The Frequency of Recovery

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TalkToMeGuy : With that. Tony Crescenzo, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and president and CEO of Intelligent Waves, a mission critical IT system integrator serving the Department of Defense. We're diving into something different, something personal. Tony is also the founder of Peak Neuro, an AI-powered neuroscience platform built on neuroacoustic technology, sound, engineered to help the brain recover. Originally developed for warfighters, firefighters, and special operators. Peak Neuro is now developed helping veterans, first responders, and high stress performers regulate stress, process trauma, and rebuild cognitive resilience. Tony's been out talking about this work, most recently discussing how Peak Neuro is supporting veterans and first responders dealing with stress, trauma, and recovery.

Today we go deeper. This is the frequency of recovery. Welcome, Tony.

Tony Crescenzo: Thanks for having me.

TalkToMeGuy: I want to start in a... because I have to. I have to start here. By now, I've read and heard a lot of material with or about you, And so I'm not sure where this source came from.

But you have said somewhere. you spent 25 years not even realizing how angry you were. Yet now I've read or heard you say, now people describe you as unreasonably calm. Would you talk about this, please?

Tony Crescenzo: Yeah, that's uh that that's quite accurate. Uh uh, the anger part, my uh my current wife, my ex-wife, my daughter, most of my friends and family would agree with you on um part of my military service was um I had some uh some combat experience as well as uh a tour working undercover with what was then called uh NIS. Now today you watch it on TV as in CIS. Of course, it looks all glamorous on television today. Back in the day, I think NIS agents were the guys who washed out of the FBI Academy.

So not nearly as glamorous at look as it looks on uh television. Um, the challenge for me was as a young Marine, this is someone, you know, 23 years old. Uh this entire incident took place between I think the age of 22 and 26. Um, where I was uh assigned uh as an undercover operative uh at an independent duty station in uh Trenton, New Jersey of all places, after having served in Beirut. Um And I was um essentially ferreting out computer fraud and uh with uh an individual who was creating people who didn't exist in the Marine Corps Mampire Management System and paying them and then uh creating false IDs and getting the checks, and I thought, well, that was uh that was kind of fascinating. I was uh you know, as a counterintelligence marine.

I didn't have much of a technology background, and that part was kind of fun. And as I was uh preparing to move on to my next assignment because they're getting ready to charge this individual, I was told I was staying because there were some individuals who were um using selling importing drugs, and that turned into a two-year, very long-term uh walk into rooms where you don't know you're gonna walk out kind of a scenario. Um, that resulted in uh 10 10 Marines and a Navy Corpsman being uh indicted and all 10 Marines being convicted at a court martial. Uh but during that time, uh the Marine Corps, whose motto is Semper Fidelist, always faithful, we never leave our dead or wounded on the battlefield.

Um, every Marine is my brother. And uh I was left uh to the vicissitudes of the people I was investigating because the Marine Corps refused to move me out of the area because I was undercover as a payroll clerk and people needed to be paid. So there were uh I think four witnesses in this trial, two of them uh two of them were killed.

One died under uh mysterious circumstances, and I was the sole surviving witness. Um but during that time, uh there was some retribution for my service, and I eventually was court-martialed myself. I was court-martial being for being uh 20 minutes late to work and find 20 dollars. You can imagine what that must feel like uh when you're doing this all alone at the age of 24, 25 at this time. Um, so my uh uh my resilience was was at a low. Um certainly didn't feel like I was part of anything larger than myself, but uh eight months after my court martial after I had been transferred to be a clerk in a room with no windows where no one would talk to me because I'd come from a unit that had been completely uh decimated by court marshals.

Um an aide to the commandant of the marine corps walked in with a uh a medal, uh uh a letter of commendation uh from the commandant and a copy of the four-page letter of apology he had written to my mother. Oh, and I got my $20 back, which I thought was really fascinating. Of course, in 1987, that was um that was money. Yeah, that was money. Um so you know, the the lesson from that for me was the Marine Corps kept a promise.

It just took everybody between me and the commandant to kind of to keep it. But I I never realized um how much uh how much that had impacted and affected me. So when I was of course, I had I had one wife, and that I had some anger issues there. And um, you know, had a for me, it was like any other veteran who suffers from from PTSD. You don't you don't think it's you, it's just the way you react to things.

Um uh starling noises, large crowds, people saying your name when when you don't know them and you think, oh my God, I just got uh I just got out it. Um and when I was 55, my second wife had said to me that I had been in more fights since she had known me than all the men that she had ever dated in her life combined. And my response was to say, Yeah, I never started a fight in my life. And she would say, Well, I've seen you do it, right?

You poke them and poke them and you make them angry, and then they swing at you and you knock them out and go, I had no choice, right? And uh literally as a uh uh as a CEO of a national defense industrial base company, I was uh invited to attend a meeting at one of our classified customers. I went to Google the alternate location I was supposed to go to and came across a uh a defense intelligence agency document from 1983 describing the nature of reality of all things. Um it was so fascinating. My wife and I, my wife is also a big physics nerd. We we spent two hours reading this 25-page document about uh shape of the universe and wave particle duality and local and non-local consciousness. And it's that was what was interesting was this was 2000, I think, 22 or 21.

22. And um uh all these things had been predicted in 1983, and they actually were all true. I think the Nobel Prize in physics was uh uh wave particle duality in 2022, or not, it was either local or non-local consciousness or wave particle duality. Anyway, so fascinating that I decided to uh go down to this nonprofit institute where this technology had been developed, and uh I tried the program basically on a goof, and in six days it changed my life. You know, it changed my life so significantly that I went to the CEO of this institute um uh to volunteer to fund a veterans program uh so that others, especially I'm you know, in the national defense industrial base, there are lots of veterans of almost all of us uh have warning uh warning uniform. The company I run today, Intelligent Waves is 60% veterans, 80% of those guys are combat veterans, half of them are special operators, marines, Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and we all have uh traumatic brain injuries, concussions, um uh to one extent or another, different levels of uh adjustment disorder and PTSD.

Of course, we're in it together, so it feels a little easier that way. Uh anyway, after I went through the program, I never got a phone call back. I approached um one of my co-founders, uh, now the uh vice president of innovation at Pete Neuro, who had developed a lot of the signal technology for the nonprofit and asked him to help me with this.

And he is uh someone who had some time in the Marine Corps as well. Um, we took a little bit different approach. That was more of a I'd say a meditative approach. There's nothing wrong with that.

It worked fine. But the issue was how do you how do you make the the leap from what is a sort of um meditative focused approach to a therapeutic based um uh scientifically proven model for changing consciousness, right? It's not so much about uh relieving a particular condition, it's about giving someone the ability to change the state that matches the situation that they're in and do that with low cognitive cost. Um today we do that work, uh we do that in the special operations community where we have a research and development agreement with um with one of the armed services at the Pentagon to work on resilience uh for for troops again, not so much remediation. How do I solve uh trauma? It's how do I prevent it? How do I create the ability to have enough elasticity in both the um uh the the cardiovascular system, the neurological system, and essentially in in in the mind of the service member, uh, how do I create the ability for them to move from, for example, uh a fighter pilot who actually might live in the United States, might live somewhere, excuse me, in your time zone, who gets up in the morning, gets an uh in an F 35, flies a 15.7 hour mission, two refuels on the way there, a high stress combat mission, two refuels on the way home, lands at seven o'clock in the evening, and on the way home, uh their spouse calls up and says, Hey, we have a PTA meeting to go to.

How do you take that day off? And how do you function in a society where you know what we're fighting has changed very much? And World War I people were gone for two or three years, and World War II, people were gone for the duration of the war.

There wasn't uh wasn't a rotation back. And Vietnam is where we really started, you know, 13 months and then come home and then another 13 months, and then the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were somewhere between nine and 13 months as tours of duty. And there were people in my company who spent seven years uh doing that kind of a thing. And today you find people who are uh flying a drone and they never leave Creek Air Force Base in Nevada, and yet they're seeing the collateral damage from an operation that a fighter pilot who's actually there physically doesn't see because they're going Mach 2, and these guys are watching the damage. That's why the highest suicide rate in the Air Force is a drone operators.

So what we're getting now is these episodic um forays into combat, where this morning, you know, you're having coffee with your husband or wife in the morning, and this afternoon you're doing a bomb to uh bomb damage assessment on a drone mission that you flew, helping people move from one of those kinds of experiences to the other with low cognitive load and without the kinds of trauma that that creates and has created historically is kind of the mission of Pete Nora.

TalkToMeGuy : I went to college in the early 70s and uh mid-ish 70s actually, and uh had done a I was working on a documentary for this disabled student unions uh group, and there were a bunch of Vietnam vets there. And the reason that they liked hanging out there was because they could kind of relate to the other people who were the wheelchair wheelchairs or blind or you know, had in incidences of what could be called trauma or were born that way, or you know, something. But I would hang out with these guys, and they'd like, you know, let's go have pizza and I'll ding and the deal. And you'd be having pizza, and somebody would, you know, a bar tray would drop, or a glass would break, or you know, some sort of sharp sound would occur. And you could I I could see this one buddy that I hung out with a lot, would either twitch or you could feel him tense up completely. And sometimes they would get into a fight for no actual reason, other than somebody pushed them or you know, was this the right setup of things, loud noise, somebody pushed them, probably too much liquor or cannabis, um, you know, some sort of incident, and then the next thing you know, they're in a fight, and they're not they're not fighting because they're I don't know, they're they're they like they explode. That's all I that's the only way I can describe it. They just explode. And then a few minutes later would come back to the table like, well, it's that's over with.

Now let's have a beer. It was just that kind, but it would just, whatever the trigger was was always amazing because it wasn't anything that we were aware of. But later on when I would talk to these guys, they would say, Oh, yeah, that knows about them, and they'd explain how it would happen if they had the consciousness to do that.

Yeah. But I just think of you know, the work that you're doing is so amazingly beneficial to these, you know, soldiers. And as we talked a little bit about backstage, I listen I live near Big Fire Country near Coffee Park, 1400 homes, um, and firefighters, and there's a big fire now in Southern California, 4,000 uh 400, uh I don't know, a lot of acres down there. And two weeks ago, we had a 50 acre fire north of us. And I think of firefighters, they seem perfect for neuropeak in terms of the stress of you know, they're tough and they go out there and they fight the fires, but then there's all that trauma.

When like you say, a lot of these guys up here would go home at the end of a shift. Well, there's no de-burr, as I would call it, rather than debrief, I call it deep burring. And I And I think that's a really well because I think that's in the from what I've read about neuropeak and from listening to you talk about it, it seems to go in and reset things and and reduce the amount of what I would call uh psychological inflammation. And I go ahead.

Tony Crescenzo: Yeah, uh I I think um I've looked at at some of your work as well, and I think your work starts with sound as information and peak neuro starts with the brain as uh as a dynamic timing system, right?

It's it sits at the intersection. Um, we use EEG to measure how an individual brain organizes itself. Um when we can uh see that state, uh, we can introduce precisely designed neuroacoustic inputs and then determine whether the person entered a meaningfully different state, right? This is about dialing the state, the the cognitive state, the consciousness state that is appropriate to the situation that you're in.

So when you're fighting a fire, you need to be upregulated, you have to be uh 360 degree awareness of what's happening, uh aware of your own safety, the safety of others with you, what's going on externally. Um when you when you leave that scene, now you need to be much more interoceptive and pre-perceptive around how you're feeling, how your body's feeling. And when you think about how you make that change, often when we experience trauma, that's a function of uh of the brain as a prediction engine, right? Our brain tells us when wake up in the morning, it should be sunny outside and the sky should be blue.

And if you were to wake up in the morning and it was dark or the sky was purple or green, uh, you would see that that was a difference. And the size of that difference really is what creates trauma uh or the the notion of trauma, which is essentially the the prediction of the predictive mismatch, right? So the brain, when we're able to do things like immersion therapy, uh which they do for veterans of PTSD.

I remember if you've ever um heard of or seen the movie Taking Chance with um Kevin Bacon. That was an immersion therapy for me. I went to 110 funerals after uh after after the Beirut bombing. And it was not something that I really thought I could do.

And that's a movie about about a guy who takes a young soldier back from Afghanistan, I think a young Marine who's killed in Iraq or Afghanistan and uh and the escorts um experience of that. And man, I you know, it took me a hundred times before I could get through the whole movie. That that's one way to do that, but that's involved in meaning making and narrative. And of course, when we when we make meaning or attempt to make meaning, you know, this thing happened, whatever tragic thing it was, it happened, and I have this autobiography. And in this autobiography, I've got to make sense of all of it. And the problem is veterans in particular, but I I know it's true for um for law enforcement as well.

Uh there are two things come into play. I I don't necessarily want to relive that trauma over and over again. I'm trying to try to run away from it. And the other part of it is you don't want to talk about it with someone who hasn't had that experience. It's almost a salacious uh perspective from those who have not been through that kind of a thing. So, you know, that going to a VA counselor who's never served in combat for most veterans is an exercise in futility.

For the most point, or for the most part, they just want to give you drugs. So you know, the real the real challenge there is really twofold. How do I a find a way to relate to that person's experience or have them relate to the experience?

And the other is well, how do I disengage the narrative, right? The your front of your brain, the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex is the place where rumination, uh, cognition, executive function, um all of those uh all of those things happen. And you can see it on an EEG, just the front of your brain completely lights up when you're when you're developing narrative when you're ruminating when you're angry.

Um what uh what we do, uh one of the techniques that we use is to suppress that prefrontal cortex and slow down or limit your ability to create narrative and open the occipital cortex and the parietal cortex and allow your body to uh process trauma somatically versus semantically. In other words, I don't have to talk about it. I can relive the entire thing and watch it with zero emotion or very little emotion. And when I do that, I'm processing it in a much different way. And it becomes more of a perspective of like an equanimity watching this happen in your mind's eye, rather than being immersed in it. And that allows you to create a much different perspective, a much different memory, if you will, of the experience that allows you to inculcate that into your autobiography and sort of move forward.

TalkToMeGuy : I was gonna save this for later, but it pops up now, in my mind. Have you looked at any relationships between people having uh not having done this work versus people that have you know soldiers that have done this work in terms of long-term health effects? You know, immunological stress. That's one of the things I observed with my Vietnam buddies was that they were in a chronic sort of, they were kind of locked and loaded in a flight or flight. I think they they primarily were in fight, yeah, versus flight. They didn't they they really were I don't know what the word is, taught, trained in a place of no, I'm here to fight. I'm not here to talk about it or process it or think about it, or I don't want to dialogue about it. And I was often the guy that was trying to, you know, bring them down, and they knew me well enough to know that they were safe with me, but yet they would still occasionally think that they might want to strike me. Just because that's an that's an organic reaction.

Tony Crescenzo: Yeah, I think the term uh term in the military, I know the term in the military. I know the term the marine corps. I think the term across the army, the marine corps is called getting off the X. And you're trained in an ambush, uh, that when that occurs, the last thing you want to do is stand there, right? You're gonna turn an assault into the ambush. You're not gonna run away from it because that's what the ambush is about. So your entire nervous system is trained to respond to force by creating even more force. Right?

It's it's overwhelming uh reaction to a threat by neutralizing that threat as completely as possible as fast as possible. And that's why you know, I've I've been in large crowds. I was in uh was in Rome uh several years ago with my wife and my mother and my daughter. I took my daughter there when she graduated from college, uh, and I was in a restaurant and somebody I didn't know turned around and called me Tony, and I was about a half a second from just going apeshit on that guy, quite frankly, uh, because that's what I was trained to do. If at some point someone knew who I was back 40 years ago, uh, the first thing I would have done would be to kind of assault my way out of the ambush, is what it would feel like to me.

So I I understand that reaction. That's your that's your lizard brain, your limbic brain that's constantly hyper-vigilant and always attuned to any external uh trigger that might uh that might rise to the level of threat. And what you know, we don't necessarily turn that off as we allow you to turn it on and turn it off at will. Uh you make the conscious decision to be vigilant or hypervigilant. It's not that we're deadening your ability to do it, we're deadening your desire to do it because you can assess the situation from a much more neutral standpoint.

TalkToMeGuy : And uh I mean you're when you start when you started doing this, excuse me. People who hadn't seen you in years noticed you were different, calmer, normal nightmares. And what did your wife and daughter say to you during that that stretch?

Tony Crescenzo: Well, my wife in particular, well, this is my second wife now. My um, you know, I would routinely two, three times a week, uh thrash and yell and scream and have nightmares in bed that would wake her up and you know, she wasn't really sure what to do. And um when they stopped, you know, that that was that was one uh one piece of evidence. I think the other piece was just honestly, you want to judge people with PTSD, get in the car with them. I was one of those, I was one of those guys, you cut me off, it's on, right?

Fantasies of cutting your throat with my car keys, and I'm gonna go punish you for whatever slight it was that you did. And I mean, I can tell you probably spoken to 500 veterans about that. We all feel the same way.

It's uh, you know, it's a reaction to a threat. Uh and I would almost go white, you know. The there's two kinds of white light, right?

There's the beautiful white light when you're meditating and you're one with everything, and then there's a white light where you wake up and somebody's lying in a bloody heap on the floor. Um, and that's that was the reaction. That's the limbic reaction. And that just went away.

Um Wow. people that I had uh I'd known in business, and you know, as a I'm kind of a serial CEO, not a serial entrepreneur. I'm uh more or less a really expensive janitor.

I go to companies that are either not doing too well or are doing well, but have reached a particular limit in size and they need to transition into a larger business and they need the infrastructure and the leadership that goes with that kind of a thing. So it's always a challenge. Um so for me, you know, I was able to hide a lot of that aggression in the leadership envelope more than anything else. Um most uh most veterans, if you've ever seen them, they they may get crazy if you're 10 minutes late, but uh when it's a really a dire circumstance, they all get calm. We're all pretty good when there's actual stress.

We're all pretty bad when there's no stress, but we have nothing to be stressful about. So we have to be sort of like wiley coyote going off of the cliff, you know, while we're still running after the roadrunner. Uh what what you really learn is how to be more attentive to the state that you exist in. It's um, you know, for me it was kind of interesting. I this started for me as kind of a meditative journey. Uh, and I wanted to understand how I could turn something designed for meditation into something that would be much more therapeutic. Uh the irony is that doesn't matter where you enter, you're always going to get the meditative benefit, whether or not you enter that way or you enter through a therapeutic benefit.

We have um uh retired Navy SEALs, retired Delta Force, troop sergeant majors, uh uh retired army colonels, army rangers, marines who have been through the program, uh and they all they all make that same comment. Wow, I had this after six months and I feel better. I've uh I had this transformative experience, a kind of a meditative experience.

People who've had uh who've had OBEs, uh, people who have um you know very interesting uh dreams developed around this because of the way that the you know the brain and the mind function when it's when it's tuned properly, I guess is the best way to say it. And I've uh no, I gotta ask it now.

TalkToMeGuy : Are you are you familiar with EMDR?

Tony Crescenzo: I am. In fact, one of our partners is uh the um the fiance of one of our uh one of our primary subjects when we started doing the testing here, who's a retired Navy SEAL, 13 years in the teams, 21 TBIs, a severe diagnosis of PTSD.

He wanted to fight me in his driveway when I showed up at his house for the first intake because I was 10 minutes late, and you're not late for people like that. Um so yeah, she's an EMDR therapist, and she's actually using we we use this now, we make it available actually in beta testing with uh EMDR therapists, psychiatrist, psychologist, licensed practical or licensed professional counselors as a junctive therapy to psychotherapy. Um it's really it's have uh it's had a really great uh synergistic effect with uh psychotherapy.

TalkToMeGuy : I would think this would work well with it. I've I've had uh let's see, back in um I don't know, 2012. Does that seem right? Some something like that. I was uh hospitalized and had 30 hours of surgeries and was in a healthcare facility for a year. Wow. So there was a lot of not combat trauma, but life trauma from that. And what I found mind-blowingly helpful, I was familiar with EMDR only because I grew up on the Monterey Peninsula, and the woman who invented it, Shapiro, wrote a book that I found in a used bookstore on the Monterey Peninsula.

And I read it and I thought it sounded very cool. And so years later, here I am looking for a therapy to help process out some of that body trauma. And EMDR worked great for me because I'm not a fan of talk therapy because it's just talking. I don't need to talk about it. I don't need to repeat the trauma. I don't blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I talk for a living. That's plenty. I hear it. So I I found the EMDR, and when I was researching your work, I thought, oh, this seems very handy because I don't have to go to somebody to do the EMDR EMDRs that I still enjoy very much, but it's hard to find EMDR practitioners.

I don't know why, but it just is. And so the idea of having an app that I can plug into and utilize once I get to do that, I I'm looking forward to it because it seems the effect seems similar of bringing you back to a calm, smooth, what I would call smooth state.

Tony Crescenzo: Yeah, I I would tend to agree with that. I think the um it's not even so much about uh a single state. A brain state, it's really the nervous system's operating configuration at a particular moment, right? And it that includes things like arousal, attention, sensory processing, um internal versus external orientation, uh, network coordination, right?

Uh we often people think about these uh meditation apps as frequency forcing, right? Oh, I need out. I've heard so many people, I have lots of gamma and alphas. I'm using uh neurofeedback to generate alpha and alpha is gating mechanism that allows you to ignore certain external features. It's not uh it doesn't necessarily create some uh samadhi state from you know, if you're a Buddhist meditator. Um what really what really matters in your brain is the this coherence, resonance, coordination, emotional reactivity, the amount of narrative activity occurring in the mind. And so in these different states, you might at one point want a narrow externally directed focus. You might want broad situational awareness, you might need creative and associative thinking.

Um you might want to just chill for a minute and have some quiet, non-narrative awareness. Um having emotional regulation under pressure, excuse me, pressure, uh learning readiness. You know, uh I'm uh I've given a couple of uh of uh talks at uh different colleges and universities last year is I gave a talk on um neuroplasticity as uh as a as a modality for creating democratized learning. Students, uh students all over the United States have access to education, but I live in Falls Church, Virginia.

I think it's the richest city per uh per capita in the United States, it's miles square. Um and you everyone here gets the same education as someone three miles away in Anacostia, uh just outside Washington, D.C., except they're not dodging bullets on their way home. They have both parents. Um they're not getting dinner from Dollar General. And they have a lot more support system. So while the education uh is equal, the the learning is not. And neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to uh adapt and learn is something that can level that playing field. That's amazing.

TalkToMeGuy : And there's a note here I have about you you've compared trauma to a stuck oscillation pattern rather than a moral failure. Why does that reframe matter matter so much for how veterans see themselves?

Tony Crescenzo: Well, you know, one is an external, uh, an externally imposed definition that's really not accurate. Trauma is trauma. Your brain doesn't know the difference between combat trauma and and rape. It doesn't.

It looks the same. Uh that trauma shows itself as patterns. You know, we don't diagnose trauma with an EEG.

We diagnose trauma with uh psychometry with a PCL5 or PCH9 or a bunch of psychometric tests that we can use to do that. But what Peak Neuro does, it's not just an app that uh that does brainwave entrainment. We are uh we we essentially uh record a state. We give we take a subject in um we give them a uh a baseline uh EEG, we also give them uh what we call a reference entrainment, which is a neuroacoustic, essentially listen to some headphones for a half hour entrainment that for uh in an oversimplified way pokes around the brain and pushes on different parts of the brain to see just how adaptable this particular brain is. And what we'll do in a therapeutic environment is we will essentially take a fingerprint of that neurological system at that point in time, and we can correlate that to physiology.

If you know, if you've ever worn a whoop or an aura ring or Apple Watch, um, we can correlate the physio uh physiological, psychological, and neurological outcomes and how they impact each other. Even your your brain as it has a neurological system has three components, right? It's got the electrical system, which is the thing, brain waves themselves, alpha, beta theta, etc. You've also got the chemical system, ATP, ceticoline, glucose, you know, the fuel that runs the brain.

And then you've got the regulatory system, coherence, hemispheric uh symmetry, synchrony, small-worldedness, and all these affect each other and work together, right? If my limbic system goes haywire, uh, and the electrical system in my brain triggers high emotion, that's gonna dump a bunch of chemicals into my brain. Uh it's gonna dump um uh oh my God, I'm just losing my train of thought here. Uh adrenaline, right? I'm gonna have this huge adrenaline dump.

That's gonna that's gonna make my fine motor skills go sideways. The chemical system lights up, the coherence in your brain drops to almost zero. The entire your ability to make decisions when you're in fight or flight mode goes away.

You have you're essentially back to your lizard brain. And so when you think about how do we how do we deal with something like that? Well, what we want to do is prevent all of that from happening in the first place by allowing you to sense that and manage your own regulatory and electrical system, the neurological system, uh, to notice that and revert to a pattern that you've been trained to uh to achieve. So the way that we do it is we take a we take that baseline EG, we will deliver to an app uh modulation exercises that are tailored specifically for that individual. And you gotta remember, it's kind of like working out, right? Once I get to a, you know, if I'm using a if I'm lifting 20 pound weights in the beginning, 20 pounds of of curls is going to get me to one place, and then I'm gonna plateau. So your you know, your brain is an adaption engine.

It's gonna change over time. So there isn't any one single treatment for this. It's taking you, meeting you where you are, bringing you to the next logical place, and then moving to the point where you are, and this is what I love about psychotherapy and neurological therapy and even uh the drug therapies that they give people. What is the the end goal of psychotherapy?

What is the end goal of neuromodulation for most uh most organizations? It's to put you within one standard deviation from the age, gender, and cohort mean, which means completely and directly making you average. And most people don't want to be average, right?

I don't just want to, I don't just want to be where I can uh I can feel normal. What I want to be able to do is optimize these states, not optimized against Michael Phelps or Simone Biles or uh, you know, any of your favorite athletes, but optimized for me. How can I optimize, for example, my ability to learn to focus and concentrate? Uh, how can I optimize my ability to sleep, right? Most of our most of our troubles all revolve around sleep. Uh you know, two kinds of sleep or three kinds really. There's light sleep, uh, there's very deep sleep, which is physically restorative, and there's emotional sleep, or I'm sorry, there's REM sleep, which is uh both good for memory and for emotional uh regulation. And when you don't sleep enough, you're typically impacting one of those.

Either you're you're impacting your body's ability to recover from physical stress or your your brain's ability to recover from emotional stress. So focusing on sleep and ensuring that you're getting a sufficient amount of, for example, what I would call uh restorative sleep, which is a combination of deep and rem sleep. So for a guy like me, I know you're you're 10 years older than me, but uh in my uh my tenure age range, the average restorative sleep percentage, no matter how many hours you sleep, is about 18 to 22 percent. After six months of using peak neuro, uh I achieve uh on average now about 47 to 52 percent of my sleepers restorative.

So I get twice the restoration with about half the sleep. Uh, and I haven't used the technology in two years. Because the thing is, most of these apps that you might buy or things that you might listen to, they work for the half hour that you listen to it, but then your brain just snaps back to whatever it was. That's what's called state change. Peak neuro is designed that over time doesn't happen overnight, but over time it creates trait level change in your baseline neurophysiology. Your baseline state will be different four months if you use it on the protocol that we give you, be different four months uh from now than it was today. And we can continue to improve over time on any on any timeline.

The biggest problem we have with this, quite honestly. I talked to you earlier about uh a Navy SEAL who's uh 220 pounds, six foot three inch, former uh division one football player who wanted to fight me in his driveway the first time I did an intake with him. Now imagine you go through a six-month program, and this is uh someone who they're making a movie about. This guy just wrote a book about his experience, he lost his wife, his children didn't want to talk to him. Just a terrible, terrible transition from active duty service into uh into the civilian world. And after six months, he's he's learning French.

So he can give the toast in French at his daughter's wedding in Paris. And then you walk in the guy's house and you say, Hey, not for nothing, but you're doing great. Would you mind stopping so I can see how long this lasts? Yeah, you're probably gonna wind up in the driveway again, getting beat up a little bit. So part of the problem is not really in, we don't really know how long the trait level change lasts.

We know it lasts at least a year, but we don't have enough data to know how permanent the change is because everybody who uses it refuses to stop. Sounds great. Sign me up.

TalkToMeGuy : Sounds you know, the the idea of improving sleep state. I was uh and I'll transition to this for a moment. I was gonna ask you about stress levels in the field I'm familiar with. I was a working chef for 20 years.

Tony Crescenzo: That's a harder job than people think it is. That's an all day, everyday, up at dawn kind of job.

TalkToMeGuy : Yeah, pretty much. It usually would start at seven. One of the bistros I worked in, I'd be at work at seven and I'd leave at five. Pretty much six days a week. And that was just a thing. It's like signing up for I'd say tour of duty, but that's demeaning the people who are actually going on tours of duty. But it's a it's a rough gig. And I've been in situations uh in the first restaurant where I really learned and became a working chef, uh set a sous chef really, and then went on to run other kitchens, was a restaurant where we'd on a Friday or Saturday night, we might serve three do 300 covers, serve 300 meals. And at the same time, because he was crazed, we might be doing a catering job for somebody in Pebble Leach, which meant you have another whole crew of food being produced in the same kitchen concurrently with serving those 300 people. And the kind of pressure and stress that's involved in making that happen is really quite mind blowing or mind-numbing.

And a lot of people, well, like in Anthony Baudet's Bourdain's biography, you know, it was it is really I I don't want to this is not combat. There is very little life threatening going on here. But there's a lot of burns, a lot of cuts, a lot of damage. And I've seen people on the line just snap from the kind of pressure that you're under when you're really doing it. And I just think it's go ahead.

Tony Crescenzo: I don't mean to interrupt, but I just want to tell you, I've I've heard this a lot. I hear a lot of people say, Well, I'm a veteran, but I was never in combat, or I'm a I'm a cop and I never was in a gunfight, but I don't know why, you know, it's uh I I'm not this on a look, trauma's trauma.

It doesn't matter. Combat the veterans are not the only people with trauma. In fact, kind of interesting. I just learned this uh a couple of months ago when I was down at the special operations conference. These days, the special operations forces, the Delta Force, Army Rangers, Marine Raiders, um, they they look for early childhood trauma in selection for special operator patterns. And the reason for that is early childhood trauma usually makes you a lot more resilient, uh independent, um, and able to, you know, to deal with stress. So trauma isn't necessarily a bad thing. The bad thing is your reaction to it and whether or not you can inculcate that into your you know your lived experience and lead a uh a fulfilling life, not in spite of it, but because of it. You know, trauma's not necessarily um is not necessarily a bad thing. Everybody has trauma to one extent or another. It's it's extensive trauma, long-term trauma, chromic trauma chronic trauma that prevents you from living a fulfilling life. That's the bad trauma. But everybody has it, it's not just for combat veterans. Okay.

TalkToMeGuy : And having been in that first kitchen, by the time I left, uh, I worked in three other restaurants by the time that one ended. And each one of those I would walk in and take over the operation. And I don't mean in a like with guns and knives, although sometimes there were knives. Um, because I had the skill set from the my experience of being in that original restaurant where it was really quite brutal all the time. And the boss and I would sit down at the end of the night, as many chefs do, and have beer and salome and cheese. That's just what happens and talk about, you know, various incidents.

Oh, too bad about Louie, you know. I mean, some people would literally just snap on the line and no, get out. You can't do this. It's it's hard. And the idea of having something that would have assisted me come back down what I would call into my body. Yeah. Would have been phenomenal, and then I'd be even a better chef.

Tony Crescenzo: Well, I'll tell you, when it comes to uh sleep and recovery, we we actually we paid a significant amount of money to a nonprofit research institute to conduct a six-month uh longitudinal study on sleep. Um with 161 participants, a mix of all different kinds of people. We had veterans, combat veterans, uh retire deputy surgeon general of the Air Force when went through this. Um a six-week intervention with no uh modulation follow-up, just six months of follow-up to see how people were doing, and what we found was a 13% increase in restorative sleep uh for veterans, a nine percent increase in the ability to identify threats and a uh 13% increase in uh neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to adapt and learn. So the you know, the ability to get good sleep, uh starting your day uh in a from a positive frame as opposed to a negative frame, really is the is the foundation of not just good mental health, but good physiological health and good uh and and good biological health.

TalkToMeGuy : And well, I I want to go back. I try I sort of almost asked this question earlier. Have you uh observed I don't know how you'd bump into this, but it's a it's a theory that I have that I think that well, I know one of the things that can create inflammation is stress of some kind, a stressor can create inflammation in a joint. And to me, or a place in your body. And to me, inflammation is the body's way of going, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, there's something over here. Look at this. This is inflammation.

What's going on there? And I I have this theory that chronic stress can be deleterious to the immune system. Because it puts that the adrenaline state in a constant pump of adrenaline. Because it's always ready for flight or fight. And like I say, the the Vietnam guys that I went to college with, it was leaning much more toward fight. That's the that's the knee-jerk reaction is to go into fight mode. And I think part of that is as a result of the adrenals always being on the go mode. Yeah. And is it then go ahead?

Tony Crescenzo: No, no, go finish. I I do I want to I want to respond to that, but I want you to finish the thought. Okay.

TalkToMeGuy : Uh the thought is really just I I think that chronic stress is immunosuppressive or immunoiritating, or you know, it it has effect on the immune system, is my observation and thought. Oh, I I can't agree with you more.

Tony Crescenzo: Um, although I would say no stress can be just as bad as chronic stress, right? There's uh um a theory in in education called uh the zone of proximal development. And the theory states that if it's too hard, you give up. If it's too easy, you don't care.

It has to be just a little harder than you're used to for you to be able to actually integrate information that you learn and remember it. Um and I think that applies to physiological stress as well. So we, for example, we take um uh we can we can look at things like what is your daily physiological stress? Can we can we find the zone of proximal development for you in terms of physiological stress?

Where does that reside for you? Because it's it's different for every individual. There are people who you know, there are firefighters, for example, around you who can spend a week, you know, a hundred yards from uh 500 foot tall flames and go home and have a beer and watch the game. And there are people who uh, you know, when a loud noise goes off, they can't sleep for five hours because they're they're worried about it, right? There's different levels of of stress tolerance. So a lot of it is really understanding where that zone of proximal development happens from a stress standpoint, and then managing the um the state, the the state of the brain to stay within that zone that's healthy and to stay away from the zone that can create that chronic stress and inflammation.

And again, you can see a lot of this because now we have access to a lot more um a lot more hardware technology in the form of wearables that can tell us about how we're doing at any particular time. So, you know, there's kind of four steps to this, right? Do we we want to understand um the the four capabilities required to deal with stress, right? Is can I enter, I mean, as a state access, can I enter an intended state, whether that state is to upregulate because there's a fire and I gotta run like hell, or to downregulate because the fire's gone now, and I just need to get my heart rate right and get my fine motor skills and relax and get back to my life.

So can I enter the intended state and can I remain there is step two without fragmentation or excess or excessive effort? You know, we talk about burnout. What we're really saying is all of the chemicals that are involved in keeping your brain going, you've used them all up. You're out of gas.

That's what burnout really feels like. So fragmentation is the brain's inability to maintain a state because it's highly fragmented, and so it's oscillating and uh and not in a good way. So excuse me, so can't can we enter a state and we stay stable within that state. Can we go deep into that state? How substantially can the brain move from its ordinary configuration to the new configuration?

And then the fourth is the state exit. You know, can I reintegrate from whatever state I needed to volitionally enter without cognitive fog, agitation or any kind of compensatory rebound, right? That's the so we're really thinking about is access without exit isn't mastery, right? The ability to uh respond, you know, uh talking about your Vietnam veteran uh colleagues, um the ability to respond to a threat uh is only a small portion of the the cycle, right? The but the ability to uh uh to exit that state when it's appropriate, calm down and go back to whatever it was you're doing. Uh that's what that's what we really are training people from a neuromodulation standpoint.

TalkToMeGuy : And have you ever worked with I don't know why there's they're in my mind. Well, I live kind of near Sears Race Point, a racetrack. Have you worked with professional car racing folks?

Tony Crescenzo: You know, that's that is uh kind of an ironic question, right? The a lot of this started in our uh national security business around um the Air Force Fighter Weapons School. Uh that story about a pilot who flies to the other side of the world and has to come home and go to a PTA meeting is a real story. That's not that's not a made-up example that was uh posed to me by the head of human performance for the Air Force Weapons School.

So we do see that uh as uh you know as a as a foundational issue. Uh the real question um well, the funny thing is is that then I got invited to go meet with some Formula One folks down in Austin, Texas when they were uh they're running a sort of having a race down there. And you know, when you take a look at uh fighter pilots and Formula One racers, man, they have a whole awful world in common, right down to the point where the neither of them want their hair messed up.

Right? They spend an awful lot of time in simulators, they're in a high stress job where you know, a minor mistake can cause a catastrophic event to occur. Um and focus and concentration are absolutely states that they need to enter uh deeply and quickly, and they need to have uh a high high amount of uh pre perception, the ability to understand where their body is in space and time and the feeling of the the G forces as they're uh executing the maneuvers that they do.

So it all a lot in common between Formula One racing and fighter pilots, even the physiological stresses are they're similar, but they're uh clearly more extreme when you're pulling 10 G's in an F-35.

TalkToMeGuy : Although I've seen them hit uh corner 13 at Laguna Seca in the Monterey Peninsula at such high speed that it blows my mind. Then afterwards, this was back in the restaurant world, we would have the concession stand, a giant hot dog stand, um, at that racetrack. And guys would come over like you know, when they were on a break, fully just having gone like 900 miles an hour in my mind around curves casually and like be laughing and joking like there was nothing to it. Oh yeah. Yeah, because to them, shift state, it blew my mind that rather.

Tony Crescenzo: For them, they just call that Tuesday, right? Because they do it every day. Yeah, yeah. And they they've trained their mind and their brain in a way that's different than modulation. It's actually immersion therapy, right? I'm gonna uh think of it as working out. I don't start with lifting a hundred pounds, I start with lifting ten. So I start in uh cart racing.

Then I might move up to uh you know dirt tracks, and then I'll go to uh uh the junior part of NASCAR. And at some point I'm gonna have enough experience in my body and my uh uh my my intellect and my emotional reactions are all uh it's all inculcated into my neurology now. My neurology is a pattern, right? Our our brains are pattern machines. And once we have a pattern down, um, it becomes ours. The question is, is that you know, do we only have one pattern or can we have many? And that is the that's really the focus of peak neuro is to allow an individual to optimize for any pattern that suits their needs at a particular time.

TalkToMeGuy : I will admit that I did have back to the restaurant um because we had that concession, a lot of the drivers would come into the restaurant afterwards, or you know, in the evening, and they'd come to the kitchen, the kitchen would be just a cacophony of action. And they'd all look they'd come over like shake your hand like, I don't know how you do this. Exactly. Because you're doing a hundred things at once. It all has to come out at the same time. It all has to look the way it's supposed to. It all has to be cooked correctly the way it's supposed to, particularly when it comes to cooking steaks, expensive steaks. Or whatever it is, it all has to come out, you know, something a souffle is coming out of the oven, uh, uh Schnitzel is coming off of the saute pan, the potato pancakes have to be ready for that, the side vegetable has to be ready for that. It all has to come out in unison, and it may be three or four people that make that happen per plate.

And they'd come in and talk to us while we were doing it, and they were just like, I don't know how you do this. And I'm thinking, I've watched this guy race around a racetrack faster than I can even possibly imagine driving it. And I had the privilege of actually driving a 9-11 Porsche on that racetrack twice. Not in racing, just driving it. And it just blows my mind, or Bombanderant, taking an interceptor, which is a Jensen giant Jensen automobile, you know, and sliding it sideways into corner 13, which is the bottom of the hill, it's Laguna Seca. And literally turning it sideways to slide so that he accelerate at the bottom of the hill. And to watch what they do in racing blows my mind. And for them to come to the kitchen and watch what we do and be have their mind blown, I just think is like, really? Well, not a comparison.

Tony Crescenzo: The great thing about that is what you just described as pattern development, right? There's a you there's a pattern for you in your brain, in your mind. Yeah that you establish now what would be really fascinating, and this is a lot of what Peak Neuro is is focused on, is if we can capture that pattern while you're doing it and create a template, we can reproduce that pattern for anyone. Now it's not brainwashing. I'm not programming someone to be able to put um uh you know a restaurant together, but there are certain kinds of neurological patterns that allow you to process, focus, and do those things efficiently.

Same thing with Formula One. That's more of a sensory motor uh uh uh uplift. So being able to identify, record, and reproduce those patterns so that others can learn them is really the central axis of Piknore. Pigneur isn't just neuromodulation, it's a platform that integrates psychometry, physiology, and neurology in the uh assessment, development, and uh training of patterns that allow you to reach states that are optimal for the situation that you're in.

TalkToMeGuy : I think everybody coming out of culinary school should have that pattern run through their brain.

Tony Crescenzo: Well, it'll probably stop you from wanting to stab the sous chef, I can tell you that.

TalkToMeGuy : Yeah, there are a lot of ways to you know harm somebody in the kitchen and as or scare them or you know, make them jumpy. That's sort of a at some point that becomes kind of a not a game because that sounds so mean.

It's not meant to be mean, but sort of toughening up a new person on the line, you might do something to see if they catch it. But you're watching that pan the whole time in your mind and by sound. Because you don't just watch when you're cooking, you're smelling, you're hearing, you're monitoring all the senses when you're cooking a dish.

And you'll set it up so that that person might burn it, but you're there to save it at the last second. And to have them kind of open their mind, because it's overwhelming, no matter how much time you spent in culinary school learning how to beat egg whites perfectly by hand. That it's a lot of information all happening at the same time. And that has to broaden, and I imagine it is kind of race car driver-ish, because you have to take all that stuff that you're doing all at the same time, trying not to get killed, and get past the person in front of you.

It's not dissimilar in a kitchen in the sense of you're doing a bunch of things at once, and they all have to get together come together at the right moment to be served to the people waiting outside. That's a pattern. That's a pattern. That's amazing. I just thought it was a job.

Tony Crescenzo: Well, you know, you're uh I know you're you do a lot with sound, and right, sound is vibration, vibration is a pattern. Right. Uh you know, the entire universe runs on vibration and frequency, right? So, how do we create coherent resonant patterns and frequencies where we can all access these states. I'm ready.

TalkToMeGuy : Line me up. I love that idea. I want to ask you, as we're I I'm surprised we're coming sort of toward the end. That I heard you say something that I wanted to ask about. The difference between being a manager. A leader. Thank you. And a leader. Manager versus a leader. Yeah. Would you talk about that? That same when I heard you talk about it, I was like, that is so true.

Tony Crescenzo: Well, in order in order to do that, let me start first with what uh theory I call the field effect, which is a leadership theory. That's part of a book that I'm writing today. Having uh having served in the military and spent the last 32 years in the C-suites of companies, well, primarily as a CEO. Um, I've been through probably as many different leadership trainings. I've I wouldn't say that much training, I would tell you this. Everything uh important I needed to learn about leadership, I learned in the United States Marine Corps.

And the entire rest of my life has been a validation exercise. But having said that, I would say that you know, or many leaders start in the in the directive phase. I'm sergeant, you're a private, because I have more stripes than you, you have to do what I say. Um that's that's uh authoritative leadership.

And that you know, when the house is on fire, you need that, right? Just go, go, go. Don't pay attention, don't ask questions, just do what I tell you. But as you progress as a leader, you soon discover that, you know, because I said so is probably not a good operating. You know, you start to build trust and trust becomes a leadership uh technique. And then uh strategic leadership is really understanding how it all works together and teaching people and the more of a pedantic approach. But I think the best leaders follow what I call field effect leadership, which is essentially understanding the generators and the attractors from a systems theory standpoint that create an environment where things get done. Um my experience has been that uh you know management is is in incredibly important in any organization, nonprofit, business, military, doesn't matter.

Management is about minimization of deviation from plan. You either did the thing or you didn't. You made your numbers, you made your profit, or you didn't.

It's binary, and it's also quantitative. I can measure management. Leadership, you know, management is about minimization from deviation from plan.

Leadership is about in what is a leader really do? What does a CEO do? A CEO envisions a future that doesn't yet exist. If if it already existed, it wouldn't need a leader. A CEO in any leader envisions a future that doesn't exist and gets everyone so excited about that future that they not only make it real, they make it their own. Because no one wants it to do my plan.

Trust me, I've been doing this for a long time. Nobody really cares about Tony's plan. What they want is to be part of something bigger than themselves. So if management is about minimization from deviation from plan, leadership is about coming up with a plan that's so inspiring that people will want to make that plan theirs and not yours. And what you'll find, if you can take the ego off as a manager and a leader, you can step back from the ego. What you'll find is the people will probably come up with ways of doing things that you didn't envision. So my goal in life as a leader is to never have to be in the room.

If you go to Intelligent Waves's website, if you go to Pete Murray's website, you'll see a leadership philosophy for every manager in the company. It's required. And mine says basically, you should never have to ask what would Tony do. I don't, I don't need to be there. Uh, I've spent a career fixing and running businesses that were intended to be sold or exited. You know, I'm one of I'm in a weird job where getting fired is success criteria. And to do that, you have to create an organization that can survive you, that can operate without you. And that requires the ability to step back and believe that I'm not the charismatic leader. My job is to create the environment where all of the mission, vision, and values of the organization can be realized by others. That's a much different approach than many.

TalkToMeGuy : Wow, that's a whole nother show. Yeah, Well, very heard that before. well, because it leads me to think about restaurants I've been in and how I had people who wanted to manage me versus show me and then get out of the way. Exactly.

Tony Crescenzo: Right. There's a principle in the military called commander's intent. Uh, and one of the great uh examples of it in the Marine Corps is you have a lieutenant, a sergeant, and a corporal, and the mission is to put up the flag this morning.

How do you do it? And there's only one answer. Lieutenant turns to the sergeant and says, Go put that flag up. It's really about understanding the commander's intent in in business and nonprofits and the in the non-military world, it's called leader's intent. My intent is to create an organization that can do the following things and do them in a way where it's meaningful for people. You know, CEOs are um, it's an interesting role.

I think we're somewhere between Congress and Chlamydia in the uh uh the polling, you know, who likes CEOs. But I would tell you good ones and even bad ones, you know, you have such a second and third order impact than just the people who work for you. You impact the people who work for you, their families, and therefore the communities in which they live and work. And if you're a CEO of a company like Intelligent Waves, which is in, I think 14 states and seven foreign countries, you're impacting the communities in which your employees live and work. You have not just uh the ability to do those things, but the responsibility to create much more value in the lives of those people because if you do that, they create value in the lives of others. And that's essentially how we you know CEOs get to make the world a better place. Maybe not the whole world, you know.

But just I'll leave you with this. My wife is so much better educated than me and so much more accomplished in so many ways. She's worked at uh Centure Booze Allen, Price Waterhouse, she's been through several IPOs. She's an incredibly talented person, but it was you know, she has so many stories of married guys hitting on her at work, and you know, the the old white guy network that'll you know takes care of itself and there's glass ceilings for women. And my answer to her, since I've known her has been you know, what's great about my job is the world's not fair, but I can make my little part of it fair. If every leader did that, the world would be fair, Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah. I believe in a fair kitchen.

TalkToMeGuy : Once I once I once I show you how to do something, I don't want to have to do that again. I'll do I'll do it once. I'll do it twice. But after that, you should know. It's not it's not rocket science.

Tony Crescenzo: Real leaders live five years in the future, and every once in a while they come back and tell everybody what's going on.

TalkToMeGuy : That's your next book. That's really good. Um Tony, that was more fun than I thought it was gonna be and informative. Thank you. I appreciate it so much. And where can where can people find out more about Peak Neuro, more about your work, more about you know what you're inventing next.

Tony Crescenzo: If you'd uh well, I that's a whole other show too, right? Yeah around the failure in education in this country. But yeah, for Peak Norrow, uh, it's just www.peakneuro.com. You can get a 30-day trial.

Use the technology for free uh at no cost. Uh if you're by the way, if you're listening to this and you're a veteran or a first responder, police fire, EMS, and you're struggling, uh, contact the show. They will contact me. We will be in touch with you. Um, it will be no cost to you at all. Uh, if you're if you're having any issues that you feel like you need some additional help with, uh you should have no problem at all getting a hold of me through the show. Be happy to contact you directly and help you with resources to deal with whatever you're struggling with.

TalkToMeGuy : That'll be great. And I'll put the contact information. You can just email me at talktomeguy@gmail.com, but I'll put that in the show notes with a note about that. That's a great thanks again, Tony. You bet. Okay. And everybody have a great rest of the week, and we'll see you next week.

Tony Crescenzo: Thank you for having me.