dropped dramatically to the point where scientifically, I'm surprised anyone makes it through their program. But the idea of the program is to put people in a state where they're, again, it's new language on a, I think concept that will be familiar to you. Having been dumped in a pool, in a helicopter, you know that, that we're gonna push you to the point of breaking and then what. But what's interesting is okay, you're, you're solo, but you passed, you somehow survived. It doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of thinking about now you're gonna go home, you know, you got through.
But the tracking post program and the programs you mentioned fit right into this one that I was working with these folks a few weeks ago.
We're going to almost destroy you to see if you can still perform at that almost destroyed rate.
And yet there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of thinking about maybe you need to take a week off, you know, whether you like the mountains or the beach or something, and maybe have a therapy session with your family to process this experience. And if you integrate it, like you said so beautifully, it can become a really source of resiliency. But knowing the day to day work that a lot of these people do, it's like, okay, Monday, you're back to work. And work is not that kind either. So I'm just curious, with things like heart rate variability, are we learning anything?
Are people, are you seeing people look at this as a way to kind of.
Kind of? That's where my recovery question kind of came in is, hey, we'll get people to almost again drowned, but is there a thought of, okay, how do we integrate that experience so it becomes a resiliency point for the rest of your life and not A traumatic paralyzing event for folks.
[00:50:30] Speaker B: So I'm going to give you two answers. I do want to say you comparing yourself to me and saying you haven't had that experience, that's how I feel about these young guys who've been to Iraq and Afghanistan. I can't imagine what it's like to be in combat for your entire young adult life. Six, seven years is just, I have no idea how anybody gets through this. That it's interesting that you asked the question about the sort of the reintegration piece. I think the military, in particular, the active duty military today.
I can talk about the VA in a minute here, but I know that they're asking the right questions. I don't think we have the answers yet. We're really just scratching the surface of a lot of this now. I'll give you an example. So we have, we have a research and development agreement with the United States Air Force to look at this, including human testing, which is something that you wouldn't, hasn't really been a thing. But I have been in meetings in the Pentagon with two star generals and their bosses who are interested in solving this type of problem. Not just the post combat transition, but the pre combat resilience building so that the, the trauma isn't as severe as it might otherwise be.
I can't sit here today, look you in the eye and say we can create a program that prevents trauma, but I can tell you complete certainty that we can create a program that attenuates or mitigates trauma while it's happening.
So when we think about hrv, you know, there was just what's called a sbir, which is an innovation research program that the Navy put out that, that we're working on, which is to create a real time multimodal system to ascertain the neurological, physiological, biological and psychological status in real time or near real time of troops. Right. So if you're in the Navy and you're sitting on a submarine, right. You may or may not have a physician, you might have a Navy corpsman, you certainly don't have an Internet connection, so you can't go to ChatGPT.
How do you monitor all of these systems and let that service member know, hey, maybe you need to take a break, maybe you need to go see the doc. Maybe we need to get you off the ship.
You know, there's, that's something that the military today is both interested in and putting significant dollars behind.
[00:53:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:53:03] Speaker B: So it's one thing to say interested, it's another thing altogether. To commit to the research that's involved in that. There's another program that's just coming out of DARPA that is looking at that in excruciating detail. There is literally a theory of warfare in the national defense strategy for this country called cognitive domain operations, where we're really focused on both offensive operations in the cognitive domain and in defensive operations in the cognitive domain. So hrv, hrv, respiratory rate, the blood pressure, your resting heart rate, your average heart rate, all of these work together. Right. HRV isn't simply how relaxed you are. It's not a universal score. It's not a direct measure of your vagus neuroscience nerve. It's not automatically better when it's higher. And it's not meaningful without context. So creating that context is what matters most. It's funny to kind of go back to sort of real world. I get young executives, people with military backgrounds who will say, how do I learn to deal, how to deal with these challenging things. I mean, running a, running a hundred million dollar business, a $200 million business, the 300 million dollar business is a 24 hour day, seven day a week exercise in stress management.
And a lot of younger CEOs and others who will come to me and say, you know, how do you do it? And my answer is the same as it would be if somebody said teach me how to fight. My answer would be go get punched in the face a lot.
That's the key to knowing how to fight is knowing that when you get punched in the face, it's not going to kill you.
[00:54:53] Speaker A: Right.
[00:54:54] Speaker B: So, you know, the, the, the HRV context is critical because what we're learning is it's not just your brain that creates trauma. Trauma happens in the gut, trauma happens in the heart. And integrating that entire system and that vagus nerve that runs through all of it. Right.
[00:55:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:10] Speaker B: Is a way is something that we're now really heavily into the research part of it.
Some of us are into the development part of it. We actually have a platform that takes all of that information, correlates it looks for causation and correlation, and then delivers interventions in the form of either neuromodulation or referrals to different kinds of therapies. I hope that answered your question. It was pretty wide ranging.
[00:55:37] Speaker A: Absolutely.
Let's end on this question. Question. It's one of my favorites to ask folks like yourself. Where, where do you see this? If you were to fast forward five, 10 years, kind of having your pulse on what you all are doing and, and what, what the military is, is doing in different sections, you know, and it seems like warfare, you know, this is an outsider's, you know, perspective, but warfare is changing maybe quicker than any time in history with what's happening in the Ukraine, what's happening in the Gulf.
I think human warfare is going to look very, very. The cognitive aspect. It makes total sense for what I'm seeing war evolve into.
So I'm curious as maybe more and more machines are, humans will be fighting in wars, unfortunately for the foreseeable future, putting their lives on the line, but more and more AI, more and more drones.
You mentioned asymmetrical warfare coming about. I'm curious where you think five to 10 years from now, with what seems to be one of the biggest transformations in warfare, maybe in history, happening as it hits other industries as well.
Where do you think this conversation will be five to ten years from now?
[00:57:08] Speaker B: It's a great question. I wish I had a cogent and well thought out answer, but I'm answering this in real time. I tell you that there have been a lot of innovations in warfare that have changed it significantly. In World War I, it was the invention of the machine gun.
Until then, we were bolt action rifles. You could fire five shots a minute. Now you can fire five shots a second.
And that changed war dramatically. It changed tactics, it changed our strategies. And with the advent of artificial intelligence, it will change the tactics and the strategies yet again. But the goal of warfare hasn't changed since the first spear got thrown. And that is war is politics by extension. So, you know, what are we really trying to do when we engage in kinetic warfare is we're attempting to get an adversary to either capitulate or meet us halfway.
So the goal of war is never going to change. The modalities of war will change. But at the end of the day, we're going to engage in warfare because our negotiations failed, which is we really should probably focus on being better negotiators, not better war fighters, because nobody wins of war it creates.
There's really nothing good that comes out of it at the individual level, at the global level, maybe. So. I mean, World War II was a. Was a pretty good example of a just war. But I think what will change is the levers that we pull to get the adversary to do the thing that we want them to do.
Look at what Russia does to Ukraine. Now. They're not.
They're not so much attacking Ukraine's military establishments, they're attacking civilians, because that's.
War is a test of will, not of technology.
And will Is here and here.
[00:59:02] Speaker A: Tony, that's a great way to end. I really appreciate this conversation.
I think some of the best work in the HRV field, unfortunately I can't talk with everybody about the details of it all the time, but just, you know, with the cognitive and other performance coaches out there really working to apply like you are scientific innovation to these folks who like deal with these incredibly highly stressful, likely traumatic situations.
It's an unfortunate laboratory to have, but one that I, we're just learning so much from. So I want to thank you again for the work you do, your service and sharing your great insight. I believe I could have conversation with you for another three and a half hours on this topic. The one question. What one, five. Did you ever write a book about yours experience or can you write a book about your experience? Because that, that whole early story of Tony as a Marine seems to belong on the movie screen or in a book. Was there, was there, was there ever. I, I want to know the whole story. Even though I'm not sure I'm allowed to know the whole story.
[01:00:23] Speaker B: You know, first time anyone's ever told me that.
[01:00:28] Speaker A: I, I'm shocked at that.
[01:00:31] Speaker B: No, I, I get that a lot. I've been hearing that for a long time. I've been, I've been pre.
In the interim, but I am, I'm actually working on, on two books. One is a book called Field Effect Leadership, which is really the lessons I've taken from military and business in how you create organizations that scale without you. You know, the key ingredient in leadership is lack of ego. But in order to be a leader, you need an ego the size of Wyoming. So go figure that one out. Yeah. And the story of that, that incident in the Marine Corps is actually just a funny side note. One of my board members at my current company is the retired three star general who fought the battle of Fallujah, the largest battles in Vietnam. Yeah, and he's an amazing, amazing guy. I mean just, I would consider him a mentor, but when I first met him, he kind of knew who I was. Because during that period, the incident that I was involved in actually became part of the ethics training at the Marine Corps Basic school. That's one of the things you gotta love about the Marine Corps. We embrace our faults.
Every time we do something, we're gonna pick it apart so we can get better. And I think that's translatable into every individual's experience in the world.
[01:01:52] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, Tony, thank you so very much and thanks for our listeners for, for joining us. Today, as always, you can find show notes. We'll, we'll put information about Tony and Peak Neuro in those as well so you can learn more. And yeah, as always, thanks for joining us. You can find all
[email protected] and we will see you soon. Thanks so much, Tony, Matt, so much.
[01:02:16] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me.
[01:02:19] Speaker A: All right.
