Biocybernauts & The Tyranny of The Rational Mind - Dr. James Hardt

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, where we talk with entrepreneurs, researchers, and practitioners in fitness, wellness, and the health sciences. I'd like to give a big thanks to our sponsors, Level Five Mentors, helping entrepreneurs achieve the highest levels of freedom in time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. Also, Certified Course Creation, helping entrepreneurs create accredited online certifications that are not only lucrative but highly scalable. Go to levelfivementors.com or certifiedcoursecreation.com and learn more. I am your host, Eric Malzone. And once again, welcome to the future of fitness. Dr. James Hart, thank you for coming. Uh, this is gonna be really fun. I'm excited. Eric, it's already fun. Thank you. Um, so before we get into the interview, I just want to give a thanks to Doug Holt, who I've known for quite a long time, and I know you now work with Doug. So thank you, Doug, for making this connection so we can have this conversation. And you uh I'll let you tell a little bit about your background, how to get got to where you are. So, yeah, Dr. Hart, if you don't mind, give us your background, tell us how you got to where you are with biocybernaut.

Well, born in Red Ring, Minnesota, lived in uh small towns in Midwest, and then small towns in the South. My dad was a teacher and moved around, so I had the experience of when I went from the Midwest to Arkansas and Louisiana, I was discriminated against as a damn Yankee. And in the South for a couple of years, I picked up a draw. And when I moved back to Illinois for eighth grade in high school, I was discriminated against as a Johnny Reb. So I know both sides of that, and I know how hollow that is. And I know that diverse cultural experience shaped my thinking about the nature of reality and about the importance of transcending culture, going outside the box to be creative, in the same way that Margaret Mead, the famous cultural anthropologist, was dragged around by her anthropologist's father to various primitive cultures in New Guinea, which gave her a perspective on the fact that the mores, the rules, the regulations of one culture are in fact arbitrary. And the tribe in the next valley over might have completely opposite antithetical views about what's right and proper normal. And so once you can see culture through the lens of multi-focus, then you are a little freer to go outside the box and to be creative. My high school education was accelerated math science and English. I got a scholarship, went to Carnegie Institute of Technology in Physics, graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics, and then did a master's degree and PhD in psychology and a postdoc in psychophysiology at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco. That's a part of UCSF. Any adventures along the way, including driving across the country on my Triumph Motorcycle, camping out along the way. But uh probably, well, before I go into any of the details, let me hand it back to you, Eric, get for any comments or questions.

Yeah, what is um psychophysiology? That's a fairly new term. I understand the components of the word, you know, psycho and physiology, but explain that because that's that's um if I don't know it, there's probably a good chance my audience doesn't know it either.

Sure. Well, in fact, I I have a little bit of fun when I'm uh coming into the United States from you know travels abroad. I have a training center in Canada and in Germany, and I speak internationally uh quite a lot. And so the customs agent will ask me, Well, what's you know, what's your job? And I say, psychophysiology. And their eyes kind of like turn up, and it sometimes leads to some quite interesting conversations. So the psycho or psyche is mind and the physiology is body. And so the work that I do uh involves the interactions between mind and body. Uh, I'm a brain scientist uh and an international businessman, and I do work which enables people to work with their physiology, the electroence, the EEG, uh, and in learning control of that, they learn how to control their emotions and their thinking and their experiences, all of which depend on the underlying brain waves. We tell people, brain waves rule, and we've actually trademarked that. Brainwaves rule. They rule your life, your emotions, your feelings, your perceptions. The only way you can have the experience of the color blue is if you have the brain waves in the back of your head, the visual cortex, for blue. And those brain waves are different for the brain waves of yellow or red or green. And so if you had your eyes closed and you were running the brain waves for blue, you would be seeing blue because brain waves rule. And in fact, this is an extremely powerful organizing principle because anything, any method that people do to have an effect and experience, whether it's shamanic drumming or Sufi dancing or uh taking drugs or having sex or fasting or meditating, they only have an effect if and when they change the brainwaves. And so what we give people is a technology and a method where in a week you can change your brain waves in the same patterns of change as if you were doing Zen meditation. It would take you 21 to 40 years of arduous daily practice to produce the changes in the brainwaves that you can produce in a week in a biosybernaut training center with our high-tech uh methods for doing brainwave feedback.

Wow. Wow, okay. Yeah, I have a million questions. Perhaps you can give me some more details on what is biosybernaut, like what is the service that you guys provide, who do you work with? What is it, what does it look like? What are the qualities of what you guys do?

Well, a simple way to say it is that a biocybernaut is to inner space, what an astronaut is to outer space. Oh, I like that. If you deconstruct the word, bio, of course, is the biology of body. Uh, cyber is the uh calculating technology. Long ago the word cipher used to mean doing arithmetic, doing calculations, and naught is a Greek suffix which describes somebody who goes on an adventure. Long ago, there was Jason and his fearless Argonauts who went in search of the golden fleece, which he had to bring back to the king in order to win the hand of the king's daughter in marriage. So there was Jason and his hardy band of Argonauts going through all these adventures. Well, now we have cosmonauts and astronauts and biosybernauts, and biosybernauts explore inner space.

Wow. So here's a question just to help put things in context, because when I think of brain or inner space exploration, right? If if you were gonna if you were gonna look at like brain exploration, inner space as a journey across the United States, and you're starting in California and you're ending in New York, how far do you think we've gotten as a race across that? If if if New York is like we know everything about the brain, and California is we know nothing, which is kind of funny and ironic. Um what what how far do you think we've gotten? How much more how much farther do you think we have to go?

Well, uh assuming we started in San Francisco?

Yeah.

I think we've gotten at least halfway across the Bay Bridge, and we're probably on Treasure Island, heading for Oakland.

Okay. That's that's kind of what I was thinking. Yeah, so there's a lot. This is a a wide open, this is a wide open uh field for sure. Yes. It's it's I I just think of, you know, in modern day, and of course, you know, the the recording today, it's it's May 6th, 2020. So we're we're smack in the middle of a pandemic, and that's a whole nother conversation. But, you know, ultimately we're in a very safe time to live, yet people seem extremely full of angst and depression and a lot of mental disorder when everything seems relatively peaceful if you look at the history of humankind. What insights can you provide? Why why are we such an unsettled creature?

Well, for one, we're very aware. If you have a cow in the feedlot at a slaughterhouse, the cow isn't anxious or worried because tomorrow it's gonna march down the uh aisle and be killed and turned into hamburgers because it's not a very aware creature. Humans have the ability to be aware of the past, present, and the future. Now, part of rising your consciousness is learning to live mostly outside of time. Ramdas said, if you want to live high, you have to live outside of time. And the famous Zen master, Suzuki Roshi, said time is the basis of fear. If you think about it, like, well, are you okay now? Well, yeah. Well, why are you afraid? Well, because at some time in the future, something bad might happen. And so, you know, you want to be knowledgeable about time. For example, I can catch airplanes, but I typically don't live my day by the clock. Today is an exception because you and I had this call scheduled for one. And so, you know, I can make things like that, but as I go through the day, time isn't what's ruling me. And so now people have, and this is one thing that biosyberna is exceptionally good at, is helping people to transition to effortless grace instead of uh tense, stressed, worried type A behavior. And so we tell people at BioCybernaut that perfectionism is a curable disease. Uh perfection is not what human existence is about. We strive toward perfection, but an obsession with perfection creates anxiety, which impairs your approach toward perfection. And so when you can let go of the need to be perfect, you will actually be closer to perfect in what you do. Uh going all the way back into the 1880s, early psychological research was able to show that anxiety would impair all kinds of performance, mental performance, physical performance, you name it. And so it turns out that alpha brainwaves are like a silver bullet against anxiety. And so when people learn to increase their alpha brain waves with the biosominate training and coaching method and technology, even if they started out as high anxiety, they end up well below average in anxiety. This is the basis of a paper that I published long ago, uh, July 7, 1978, in the prestigious journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, namely Science, one of the top two general science magazines in the world. And there I was able to show that if you took high anxiety people and you taught them how to increase their alpha, both types of anxiety would drop dramatically. Both state anxiety, which is like if you almost get run over by a bus, your heart's pounding, you're like temporary anxiety. But also the alpha training reduces uh trade anxiety, which is a long-term personality disposition, which most psychiatrists believe is not changeable over the adult lifespan. Au contraire, with alpha training, you can take an anxiety neurotic and have them be below average in anxiety ongoingly. Uh, we've done follow-up studies six months and 12 months after the training, and people are actually better at six months and even further better at 12 months than they were in the day right after the training. So we know it works. Uh high science proves it works, and we have an ongoing training center here in Sedona, Arizona, for people to come and uh have a brain makeover.

That's really interesting. I come from a long line of anxious people. My mom is, and to add on top of it, I'm an entrepreneur. So it's great. Yeah, yeah. It's just I'm I'm just used to anxiety, and it's it's interesting. After specific traumatic events in my life, I've noticed that no matter what I do, you know, I do cold water treatments, I do meditation, I might take care of myself, I exercise, I do you know, whim hopper. I've done it all, right? Yeah, I just can't, you know, my default is I wake up every morning anxious.

It's just like oh, well, we we have a we have a chamber here in Sedona just waiting for you.

Yeah, I mean, this sounds really, yeah, this sounds pretty amazing. Yeah. It's interesting too, Jim, because I uh out of all the podcasts I've done, the ones that where I talk about, I have a guest when we talk about anxiety and burnout is the ones not necessarily the ones where I get the most, you know, downloads or whatever. That that that doesn't matter. What I do get is the most direct messaging from people about, hey, that resonated with me, which tells me that anxiety and all of its forms are extremely common and yet everyone's weird about talking about it, right? Like what why is that? Why is there something, is there a shame around anxiety? What is it about it?

Oh, well, in fact, there is uh anything related to your mental state, if you think it's not optimal or if you think it's not as good as uh people around you, there will, in many people, be shame. Now, that's a thing we can also easily help people to get rid of. And so I remember doing a business plan 15 years ago, and uh the top five anti-anxiety drugs at the time had a market share of over half a billion dollars. So there's big money in anxiety, and a big pharma knows that. And so one of the, you know, and there are many non-prescription drugs that people take primarily because of anxiety. Alcohol is one of them.

Yeah, and then you look at something like Xanax, like these these types of drugs, are they are they messing with alpha brainwaves or how are they working? Is is the science related between the pharma and what you do, or is there a connection?

Well, let's not step into quick stand, but let's note accurately that human beings are a bio, electro, magneto, chemical organism. And our awareness is dependent on proper functioning of the biochemistry, uh, the electrical and the magnetic uh activity which is produced by the biological chemical activity. And so we could intervene in this cycle at any point. Drugs are one way of intervening with the biochemistry. When we put electrodes on people's heads, small gold discs that hick up the electrical activity being produced by the brain, super tiny signals. I mean, they're just a few millionth of a volt. They're measured in microvolts, and we turn these, we amplify them 100,000 times, so they're big enough for computers to work with, and then we turn them into musical sounds, uh flutes and oboes and clarinets and saxophones and organs and mystic choir, and so people get to hear in real time the working of their brain, the electrical workings of their brain. And when they through mechanism that nobody understands, I mean, like if I asked you to reach out and pick up a glass of water, uh, and you could do it. But if I say, How did you do that? that's ultimately mysterious. Now, some uh physiologists could say, well, you know, there are nerve impulses that come from the brain and they go to the muscles, and then the muscles act, and they're yeah, but how does what I said get translated into that first neural impulse? And so there's workings of the brain and consciousness that nobody understands at this point from a scientific perspective. You could be it, but uh to know it, that's a a different thing. And so when you are working to do something, you have activity in your brain. When you're doing brainwave feedback, you're doing you're doing processes through consciousness which alter the underlying biochemistry. For example, there was one study done, reported in 1989 by Gene Penniston and uh his colleague uh Kolkowski, where they took hypoglycemic, post-traumatic stress disordered alcoholics in the VA system. Nothing was working for these people. So Gene, despairing of how to help his patients, visit Elmer Green at the Menninger clinic, and he did some long sessions of theta brainwave training during which angels appeared and downloaded to him a protocol for alpha and theta brainwave feedback training, now famously called the Penniston Protocol. And after applying this to these hypoglycemic post-traumatic stress disordered alcoholics, suddenly 80% of them are on the wagon. They're not drinking. Four years later, 80% are still on the wagon. Now, Gene and Penniston and Kolkowski had the wisdom to um sample blood before and after they did this uh brainwave training. And what they found were significant and useful reductions in beta-endorphin, which is a stress indicator in the brain. Alcoholics control it down by drinking, but the brainwave training, which is working with the electrical activity of the brain, demonstrably reduced a bad marker of brain biochemistry. So you can intervene in the system any place you like, but if you're going to intervene with the chemistry, you know, and have real-time measures, you have to stick some kind of a needle into the brain and pump the fluids out and analyze them and then give feedback based on that. It's a whole lot easier just to put a few surface electrodes on, which people don't even feel, you know, a minute after they're put on, and you can wear them easily for hours, and then you are doing feedback on the electrical activity of the brain, which helps you alter your brain biochemistry, including those markers which underlie depression, anxiety, and various other psychopathology.

Wow. So this is uh fascinating field, Jim. I I can't even imagine. How how long have you been you've been studying this since what, your 20s? I would imagine, earlier?

Well, uh, the last numbered birthday I had was 26. I was already doing this work then. There's a founder story, if you're interested, I can share.

Oh, yeah, yeah, please. Well, first of all, so you say the numbered, give give me so when you explain that. So you don't you don't really count your your birthdays anymore, is that right?

Well, birth birthdays are a big deal at Biosabin. Any staff or even one of the people who comes for training, if they have a birthday, I'll make a cake and we put one candle in the middle of it to celebrate the fact that this is the first year of the rest of their life.

Ah, awesome. Okay. Birthdays are a big deal, but we just don't number them. Yeah, okay, awesome. Yeah, but so please, please share the uh the origin story. I want to hear this.

Okay. I'm a senior in uh physics uh at Carnegie Institute of Technology. It's a fall semester. I come out of the student union after lunch, and there's a big hand-painted sign. Every letter is a different color, and it says Dr. Joe Camille will talk on brain waves and consciousness. And he gave it time that I looked at my watch, it was just 10 minutes away, a location, the building was, you know, 50 yards from me. And I didn't have a class that hour, so I went. And Dr. Camilla was a Japanese American scientist, sleep researcher, recently moved from University of Chicago to UCSF, and he accidentally discovered that, you know, there's a pretty coeb lying on a cot next to his polygraph machine trying to fall asleep. And if he saw a big burst of alpha and he commented on it, he seemed to think that there might be another one or two big bursts. And so he had the idea that, well, maybe he was influencing it by giving feedback. So then he rang a little bell and that worked even better. And then he made an electronic system and that worked even better. And in April of 1962, he reported an earth-shattering result at the Western Psychological Association meeting in San Francisco that contrary to conventional wisdom, humans could, yes, learn to control their own brainwaves. Everybody thought it was autonomic and outside of voluntary control. Well, this kicked off a real flurry of excitement. Oh my god, electronic Xen. But that died out pretty quickly because there's a hundred dozen ways to do it wrong, and only a very few ways to do it right. And when I came into the field, I sort of had to set things straight and, you know, show people what kind of measures to use. A lot of the measures they were using were like rubber rulers. So anyway, I'm excited. I go now to Dr. Camilla after the talk and say, I'm gonna be in San Francisco this summer. Can I come see you? Well, yes. So I went to the library every spare minute and read everything I could find on Brainwaves. And I found a very interesting history of it. Now, we know that Rene Descartes dreamed up science, and uh he did it during 16 months of being billeted in uh one of the low countries, the Netherlands, I think, during uh a pause in one of the interminable wars uh in Europe. And he famously said, Cogito ergo son, I think, therefore I am. Well, that meant if you weren't thinking, you didn't even exist. And so the tyranny of the rational mind was born, and it spread quickly all over Europe and the Western world. And so intuition was devalued. Men didn't dare have intuition if they had something like it to call it a hunt or gut feeling. But intuition was relegated to women, those you know, not very rational creatures, according to the thinking of that time. And so this spread all across Europe, except it did not touch very deeply into the minds of people in Bavaria, which had deep mystical roots. Well, in Bavaria was born this little boy, uh Hans Berger, and he became a psychiatrist, went to Vienna, was in practice there, and then He was conscripted by the Austro-Hungarian Empire's army to serve in one of their interminable wars in the Crimea. During a battle, his horse was shot and it fell on and broke his leg. He spent long months in a military hospital. When he got back to Vienna, he called his family together to tell him his tale. Well, halfway through his story, his sister interrupted, took him into her bedroom, and showed him her diary, her tagebuch, where she had described in detail every single thing that had happened to him that he'd just reported. And so he now suddenly, being Bavarian and not European rationalist, he began to believe in ESP. Now in France, a guy named Volta was discovering that you could make a little battery and apply it to animal frog legs and they would jump. So Herr Dr. Dr. Hans Berger went looking for electrical activity in the brain. Very primitive equipment, but he found some. He found some little wiggles. He called them alpha because they were the first. They're not the fastest, they're not the slowest, but they're the biggest, and so the most likely to be found with his primitive equipment. That was 1908. He kept it a secret for 10 years while he did super good research, including finding out that anxiety would give people lower alpha. That was known, you know, before he went public in 1918. Well, when he went public, it created a sensation. Oh my god, electrical waves in the brain. Pretty soon every hospital in the developed world had to have an EEG machine. And they would do eyes open, eyes closed, baselines, and it was very helpful in assessing the state of the organism. Pre- and post-surgeries, for example. And so when Dr. Camilla in 1962 discovered that people could voluntarily control their own brain waves, it was a stea chain. And it was so into this environment that I rode my motorcycle, going across the Trans-Canadian Highway, down I-5, and the Coast Highway, showed up at Joe's lab, volunteered. Very primitive equipment. He had a house on the edge of campus, a big PDP-15 mini computer in a bedroom of his house. The training chamber was a bedroom with a closet off the bedroom with a chair and a table and a three-digit Mixie tube display, little vacuum tubes that could light up with digits, and a big torn speaker on an orange crate in the corner of the closet. And I would sit in there in the dark and have one channel of audio from midline occipital alpha. Well, it was the most fascinating thing I'd ever done. It was so cool, tempting, and uh tantalizing at the same time because there'd be a burst of alpha, the sound would burst, and my rational mind would go, What was that? How do I do that? How can I keep it going? And of course, it would retreat to silence. And so I'd settle down and relax and it would come back. The sound would come back, and my mind would go, What's that? How do I do it? How can I keep it going? And it would retreat. So I quickly learned to put a leash on that part of my mind, my rational analyzer. You know, it was well developed. I'd just gotten a bachelor's degree in physics. And so, but I had to restrain that sucker because it was sabotaging my alpha with its need to know. And so as I would restrain it, say extra half second, the tone would last longer. My score accumulated, which would be displayed every two minutes, would get bigger, and I had three days of this, an hour each. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. I went back on the fourth day wanting more, but they weren't doing any studies. Oh, I was so disappointed. Well, I had learned a little bit about how the lab worked. Joe Camille's girlfriend, Aunt Joanne Gardner, worked in the lab. She and I had become friendly, and so I went to her office and said, Joanne, would you take me downstairs, put a few electrodes on my head, put me in the closet so I can play. Oh, yeah, sure, okay, I'll do that, and took me down, put the electrodes on, started the equipment, just the computer to run everything, no polygraph because I wasn't anybody's data. She went upstairs, got involved in her work, and forgot I was there. Later, lunchtime comes, and she and nine other members of the lab go out to Chinese lunch, and in course eleven of a twelve course Chinese lunch, she goes, Oh my god, and she remembered there was somebody locked in the chamber. So all ten of them piled into this VW camper, go hurtling back across town, run up to the building, rip open the door of the chamber, and interrupt the late stages of a most incredible adventure. When I went into the chamber, I was a Protestant fundamentalist. My dad's father was a Lutheran minister who married my parents and baptized me. I had never been drunk, I didn't know what a meditation was, and now I'm coming out and into the light after this incredible adventure where I was out of body, I was flying around the universe, I was having ego disintegration, I was encountering discorporate entities, and as I'm being asked to tell this group what happened, uh Paul Gorman would say, Oh, that's a meditation experience. He and his wife had toured India the summer before in that BW camper. And so virtually everything that had happened to me, he would say, Oh, that's a meditation experience. And so this was my first awakening. Now I was so high from that experience that for the next three days as I walked around, my feet were like 18 inches off the ground. But then the summer was over, and I had to go back to Pittsburgh, ride my motorcycle across the country that was like flying, because I had some, I somehow knew that I my life was going to be about this. And it was so weird and so far out that I figured I would need to get my rational mind stamped with the seal of approval of a PhD in psychology in order to be taken seriously in doing the weird stuff that I figured I would end up doing. And so that was pretty cool.

It's really cool. So I uh I'm not naive to plant medicine, and it sounds like obviously there's a lot of similarities, but how the two contrast or do they complement? How how you know, and we're talking like psilocybin, ayahuasca. I guess if you want to throw MDMA in there as well, I'm not sure if that's technically plant medicine or not, but how do they compare? How do they contrast? Is there a gap to be bridged between the two?

Or yeah, well, remember the the simple unifying principle here is brainwaves rule. Trademark. Okay. So if plants change your brainwaves, guess what? You will have experiences. So let's talk about some of those. I have a colleague from Denmark who was taking a four-channel EEG recording machine to Peru and recording brainwaves during ayahuasca ceremonies. And what he reported to me was ayahuasca increased alpha brain waves at left and right occipital, that's 01 and 02, and left and right central, that's C3 and C4, in the International 1020 electrode placement system. And those are exactly the four locations that we do our starting training at. And so, hello, we're increasing alpha at these same sites with ayahuasca and with the biosybernoid alpha training. The only difference is you don't have to vomit when you come for biosybernoid alpha.

Nice bonus.

Nice bonus. Well, take another one, mescaline. The mescaline is derived from peyote. Peyote has 13 different alkaloids, 12 of which all they do is make you throw up, and the 13th one is called mescaline, and that gets you high. So, and the uh there was a long ago, there was a study in the journal of the American Medical Association, where some med students who had access to some brainwave computer analyzing stuff decided they would test out what happened if they smoked marijuana, which they did, and then they recorded the brainwave changes, which were an increase in the power of alpha and a slight slowing in the frequency. Well, these are two of the effects of the brainwave training, the alpha one training at biosaberna, and they also are what happens in beginning and intermediate Xen. Now, when we go to advanced Xen, which people who do the alpha training at Biosabrona do, there's the in addition to the increase of alpha, the spreading forward on the head, and the slowing of the frequency, in the advanced, there's also the emergence of theta waves at the frontal locations, F3 and F4. And that does not happen with marijuana. Plus, when I was researching at UCSF, one of the groups that I studied were students from San Francisco State. This was in the 70s. So, you know, it was like pharmacopoeia. The students were on just about everything. And they would come to the lab and I would ask them to report everything that they had taken and when and how much, and what did they eat, and when and how much, and did they have any sexual activity, and when and how much, and a rating, and so and we took daily mood scales. Of course, we had brainwave baselines every day, and so I learned a lot. And so when when people would come, I would not allow them to bring marijuana into the lab. But some of them would stand on the porch outside and smoke up, then come in, get their lectures on, and have their uh feedback session in my research studies. And what I noticed was their baselines would be higher if they had had marijuana, they'd have more alpha, but they would completely lose their ability to learn from the feedback how to increase the alpha further. Now it's well known in the lore of marijuana that it destroys short-term memory. And it also, I observed, it impaired the ability to use the feedback tones and the scores to increase your alpha in the moment. And so we can also talk about uh LSD. Very intriguingly, Joe Camille introduced brainwave feedback to humanity in 1962 in California. Well, also in California, in 1962, LSD was made illegal. So one method for changing brain waves was taken away and another one was provided. Now, shortly before LSD became illegal in California, this was in 1962, an early biofeedback researcher named Barbara Brown, working in Southern California, gave legally gave LSD to college students and measured their brain waves. And what she found was that for some of the college students, LSD made more alpha, and in other of the college students, it made less. And the dividing line was were they visualizers or not? Now, if you're sitting there uh with your eyes open, your alpha is going to be lower than if you close your eyes, because the the human eye sends an enormous amount of information up the optic nerve that the brain has to process. It's ten times more information per second than comes up the auditory nerve. And so closing your eyes reduces the information processing burden of the brain, and your alpha can go higher. Except, of course, if you're sitting there with your eyes closed and visualizing. That's making that visual cortex work hard and it suppresses alpha. There's a saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I've modified it to say the road to lower alpha is paved with beautiful visualizations. And so one of the things that people need to learn to do is to cease from, to desist from visualizing and go into their feelings. Avoid thoughts, avoid visualizations can wax abundant.

Wow, this is really interesting. I would imagine as you've you know forged down this path that you probably met with a certain amount of resistance or yeah. What's been give us an anecdotally, like give us, you know, one of the biggest personal challenges that you had as you developed Biosavern and and you know, kind of led down this path.

Well, even before then, okay, so I've come back from Joe's lab, now Carnegie Mellon, and joined with Mellon Institute. I registered for psychology. They liked me. They gave me uh a full scholarship and $2,200 a month stipend to live on. So I've just registered. Now, during my senior year, I'd set up an exchange program between the psych department at Duquesne University, where they had some professors who were Jesuit priests from France who were teaching phenomenology. Wow, the science of studying consciousness. Well, a lot of the people in the Carnegie Tech psych department were rat runners, behaviors. They didn't even believe in consciousness. So they looked at the people at Duquesne as practicing witchcraft, and so they were not too pleased with my setting up this exchange program to expose the Carnegie students to witchcraft. Well, so now I'm registered as a grad student, and some of these physiological professors hate my guts, and so they're, you know, sort of opposing my working in this area. So I wanted to do research, obviously, with oh, so I've registered for grad school and I walk up the hill to the home, rented home of Dr. Rolf von Eckersburg, one of these Duquesne professors. Now, Rolf had been a grad student at Harvard under Timothy Leary, and he had done tons of LSD. He and his wife lived at the community at Millbrook and did tons of LSD. So, and he's a social psychological phenomenologist. He and I had become friends. Whether he's giving a lecture at the university or making love with his wife or playing with his kids or canoeing down a river, what he's really doing in his mind is studying the structure of his consciousness and noting how all of these things that his body is going through are influencing his consciousness. So I go, well, if anybody would know what happened to me there in Joe's chamber, it'll be Rolf. Yeah, Rolf will know. So I walk up the hill, walk into his big rented house, and into his office, and he looked at me and he saw that I was profoundly different. And he motions for me to sit down across to his desk. He took his left arm and swept everything on his desk onto the floor, folded his hands, put his elbows in the desk, and said, Tell me what happened. So for the next three and a half hours, I'm downloading to him everything that happened to me in his chamber. Now, partway through my download, his neighbor lady came in listening, then she left and she came back, bringing me a book and put it right by my right hand. It was the autobiography of a yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. Now, if somebody had given that to me a week before, I'd have looked at it and nonsense and I would have tossed it. But now it became something that I and my roommate, we actually did for uh seven years a correspondence lessons from Yogananda. We became initiated into Kriya Yoga by one of Yogananda's direct disciples, called me Kriyananda. And so uh in parallel with my work in the science, I was also doing meditation in the Yogananda tradition. So it's very powerful. So now, but I don't know, now I'm a grad student and I'm got my master's degree, I'm ready to start on my dissertation, been there a year. And so I'm told to go talk to Dr. Terrence W. Barrett, who is a postdoc who's got his first job, and he's in charge of the physiology lab. And so I go to him and I tell him excitedly, oh my God, you know, there are these things, they're brainwaves, and uh, they've been studied in Zen monks, experiencing Satori, a superconscious state. They've been studied in yogis, experienced satori, I mean samadhi, a superconscious state. And the brain waves are high alpha all over the head, but they're different because in yogic samadhi, if you disturb a person, even by putting a red-hot branding iron on their arm, so the flesh is burning and the smoke is curling up, it doesn't disturb their alpha waves. They are in a different world. And this world is Maya or illusion, as yoga philosophy says. Now, if you're working with a Zen monk who's in Satori, and you even just ring a little bell by his ears, Alpha will block. You do it again, the alpha blocks do it again, the alpha blocks do it. With a normal person, after five or six times, the brain goes, Oh, it's that bell again, it's not interesting, it's not dangerous, and the alpha doesn't block. But the thousandth time you ring the bell for the monk in Satori, it blocks. It's like the William Blake phrase, which is when the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears to man as it is, namely infinite. And so the thousandth ring of the bell is fresh and new when you're in this alpha state of Satori. Different if you're in the yogic state of samadhi. So I go through all of this, and you can tell even now I'm excited about you know how brain waves relate to states of consciousness, and you can completely predict the differences in Zen and yoga philosophy by looking at the differences of the alpha response in the superconscious states in yoga, which is samadhi, and zen, which is satori. And so brain waves rule, they rule these entire cultures. The entire culture emerges out of the brain waves that are present in these superconscious states in these societies. So, you know, I go through and I'm all excited and I tell this to Dr. Terrence Barrett, and he doesn't crack a smile. A couple hours later, I get a letter in my inbox in the Department Internal Mail System. Permission to use the electrophysiological equipment denied. Reason. Nobody who's interested in consciousness could possibly be serious about pursuing a PhD in psychology. However, if you're willing to give up these nonsense ideas and submit yourself to me, I will design a program for you which will lead to a PhD in physiological psychology. So fortunately, the dean was on sabbatical. The acting dean was the only other interested in consciousness. He was a Piagetian, following Jean Piaget, the child development psychologist from France. And so he was interested in studying the development of consciousness in children. And so I showed the letter to him, and he just rolled his eyes. And Dr. Barrett's infections were swept away. Dr. Barrett's contract was not renewed, but that earned further the enmity of the hard-nosed rat-running physiologist in the department. And so when I'd done my research at Joe Camilla's lab in San Francisco, better place than Carnegie Mellon, and I was now ready to present my doctoral thesis for its defense, my uh thesis chairman arranged my defense so that the two worst hard-nosed physiologists were leading classes and couldn't be there. They sent hostile questions, but I answered the questions and they couldn't do follow-up. And so, yeah, there's been opposition from the very beginning. People who didn't want consciousness to be studied.

Yeah. Yeah, I just, there's so many different rabbit holes. And I so as people go through, I know you've had a lot of high-profile people go through the bio-cybernaut experience or program, whatever you may call it. Can you give us insights into like what type of people go through your program and and what the benefits are that they see after? What is it? Yeah, give us some some stories.

Well, sure. Well, uh, you probably know that Tony Robbins and his wife and her personal assistant have gone through. In fact, we just had we just crossed last month the fifth anniversary of their uh going through. And we had somebody in training who was a Tony Robbins trainer, and I sent a text message to Tony saying, Oh, Tony, thank you so much. Uh, because Tony's out there. Tony said that biosybernaut is one of the most valuable things that he's done in his life. And I've seen videos of him uh leading groups where he'll say, There's no problem that can't be solved in alpha. And he's really high on the biosybernaut process. When I sent him this this text, this is uh April 23rd. Here's what he sent back.

It was five years ago today that we should have put your room uh your doorstep on the wrong day for your program, my bro Mary and I.

We were talking about it today. Just want to send you some love, and then you sent this little note. I'm glad to hear that's Mary Yarn loves you.

I didn't, you know, when I woke up this morning, I didn't think I'd have Tony Robbins on my podcast. But it's official.

It's official. Well, when Tony uh on day seven, he he they did a ceremony for me, and they said, Jim, you are permanent family. And so it is uh an association, it's a family connection that I absolutely treasure. And so, and and Tony continues to speak about uh his wonderful experiences in Biosabina. You know, we're very much looking forward to uh him bringing the family back for their Alpha 2. We actually had that scheduled uh sometime last year, and then there were you know some important events that caused it to be postponed. But yeah, so Tony Robbins is an ardent fan, uh supporter, dearest friend, and family member. And we've also trained uh royalty, European royalty and uh Middle Eastern royalty, who have then subsequently sent uh many, many people to Biosabinet. We have a training center in Germany, so it's particularly easy for the European and the Middle Eastern royalty to return for more trainings and to bring or send friends or family members or business associates there. So yeah, and uh well, I can remember we had a CEO of a billion-dollar uh corporation do the training, and he said it was one of the best things he ever did in his life. Wow. We had professional athletes, and of course, grandmothers and grandfathers and grandchildren, and we trained over 200 Canadian Aboriginal people. In December of 08, I was running, uh moved my training center from California to Canada, and I trained a man who was a co-founder. Oh, this is a cool story. This man is a co-founder of Canada's second largest oil and gas company with one partner. He grew the company from zero to two billion dollars in just two years. And he sent, after his training, he sent many people from his company, and he said the ROI on a biosabon training is a hundred. He had a private foundation and they were doing like nutritional supplements for the workers, many of them in the far north, in isolated, you know, drilling sites with no access to you know restaurants or supermarkets. And so he was providing nutritional supplements, and he said the ROI on their foundation work was seven. But he told the assembled board, he'd asked me to create a scientific advisory board, which I did. And on our first meeting in his headquarters in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, he jaw droppingly said the ROI on a biocybernaut training is a hundred. Now, this is not your ordinary. Entrepreneur. This is a guy who, with one partner, grew a company from zero to two billion dollars in two years. And he said the ROI is 100. So, you know, business people might well take that quite seriously. Now, he also has a soft spot in his heart for the Canadian Aboriginal people who have suffered enormously from the racism of the dominant culture. Including they had a thing called in Canada the residential schools, where they would rip children away from their parents or grandparents and send them to these 12-month-a-year schools. Well, Georgina Lightning, one of our trainees, who's a famous filmmaker, did a documentary called Older Than America, in which she documented that 50% of all the Aboriginal children sent to these schools died there. They had plaques famously displayed, kill the Indian to save the man. Now they meant kill the Indian culture to save the man, but in fact uh 50% of the children died there. So there's immense trauma. These schools continued in some parts of Canada up until 1989. And the children sent there were beaten and raped by the older students and by the priests who mostly ran them. And uh we trained famous chiefs and uh shaman uh and medicine men and women who had attended these schools. One of them, Chief Willie Littlechild, uh, was actually on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He is the first Aboriginal ever to be elected to the Canadian National Parliament. And when he did the alpha training, because he had lots of forgiveness to do, and he said, if you have been abused and you have not forgiven, you will become an abuser. And so the work that I did in Canada not only won me an invitation to be adopted into the Cree Indian Nation, which I was. My Indian name is Kessik Kanepawit, it means Standing in Heaven, not quite Skywalker, but standing in heaven. And uh I was also invited to speak at the United Nations in Geneva about this work because it helps people overcome abuse and the anxiety and the depression that often follows abuse. And so we had uh an amazing uh opportunity there in Canada with training over 200 Canadians. Now, I've actually uh published some research uh from that work, and one of them is a paper that is about reductions, it's kind of called reductions in psychopathology in a cohort of male and female Canadian Aboriginals. And as I said, we trained over 200 of them, giving them personality tests before and after. And among the dimensions of personality that were significantly reduced pre to post their alpha training were anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, paranoia, hypochondriasis, psychopathic deviancy, uh pretty much the whole uh gamma of the clinical scales on the MMPI, the Minnesota multiphase personality inventory. So we're used to people transforming. We're used to people transforming. Now, you perhaps know about neurolinguistic programming or NLP. Yep. In 1992, when I was already in my university research showing profound reductions in different dimensions of personality dysfunction following just one week of the alpha training, I had the privilege of entertaining Robert Keltz, one of the second-tier luminaries in NLP at my lab in Palo Alto, California. He had just written a wonderful book called Changing Beliefs, and he explained how with NLP, if you could change somebody's beliefs, everything from there on down, including behaviors, even addictive behaviors, would drop away. And I was marveling with him about that. And I said, You know, Robert, this is wonderful, and I'm here to share with you that the biocyber non-alpha training can change people at a level of identity. And his jaw draw, his eyes got big, and he said, Well, the only thing I know that can change someone at a level of identity is a spiritual awakening. And I smiled, folded my hands, and I said, You said it, not me. And so when you change your brain waves, and in a week, you're producing the same changes as if you did Zen religiously for 21 to 40 years, you're going to have experiences which are going to put you more in touch with capital S source. And so we've had typically people who've been uninterested in consciousness or spirituality, will following their training, go make raids on metaphysical bookstores and start to learn more about other aspects of reality than meet the eye.

Wow. Yeah. So I I uh we're we're running towards the end of time, Dr. Hart. I mean, this has been absolutely fascinating, but I want to respect your time too. And is there, you know, as the listeners are are hearing this, is there anything that you or your business need right now that that people can help out with?

Well, certainly. Uh we have an RD program, which is funded entirely by our training revenues in this uh lockdown. We've had a few trainings, people who had self-quarantined and uh, you know, we wore masks, so we are able to uh do uh trainings, but RD is lagging at the moment. We have a new system, Dream System, which is five of the six boards are complete. Uh we've been working on it for five years. It'll allow us to do brainwave training on the patterns underlying halos and maybe even shorten the training from seven to five days, but also publicity marketing, having people know about this. One of my trainers in Canada used to say miles of the best technology on the world that nobody knows about. And up until very recently, uh I never put any effort toward marketing. I was, you know, I'm a I'm a science math geek, uh brain scientist, and had to become an international businessman, but marketing was uh we have Doug Holt now, who is very gifted, and you know, he's only been with us since uh late last year, and so we have initiatives there, but anything that people can do to inform others about this. There is one other thing that I'd love to share with your listeners. One of the things we do, it's called the high-tech decision making. I built the world's first microcomputerized brainwave feedback and analyzing system. I used the Motorola 6800 microprocessor. At the same time, uh Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were using the Intel chip to build the Apple, and one of my friends who was with them in the Silicon Valley Computer Club built the Apple computer, the guts of which I adapted to make this first ever brainwave feedback system that was microcomputerized. And so one of the first people who came, and that was produced in 1978. That's when I made the first the world's first microcomputerized brainwave feedback system. And one of the first people who came was a very gifted electronic genius. His name was Gunnar Hertig, he had a Stanford MBA and a master's degree in electrical engineering. So he knew silicon at the atomic level. He also knew business very good. His business formula was he would accept a job as CEO of a certain stage company, $175,000 salary and 1% of the company. At the end of two years, you could not pay him any sum of money to get him to stay. He was a quarter circle guy, he knew it, he had a quarter circle gold pen. He would move on to the next company. Well, he was so good when Gunnar was coming off contract, there'd be headhunters on him like you know, bees on a field of flowers. And he would have 50, 60 offers. He'd winnow them down, but you know, he'd do things like weighted list. This pro is two and a half times that con. But he just in his heart didn't feel that it was, you know, for sure. So he came to me after he did his alpha training and he said, Jim, I want to do a four-day tune-up. And I go, Garner, we don't have a four-day tune-up, we have a seven-day training. We didn't even have the alpha two then. And he goes, Well, now you have a four-day tune-up, and I'm gonna pay you four sevenths of your regular fee. Hey. And so he was had come off contract or was about to, and he had all these job offers. He winnowed them down to five. And so in the first two days of his four-day alpha tune-up, he would like a sailor just reconnect with alpha, like getting his sea leg back. And then on the third day, he would bring to mind one of the five top contenders, and in his mind, he would accept that job. And he would jump into that job and start operating as the CEO. And after some epics, he'd see where his alpha scores were running, and then he'd step out of that job, and in his mind, he'd step into the next job, roll up his sleeves, and begin operating. Now, he knew the industry well enough to know that in this job he'd be supervising mainly computer programmers and electronic engineers, and in his other job, he'd have international marketing responsibilities. And so he would repeat this process on day four. And so he would have rank ordered from most alpha to least alpha the job offerings. And he would sit in the chamber, wouldn't even come out after the session was over, call for a cordless phone. I would watch him and he would call the recruiter whose job offering consistently gave him his highest alpha, and he would accept that job. And his career went up meaning when he reached $50 million network, he retired thinking, well, you know, that's enough. And uh he went off to an Australian university who had a big radio telescope and got a PhD studying seven different star foaming regions in the southern hemisphere sky. Now, after that, he came back, got back into the industry, and he ran two $100 million venture capital funds for Weispeck and Greer. So he, you know, did get back into it. But the point is that in and he knew that if a job offering gave him the most alpha, he would be most creative in that. He'd have more fun, he'd be more effective, and most important to him, he would make more money. And so for a very long time, every two years, Gunnar would come back for another four-day tune-up, and that's how he would choose his next job. Now, I've had people, I would we have one oil service guy who had major girlfriend on three different continents, each of whom wanted to marry him, and he used this technique to determine which woman to marry.

So it's it's become a uh a high-level decision-making tool. Exactly. Yeah, that's really interesting. That's a great anecdote.

And so if if you're considering something, it gives you your most your most alpha, it's going to be most in harmony with all the different unconscious and conscious components of your being.

Yeah, that's that's fascinating. Dr. Hart, where where do people find out more? People want to get involved in these, you know, everything that you do. Is there a place to get a hold of you or Doug? Or where where do you guys send people?

Well, yes, Doug is dholt at biosabernaug.com. I'm Jim at biosabernaug.com, and there's the website wwwbiosabernaut.com. And you can there's there's scientific papers there. There's also papers written for the lema. You can read up on it. There's testimonials written and video testimonials. You can register, you can be part of the uh there's a a public section of the alumni group. We also every Sunday are doing a Zoom webinar to we call it power intention to beneficially transform the coronavirus into something that's actually beneficial to humans and no longer harmful. And so the also have a book, The Art of Smart Thinking, which you can either order from Biosybernaut, or I think Amazon has it. And so many ways to become involved if you wish, when you wish. Awesome.

Well, Dr. Hart, I I appreciate you taking the time and educating this. It's been really fascinating. I appreciate the work you're doing. And uh yeah, perhaps we can have you back on next time in about six to six to twelve months, see what you're up to.

Thank you, Eric. I do appreciate it. It's been very fun hanging out with you. Yeah, it really has.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Jim Hart. Hey, it's your host, Eric Malzone. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Future of Fitness. If you enjoyed it, please do me a huge favor by going to the website and signing up for our newsletter. The website is futurofitness. We've got some big, big announcements coming down the pipe, and we want you to make sure that you are on top of it. Thank you again. Signing off