Using Home Neurofeedback as A Solution for Mental Health

Introduction to Aziz Cardon and Mind Lift 0:00

For the next speaker, I want to introduce Aziz Cardon. He is the CEO and co-founder of Mind Lift Me and the lift. It is an award winning brain health technology company. And Aziz has been a pioneer in this field of brain computer science interface, where we find how to look at the brain in specific ways and optimize it using the technology that we have. As he serves on multiple businesses on their boards and nonprofit organizations. And as part of Forbes 30 under 30 lists in Israel, this professions revolve around linguistics and design and behavioral change.

And he holds a computer science degree from Haifa University. So we are going to talk really deep about technology. And I can't wait to introduce you. So let's welcome Aziz onto the stage. So I'm so glad to introduce you to the family that we have here on the online summit. So as these welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah. So when I first heard about your company, Mind Lift, I was super skeptical being in, the brain imaging and neurofeedback space. I was I wasn't sure how this is going to be accomplished.

And for those of you who are listening, more that ever confused, don't worry. We want to kind of break it down a little bit. But I really want to start by just, you know, asking, we're in this world right now where we have access to technology and the people the public is, are really trying to access technology enough so that they're not necessarily dependent on medications and finding an optimal solution. Right. And I, you know, and a lot of people on the summit have kind of explained that health is hasn't really transformed.

It hasn't been transformed by technology as much as it should. But brain health is is getting there. So what's the story of of how my life was created and what is my lift? And just kind of in your words, how did the journey begin?

How Neurofeedback Inspired the Company 2:12

Sounds good. So it's good just to relate to your first, note. I can see why, you'd be, skeptical. I mean, it's, super pioneering technology, and it seems sometimes too good to be true. But that's that's the aim of building the company. Like building too good to be true products. But there's true, and the real and, you know, I hope that your skepticism is no longer there. It's no longer there. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, I'm glad not to be here. Just the story of the story of how this company came about.

Was a few years ago. More than seven years, actually, when, I was introduced to neurofeedback. And the reason it was introduced in or feedback or neuro therapy is because early on in my life, two of my siblings were diagnosed with ADHD and the one who diagnosed them and then prescribed ADHD meds for them was my own father is a, pediatric neurologist that specializes in ADHD. And so after, you know, my siblings took these medications for quite a while, we understood that. Well, I understood that, you know, while these medications work, they have, you know, tons of side effects.

And I could see them. And then, of course, I would ask my father, what else is out there? I mean, is there something out there that can actually go without these side effects? So he started pointing me towards different directions, but one thing was clear. You know, he said, look, there's this thing called, neurofeedback, neuro therapy. Take a look at it. This is something that, you know, I believe can actually help. But my problem with it is that, you know, I'm not willing to take your siblings to the clinic.

You know, 30 times throughout the therapy period and, and spend so much time taking them in and out, because the closest clinic that actually offered this when we lived was two hours away. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it was a struggle. And so I said, okay. All right. Okay. Thanks for the knowledge. And I, I continued on my way there, to kind of like, experiment and understand what is this, neuro therapy now in my background, is, well, I'm trained in computer science. And so it was after understanding and, you know, experimenting or experiencing neurofeedback myself.

Right. Understood. How to connect the dots. I looked at the market, and I understood that. Well, the only thing that you need to do is essentially make neurofeedback something that can be accessible from home, but without compromising the clinical integrity. Because by the time we started the company, there were tons of EEG, you know, wearable devices in the market, claiming to be neurofeedback apps or devices. And hence that's, you know, where your skepticism came from, I would assume. Yeah, but they would target, you know, very noisy location on the scalp, like the frontal areas, you know, put on a game on an app and call it a day.

That's exactly the opposite of what we wanted to do. We wanted to actually bring the same type of, training or therapy that is happening in the clinic with the, personalization, clinical supervision. Put it in an app that can be used at home, but also make sure that the device that is hooked to this, is able to measure the brain activity from, other areas of the brain, and not only, you know, limited to the frontal. So, in other words, we took neurofeedback from something that was inaccessible, unaffordable in the clinic to something that is done from home without compromising the clinical, quality, you know.

I'm sure that some of the audience might not know what exactly neurofeedback is, so I'm happy to dive deeper into that. But that's essentially the how the company came about. We started working with, clinics who started adopting it, and the rest is history. Now it's used by thousands of providers all across the nation. Yeah. Well, you know, I'll kind of define neurofeedback really quickly because we did cover this in another segment. But for those of you who didn't see our other segment on neurofeedback with Doctor Amico, it's basically technology that personalizes a training program that's based on your brain frequencies.

And everyone has different brain frequencies and different analyzes. But what's powerful about it is that as, as you train and as, certain things occur and the brain changes, the programs change with it as well. So it's always a moving target. And we're going towards the direction of, improving the brain performance. And that's the whole concept of neurofeedback. And and you're right, you know, you know, going back to my skepticism is that, you know, we we've we've done, in clinic neurofeedback and it works well.

But to do it, from like a home setting, that's interesting, but I think the idea that I had is that you need a lot of really complex, you know, equipment,

Building Home-Based Neurofeedback Technology 7:00

that it's not really affordable, to get good quality data and to get good quality results. Right. So how did you, like, start and how did you start looking at what's available right now? Because there's a lot of equipment there into like the, the simplicity of the of what it is right now. How did how does that transformation occur exactly? You're absolutely right. To do neurofeedback you need you need to be able, you know, so it has two basic components, you know, neurofeedback to be able to measure the electrical activity in the brain.

That's, that's the most basic. And to have good measurements. And as we know, you know, the EEG signals are you know, can sometimes be quite noisy. In other words, you cannot really interpret what's going on. Or they might give you false results unless the equipment is good and it's done well. And so that's the most basic thing that you need the measurements to be accurate. And they need to be correct. And then the other thing is that you need to connect these measurements to some sort of a, some sort of content, which can be either a video or a game, that the patient essentially uses, and consumes, but the content is controlled by the measurements of the brain.

Right. So you need to have these two basic things. And then the third one that makes this entire thing thick together is the personalization. The clinician needs to be able, based on the measurements, to decide what areas or, what regions of the brain they're training and which frequencies, which brain frequencies are being trained. So if you have these three components, you you know, you have a neurofeedback, actual clinical neurofeedback training. The challenge for us was, well, you know, you have good equipment in the clinic and that's expensive, as you mentioned, you know, using the equipment that is being sold in the consumer market.

That can be tricky because does not guarantee quality and you need the quality of measurements. The second thing was, well, how do you also create, engaging content that will keep the user engaged and actually have the user use the, product for, you know, a commitment like it has to be a commitment of 2 to 3 months and to receive these, good results. The third one was how do you still keep the clinician in the right? So I'll break it down on how this happened. We used, or still use, the muse device, which is a brain sensing wearable device that measures your brain activity from frontal and temporal areas.

And we added, you know, because the frontal temporal areas or, you know, these, these regions were not enough for us to get, to do personalized training, because sometimes you need to measure EEG from other regions. You know, occipital, very little, so, you know, frontal, temporal, not all, you know, are not necessarily enough. So to combat that, to overcome it, we added an extra electrode to the muse that connects to the power plug. And then with this electrode, this electrode can be put anywhere because it's a movable electrode.

It's a little you can put it anywhere on the skull and suddenly you go from a locked, you know, preset headset that is extremely consumer, friendly, but, you know, limited in terms of measurements to a headset that actually allows you to measure EEG or brain activity from any location that you want. So boom. First challenge overcome, right. That was the first step. And without that, we wouldn't have this product. Today you wouldn't be using it with your patients right? You wouldn't because you're extremely limited.

So that was, the way that we unlocked it. And I'm glad that we did. The second one was the second thing was, okay, so people are going to use it at home. Probably they're going to put on the headset, they're going to put on the electrode, and they're going to move a lot when they're doing it because, because they're sitting at home, you know, you know, if you record it so there is no one telling you to stay still because EEG requires you to sit still. And that's a big challenge. So how do you actually take these signals that, you know, you're measuring from the brain?

These signals are being interrupted by movements, you know, facial movements, body movements. And they really look at the signal. How do you take it and still make something out of it? This is where deep expertise in software and algorithms and signal processing comes in. Okay. So that's the expertise of the team. Actually we know how to take these signals, break them down even if has noise. We know how to process it and still provide meaningful data. And that's really the that's one of the trickiest parts.

But we figured that out. So now we have two out of three that we have. We have good signal that can be used at all. We added content, to the app that basically games that you, you know, you can control with your brain activity. And then to supplement all of this with the clinical supervision and the clinical quality, we've built a dashboard for clinicians to be able to monitor the data and to decide how to personalize the program and to decide for each patient they get their own personalized program.

You know, what areas of the brain the training and what frequencies are being trained. And therefore it went from a, you know, preset consumer looking headset into a personalized neurofeedback machine. You know, it's not a black box, anymore. And that's, that's that's really how we did it. And of course, that was the reason why providers, used mine was because now they actually have the flexibility to do whatever they've been doing in the clinic exactly the same thing, you know, good measurements and program personalization.

Now they can do it also remotely. At home, using the power of the cloud and using remote, technology. You know, it's amazing to have that sort of technology be accessible at a low cost to consumer. Is is such a big game changer. And not only that, you know, I think that we really have to examine the way that that medical care is delivered. I mean, we're we're sort of in this new age of telemedicine. Right. And that a lot of people, you know, now prefer to either, you know, stay at home or at work and, obtain medical care.

And, you know, that's exactly what we did in our facility. We we converted hugely into the telemedicine space. And now we're we're actually, you know, doing, my live and I'm on my live practitioner myself. And so having that accessible to people is really important. And the other thing is compliance. And I use I hate to use the word compliance. Compliance and medicine basically means that how, how how much people are willing to adhere to a regimen. And so, I'm going to switch the word from compliance to empowerment.

And so I think people are really empowered to, utilize this because they're using, you know, their their phones, they're using their tablets or whatever, and it's at home. And it doesn't take a whole lot of time. You're not wasting time driving and doing stuff. And, and it's it's this stuff like this is really changing how medicine, especially brain health is going to be really practice in the future. And my hopes one day, my hopes is that we're going to be looking at technology first parts medication, because right now it's quite the other way around is medication first and then technology.

And there's nothing wrong with doing both either. We have a lot of people doing both as well, you know, now, what has been your feedback of people utilizing the device and the doctors that are using it right now? Like, what is your like sort of moment that you realize, hey, we got something special and testing. So, you know, obviously, you know, just to really zoom out and understand what, you know, the work that has gone here and we've invested, you know, we're we're a technology company that works on it.

So we're a mental health technology company. Right. And so we're funded by VCs. And we had to invest a lot of, effort, energy and money, into building this. And it took us years.

Clinical Validation and Early Adoption 15:00

So just to get the product in the market took us around four years and over, I think over $10 million invested in the product just to build it. It's a lot of, a lot of work. And because the reason being, you know, we took something that basically you can only do in the clinic with expensive equipment, and you need the presence of a professional all the time while you're doing it to the clinic, to something that now you can use extremely affordable equipment like never before. And you can do it by yourself at home.

And you have the remote monitoring of a professional. But that's a huge game changer. And that the but to get there, it required a lot of development. When we actually first introduced this to the market, as we expected, there was a lot of skepticism from the professionals that already did neurofeedback in the clinic. I mean, can this really work at home? I mean, will I get good quality data? So we had to go and, you know, do a lot of validation work to show that, okay, here's mind lift data compared to gold standard, EEG, that's how it compares.

Right. Like so you have nothing to worry about when it comes to the data quality. And then when we added extremely advanced features in the dashboard to show look, you can personalize in the same way that you've been personalizing, you know, in clinic neurofeedback. And we kept kind of so so customers started coming in right. People started okay. You know, lowering their guard, saying, you know what, I'm going to be open minded. Obviously, the first year or two when we launched this to the market, we got the early adopters, you know, those that are extremely open minded who wanted to try new things, but they stuck with us.

They're still using the toolbox. They we have people, you know, the the first customer that used mine left the first one that bought the first kit is still using this tool this day, with their patients, which is fantastic. And that shows, what what was built here. But we did not stop like I think and that's, that's really the most exciting part, in my opinion, is that. Okay, so we've built the neurofeedback machine, right? So you have EEG that is being measured and you're retraining specific areas of the brain.

You're improving attention. You're improving relaxation or improving, you know, anxiety symptoms and so on and so forth. But then what we did was we said, okay, now we're getting this huge database we have over well, now getting close to 10,000,000 minutes trained on the system with over 400,000 sessions done. Right. From, you know, from from hundreds of thousands of, clinics and tens of thousands of patients, what can we do with this data? How can we actually uses data to help in improving the product and and actually bringing more brain health innovations so recently and I'm super excited about it.

We launched something that is called brain maps. It's actually, visual representations of the electrical activity in the brain and how it compares to the population. So when you put the mind the equipment on, you know, you move the electrode from one place to the other. And then by the end of that process, you get a report, showing how, you know, your brain data essentially compares to the rest of the population. Now, you can ask me, like, when did we get the data about the rest of the population?

We have a huge database and we use that to that, to that purpose. And it's an ever updating database that no one in the industry has. Why is that? Because the industry kind of stayed still when it came to cloud technologies, when it came to building databases, when it came to actually using new advanced technologies in the field of neurofeedback. And this is when we came into the picture. So of course, we we took a lot of hits at the beginning, but I think now, you know, we are we already established ourselves as, you know, a category leader in the neuro therapy field.

And you can take a look at the numbers they speak. I've got to say that they speak for themselves, but definitely was not an easy path because, you know, the clinical market has its own ways of operating. And it was kind of like a shock to the system, but it's working. And so and that, that really help us, and I'm really grateful to the customers that we have, because that really helped us continue to develop the system. Further now. It's great. And you know what? I think that, for people kind of listening to this and we're being super general right now about about neurofeedback therapy, but let me tell you sort of my experiences, on, on the system.

So one of the greatest things about practicing medicine is that, we provide something for the patient, and the person gives us a positive feedback on, on how they're doing. Right. Or a negative feedback is just as good because we know what not to do right. And so I think that we we utilize technology to try to obtain this data, whether it's how they're feeling, it's kind of checking in with themselves, how they're breathing. And what's great about, this is that we're getting instant like feedback into how people are doing far better than we can do, like a one on one doctor's visit or even the telemedicine visit.

Right? We're getting like daily check ins to see how people are doing and then and then and then providing the actual feedback so we know what works and what doesn't work. And it's really fast. And that level of communication and that level of that interplay between the doctor and patient doesn't matter if it's neurofeedback or not. That's not done right now in medicine. Right? For someone to have daily feedback on the pieces is doing. It is not done in medicine. And so for, for any technology to not just provide the feedback to see how we're doing, but also to get actual like physiologic data on the brain at the same time, correlating with, how people are doing.

That's sort of like the that should be the new gold standard, especially if they're doing at home, you know. So I want to really applaud you, for this because I was I was one of the skeptics at the very beginning, too, because I heard about a while ago and I'm like, there's no way in hell this works. So, and so but, but you're on the you're on the summit, actually, because of my experiences and my realization that, I mean, we don't we don't we don't even do in-person neurofeedback anymore and we completely abandon it just because this is so much more powerful.

And I think it's far superior, in my opinion. And the other reason is that, you know, as the, as more people do it, we get more and more feedback on, you know, most people do it for like attention deficit, but insomnia, that's a huge one. Like sleep issues, mood changes. All these things are happening so fast and people can see, like on their app, what percent they're improving in different areas as well. So even though people with themselves don't, cannot necessarily feel that are improving at the very beginning, but at least they actually have a device showing that you're improving this at this time.

It's turning words into numbers and anything, anything that's for words, into numbers and in numbers back into words, meaning that we get the electrical data and we're going to turn back into are you doing better, yes or no is absolutely valuable information, especially in the organ, as complex as the brain, you know. And so and so not like this is I feel like this is a lot of power to have to, to, to really be in the field of neuroscience. So, what are what do you think? Well, first of all, other clinical data right now specifically for mind lift and what are these and then and what do you think of the limitations in getting more or are there any limitations at all?

Thank you. Thank you for asking that question. Actually, I'm excited to share that we just published, a peer reviewed clinical study on more than 560 patients, that have done that. And we've shown the efficacy on mental health, including, attention deficit zaddy and depression.

Brain Maps, Data, and Broader Applications 23:00

That study, you can, find it, you know, find it in, the Journal of Medical Internet, Research just published recently. And that's powerful clinical data. I'm not aware of any other, clinical study on neurofeedback that was as large and as comprehensive. And so we're super, super proud of it that that was, you know, years in the making. So that's the that's around the clinical data. But of course, you know, we don't stop there. We keep on, you know, collecting more and more and more data, running more studies just to be able to understand, okay, how can we take neurofeedback and optimize it further?

But I think the major breakthrough change is that. So neurofeedback is fantastic. And it's it's an amazing way to really to add more modalities and of course to more mobilities. Or sometimes you need to combine modalities to get better, and better outcomes. But there's also, you know, along the way we figured out that we don't already know how to do neurofeedback, but actually now you have a reliable way to do it at home. And if you can take EEG at home, measurements and integrate it into any type of mental health therapy, whether it's medications, you know, rise, you know, CBT or other types of, computing modalities and allow the EEG to inform how the therapy should actually go or whether a therapy is progressing or not, or whether the patient will actually respond to, you know, therapy a versus therapy.

This is, in my opinion, the biggest breakthrough that the field of neuro therapy, can have. That's what we're working on. And I'm inviting, you know, any researcher, professional that is interested in integrating EEG into their clinical practice to let us know we're actually we want to collaborate with as many researchers as possible to build that because my opinion, that's the biggest revolution that's going to happen in mental health. How do you connect brain produced data to any therapy, mental health and optimize, as you said, like turning the words into numbers, but, you know, generalizing it to any therapy because right now it's kind of like a self-contained few.

You know, the neurofeedback, you know, you're using EEG to measure the impact of EEG training. But it's actually extended it a bit. And we use EEG to measure the impact and to inform on the therapy, you know, other therapies and not only, neurosurgeons or neuro. Right. You actually can get it into the mainstream, more mainstream, community. Right. Because you're absolutely right. So what's happening right now in the world of mental health is that, a lot of the data that's collected is really just subjective data, meaning that how do people feel scores in, you know, different categories and neurocognitive data.

And, and that's that's all. Well, that's all nice and. Well, how does that translate specifically into like bring frequency patterns, things that you can't control, things that aren't, you know, subjective. Like let's say if you're having a bad day, then your score's probably going to be worse on that day because of something external that happened. And that's the confounding factors within within psychiatry. Right. And so but putting putting those words into the numbers and asking for feedback, we can say that, hey, you know, you may be having a bad day and we can see your brain's doing this.

Or here's some factors as to why. And putting that into what we can physically see. It's you know, it's better than like an x ray, it's better than an MRI, and it's better than a Cat scan that we have right now, because those are just seeing what we see from, from from physically. But we can see the actual patterns. And I and I, you know, tell people it's like, you know, watching The Matrix, right? You see the lines of code coming down. And so we can literally see the lines of code when you're coming down into brain frequency data.

And that's the exciting part, right. And it's not just neurology. It's not just psychiatry. It's it's other things as well. You know, for example, we are able to determine, brain signals relating to like sleep apnea or relating to asthma, relating to other sort of non neuroscience disorders. And I think the more data we get, the better the better. Stories that we can tell utilizing the data for, for much larger data set. So I want to congratulate you on your study because was it 560 patients. Was it okay for those those of you who aren't in the science world, 560 for a data set is massive.

It's it's the largest one I've heard of in neurofeedback. Specifically for the things that you guys are looking for, which is huge. I mean, that takes a lot to to coordinate. So I want to congratulate you on that being so and so. So what so now that we see the vision, right, we have this digital therapy and it's beautiful and it's great and it's accessible to the public. What do you think is going to be the biggest factor or help getting this technology into the hands of like clinicians, whether it's psychiatrist, neurologist, primary care behavioral therapists, so that the general public can have far more access.

What do you think is is that key? Well, you know, EEG. So in my opinion, EEG needs to be as ubiquitous as the measures we get from Apple Watch or Fitbit. Right? It needs to be as, you know, it needs to be similar to, vital signs. With the measure, when you're looking at a physical condition, for example. Right. To get there. The major barrier to EEG has been, well, two major videos. One, the setup of the EEG is is a nightmare. And so and that deterred a lot of professionals. Right. In the, in the healthcare field from even thinking about adopting EEG technology just because you need to go and get trained in it and then train, like the setup is a nightmare in itself.

So that's already a beauty. And so if you actually now make it easy to just, you know, put on a wearable device that's sent to the patient's home automatically, you don't have to even deal with the logistics that you already took a huge part of it. Right? So now it's easier for you as a professional to think about adopting EEG as part of your, clinical practice. That's one. But that's not enough because you can send EEGs to patients all you want. If you don't know what to do with the data, that's meaningless, because then the second part will be okay.

So now you get this raw data about EEG and the different areas, the brain of the patient and how they you know, what, you know, you see a bunch of numbers, you see a bunch of colors. But for you to actually understand what's going on, you have to go through, you know, EEG training. And again, that's another barrier. So the right way to do this and to get this out there is to deliver, like to use technology with good interface to deliver insights based on what the software interpreted from the patients in the EEG and just deliver these insights handed to the professional, simplified, but with a lot of depth, right.

With a lot of scientific depth. But to simplify the, you know, the practitioner, there's one, two, three, four. This is where you should look at these are probably the therapies that, you know, you should use with this patient because 1234 and that, that jump from just raw EEG data to packaged insights, I can't even state how difficult that is. And that's exactly the the technological leap that we need to have to be able to make the EEG part of mainstream healthcare. Again, from my view. And that's exactly what we're trying to pioneer right now.

And that's why in my previous answer, I invited the researchers, physicians, anyone that's interested in this to talk to us. We want to collaborate with as many people as possible to make that happen, because the moment that that happens, mental health changes. You actually add a objective dimension to mental health.

Making EEG Mainstream in Healthcare 31:00

That is easy, right? You're not because you can't really ask any patient to do fMRI. That's not that's not realistic. But if EEG is easy, you can ask any patient to make to have an EEG scan, especially if the interpretation is is also packaged. And then that's how I see. Yeah. So let's just, you know, break it down a little bit. So whenever we say EEG and electro electrical and stuff like Ram. So for those of you listening, it's it's kind of like when you get a EKG or EKGs at a doctor's office of your heart, you're really looking at how the heart is conducting, those signals.

An EEG is for the brain, and brain is far more complex than the heart. Conducting electrical signals. And so, historically speaking, the EEG has been used in the field of neurology to look at seizures and seizure disorders, but it has not been studied that much in the field outside of, neurology in terms of, like, psychiatry and mental health disorders. And it's also not been used in any neurological disorders, a whole lot outside of just specifically seizure, for example, Alzheimer's, dementia, multiple sclerosis, etc., etc..

We know these these differences exist. But it's thus far it's been really hard to sort of make that correlation. And so the whole idea here is, you know, is, is your a person, you're thinking, hey, you know, I'm going will bring foggy my attention's all over the place. I don't know what's going on with me. Can you just pop on a device at home and actually get data and and show to doctors, say, hey, this is how my brain compares to someone else's brain, right? That's similar to my age and gender.

And this is how far away from the normal I am. Like, what's up with that? Right? Thus far, it's been almost impossible to to get this information. I guess until until recently. And so and I think we're where technology really has the flies into sort of the mainstream type of type of medicine. And anything that simplifies the process decrease to decrease the cost, to obtain this data, is going to be, you know, absolutely crucial if you if you think about it, let's, let's say that my, my Apple Watch, for example, I want to know what my heart rate is.

So I tap on my little, you know, heart button. Right. And let's say I want to know what my rhythm is, is there's an ace sib analysis atrial fibrillation analysis on the Apple Watch. I remember to to to look at that. But for the brain is just far more complex. But I think something like mine live is really the closest thing we have to get like actual physiologic data that's easily accessible for, you know, for the brain. And that's what's truly, you know, exciting. Right. And so and it's still like super early on like what I'm.

Yeah. Absolutely. Right. Like when you're tapping your Apple Watch and you're seeing, you know, your heart rate and your heart rate variability, you're, you know, you have benchmarks to tell whether you're, you're okay or, you know, it needs more work. You need to actually, do more exercise that you have benchmarks to understand. How how well are you fitting, you know, compared to your age group and gender? With EEG, you're getting absolute numbers that to you, even if you're training the EEG, sometimes might look abstract just because of how complex the electrical activity in the brain is by orders of magnitude compared to actually.

And this is exactly the challenge. How do you bridge that gap from absolute abstract numbers, to actual insights, just like you get on your Apple Watch. Huge challenge. Huge. But that's the story. And I love how you say that. This is just the beginning. We're just getting started, you know. Yeah. And the holy by next year or the year after, we get some even more major discoveries. And so, for those of you just want to check out my list, just go to my live.com my in the list.com. I like that there's sort of a blog section, and also there's individuals who are wanting to look for my live practitioners.

If you look on that as well, like looking at go ahead and click on the the that's a tab in my Live.com. Once again it's my in the lift.com. So the last thing that I want to touch on is, how has this company transform your own view of, of looking at, well, just medicine in general, not just mental health. Well, you know, the company has grown, and I've also grown a lot, as a person, and unfortunately, like, you know, when I started the company, I was more optimistic about the, US healthcare system, and I because I knew less than what I know now.

That's the unfortunate reality. And so the way that, you know, my my views have transformed. Now, I know, that sometimes you can bring, again. And I'm sorry. This is going to sound pessimistic, but it has to be put out there. You can create fantastic technologies sometimes that really change people's lives. But in healthcare specifically, it's hard to understand who's going to pay for it. This technology might not see the light. And I've seen this happening all around me. I've seen many companies that started that shut down a year, two, three, four years later, even though they were innovating in their fields.

Just the reason being who was like, nobody was willing to pay for it. You know, payers were not into it because there was no CPT code or professionals were not willing to pay for it because they can't make additional revenue as a result.

Healthcare Barriers and the Future of Brain Health 36:30

And patients just wouldn't pay for it if it was not, you know, reimbursed or like you had these like, and that complexity of who's going to pay for it really limits innovation in mental health and in healthcare and, and you see, for example, many companies that still are, trying to change healthcare end up being, you know, you know, they start wanting to change healthcare technology. They end up mimicking, existing healthcare procedures that are flawed. But just on a larger scale, you still have, putting the technology aside, you know, like the concept of mental health, or brain health, improving it.

You know, we've seen many companies come up. You know, and, you know, connecting between patients and therapists to do talk therapy. And that's, that's fantastic. That's solving the access issue. There's a huge access issue. And these are the companies that are able to kind of succeed in this flawed system because they're following procedures that are understood. Right. Like therapy is something that is understood. It's right. People, you know, payers can swallow it like everyone understands what that animal is.

But the moment that, you know, a company comes up with totally new innovative technology that was not available before, the bet is a lot, a lot harder if you're not following or mimicking, you know, existing procedures. But then if you're mimicking existing procedures and you just making them a little bit more scalable, then you're not really innovating. You're playing within the same square, that that was drawn to us for, for tens of years. Right and. Right. So I think that, the way that the way that especially in the US, especially insurance companies work because they're looking at historically what has worked before in the past.

And how do you fit into that specific category if you come up with a whole new category? It's really hard to even talk to the right people to get lots of unless you have valuable and really lots of data as well. And even if you have the data, it's still an uphill, journey. And me trying to practice integrative health within the insurance market and all these years, I'm, I have a similar battle with not really trying to fit into some sort of model, trying to, you know, be innovative in the actual space and especially in brain health. Right.

And putting together the right minds to, to really, understand how to improve, the way that we're practicing medicine requires a big shift in the way that this is, you know, thought about. And so but that's why you're you're on the summit. So I just want to reach out to hundreds of thousands of people kind of, out there kind of listening to this, right, knowing that that you're really witnessing a company like mindless is really just scratching the surface, the beginning of what could be done for brain and mental health, you know, disorders.

But anyways, I just want to thank you for coming on this has been such a interesting discussion, valuable discussion. And like I said, you've kind of made a believer out of me. I was I was the biggest skeptic in the very beginning. Sorry about that. But, but definitely, now I'm fully bought into not just the actual technology in the process, but where this where this is actually going is actually truly exciting. And hopefully it decreases the cost of healthcare, increases accessibility into the ever growing, ever, ever growing, mental health challenges, here in the United States and the world as well.

So I want to thank you for being on the day. Well, thanks for having me. I enjoyed.