Building the Future of Brain Training with EEG Headphones - with John Golden, CEO of Vital Neuro

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome back to Products and Health Tech. I'm um, Chris Hoid, principal at Vynyl. Today I'm joined by John golden, the CEO of Vital, uh, Neuro, which is a company that spent nine years developing an EEG enabled headphone device that uses real time brain monitoring to create personalized neuroresponsive music. In our conversation we explore how Vital Neuro is addressing anxiety and stress across diverse populations. From reducing absenteeism in call centers by 13% to helping patients achieve sedation level relaxation in medical procedures without pharmaceutical intervention. John shares insights into their patented technology, the challenges of building consumer grade clinical EEG and their vision for integrating brain state management into everyday life. Let's dive in. John, thanks so much for being here today. I wonder if we can start by just diving right in. Can you give us an overview of what Vital Neuro is?

Speaker B: Yeah. Chris, it's a pleasure to talk to you and your audience. You know, Vital Neuro is really uh, a lifestyle that we want to bring through our technology. We're all overwhelmed and life is very challenging and our goal is to be able to give you that peace, that sanctuary, that sense of control and, and help you control where your mind is so you can be your best and most present. So it's a technology that enables that.

Speaker A: And what is the modality for that technology or at least the primary modality? What does it look like and feel like?

Speaker B: Yeah, today's manifestation of that is a simple Bluetooth headphone with some EEG sensors. That looks really cool, right? Not like typical neurofeedback that looks like a colander with spark plugs on your head. We really want you to be able to wear it anywhere, anytime and it interfaces with a mobile app and that mobile app connects us to the cloud so we can do real time EEG monitoring to be able to create really custom music for you.

Speaker A: So just by way of helping the product and health tech community get to know you, can you talk us through your background and how you became CEO of Vital Neuro?

Speaker B: Well, I'm certainly not the inventor of Vital Neuro. There's some people that preceded me like Dr. Cameron Follipore and Alex Dohmen. These two gentlemen came together and really the genesis is uh, Cameron Follipore and what he had done. He's a clinical psychologist in New York City and uh, he had seen things to his practice and then partnered with Alex and him and had him and Alex had this idea. Uh, from there I was invited and met with them after um, exiting a business called Exos. And uh, a gentleman by the name of Mark Haddis introduced us and I'm so grateful to Mark to making that introduction. And um, you know, now there's a whole team of us that have kind of transformed vital to where it is today.

Speaker A: So let's talk a little bit about that transformation. So it started, you know, a handful of years ago as a good idea, right? Sort of supported by uh, a clinical expert's experience and maybe intuition. So it became a, you know, a fledgling startup. And talk to me about the, the journey. Where are you guys seeing traction? Where is the company now? How are you feeling about where things are headed?

Speaker B: Yeah, Chris, we're that typical startup. Overnight success, right? So we're about nine years into that journey and I've been about seven of that journey. And uh, the transformation has really been about trying to be efficacious about what we do. Clinical grade EEG is a hard thing to do, to make it cool and truly mobile and be able to take it anywhere you want. And Frictionless is an art form and it's taken a lot of repetition to get there, a lot of practice, a lot of iteration. And so we really wanted to perfect that. And then our goal was to learn the voice of our customer. Right. Most people aren't interested in, you know, talking about their mental health or talking about the challenges that they're dealing with. Though it's more open today than it's ever been. It's still fairly taboo or, you know, not, not uh, as open as you would hope it would be. So our goal was to understand what did people really want and need. They didn't call and raise their hand, said, I need brain training, I'm going to run out and get brain training, give me some neurofeedback. So we really want to understand what they did and needed. So we spent actually the last two years understanding that and knowing that they're looking for something that gave them, uh, the capacity to be their best in a frictionless, use it anywhere environment. Once we understood that voice, now we're actively and we've been in the market selling now for about a year. It's been a great, uh, transformation for us. We're excited, we're getting tremendous traction and uh, you know, we have a direct to consumer and also we sell to physicians today. Um, and then we've got some really key partnerships that are developing.

Speaker A: You, I think initially described it as a lifestyle sort of supported by uh, the music, by the device, by the eeg. Um, can you talk a little bit about the outcomes that you're starting to see and the patients that are using it.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And um, you know, the user of Vital is patients and consumers of all walks of life. We have children all the way through, you know, senior citizens, and they use it both personally and professionally. And again, when we say lifestyle, that's really important. As common as you would wear a headphone or EarPods, that's what we want you to use. Vital. Right. And the outcomes, we measure the outcomes kind of in three categories. The first one is in the impact for your mental performance. So we look at, how do we look at like a Gad7 survey. So how do we do against depression, anxiety, how do we help you with your sleep, how do we help you for your readiness? So we look at those things and I mean, again, everybody will quote different numbers. You know, we're very proud of what we've been able to do. We'll typically see a, uh, 40 plus percent reduction in depression and anxiety symptoms. Uh, when we've gone into populations and we've been in medical situations, we've been in enterprises and we've dealt with direct people, uh, every day. And we've tested with really some interesting populations. We've done a study with uh, Southwest Airlines, uh, flight attendants, we've done nurses, first responders, we've done teachers, um, so really interesting. And we've seen consistent results in that really improving sleep. When you're able to improve the sleep of a flight attendant, that's a pretty amazing thing because they're sleeping at a different place all the time. So that first measure is kind of in that mental health, uh, uh, sort of capacity. The second thing is we look at engagement. How often does somebody use it? Right. It's one thing, you know, we all have a treadmill that's sitting in the basement somewhere with maybe some clothes hanging on it. So the question is, how do we get to make sure that somebody uses this thing? Right. And so for our average user, they run about a 14, 15 minute session. That's how long it takes. Now they can choose to run five or 30 minutes, but it's 14 minutes. The average user runs about 20 sessions a month, some more. When they're maybe in a crisis or going through a difficult time in life, they'll use it more and sometimes, um, a little less frequently. But they, they come back to it. So usage is important. Most of our patients and most of our clients are using it first for rel, then focus, then sleep, then pain management. And our biggest growing category is around Sedation and to be able to get somebody to a level of volume in about 11 minutes. And that's in our pre procedure when you're going in for like uh, some sort of medical procedure which we can touch on. And then the third measure we get into is ROIs. So uh, return on investment that we do. We've like call centers, how do we drive productivity? How do we improve absenteeism? So across our call centers we've reduced absenteeism by 13%. That's basically giving every call center employee one extra day of work for their employer. That's really powerful, being able to help them and make them more productive. We looked at sales metrics, improvement in sales and then obviously we look at, in the medical space, are we able to get somebody to relaxation. And we've hit the gold standard in that we can show a statistically significant nerve neurophysiological change at the same time with great patient score, self reported, they match. So those would be the three categories, you know, around uh, mental health measures like a Gad7. Then we get into usage, uh, and then ROI.

Speaker A: So John, what do you say to folks who are skeptical of some of these claims, especially due to the breadth of what Vital neuro is able to address?

Speaker B: Yeah, like a lot of coaching and biofeedback stuff. There's a lot of woo woo into that as they say. Right. So it's like I'm a big biohacker or myself and do a lot of things and there's not always a lot of great science. Um, but with vital, we're actually measuring your brain activity real time. So we have that information. So we can not only just demonstrate by asking you a question, do you feel better, more focused, more relaxed? We can actually demonstrate it in the results that we gather from the EEG and what we're seeing. So for me the proof is in the data, proof is in the numbers and um, the resiliency that people have. And they keep coming back with our data. Win, win.

Speaker A: So it's, and I just want to kind of double click on the nature of the impact of it. So is it, it relaxes you, it kind of puts you in a flow state, Is it meditative?

Speaker B: Uh, all the above. Right. So it depends on your desire. So you come in with a current state of mind. You could be unfocused, you could be very stressed out, um, or you could be sleepy and you have a desired state which would be to become more alert, maybe get into executive fun state of flow, uh, maybe I need to fall asleep. Maybe I just need to calm down and get the noise out of my head. It's just overwhelming, and I can't make a decision. Somebody asks you, what do you want for dinner? And you're like, leave me alone. I don't want to make another decision. As I say, we're all kind of. Our new title is I'm the vice president of being busy. Right. And, uh, we all feel that. So I think, you know, what Vital is actually doing is helping you alter the, Your, uh, state of mind. What it's doing is it's reading the electrical signature of your brain. There's plenty of, uh, science out there around neurofeedback about what parts of the brain are stimulated, overstimulated or understimulated. Based on your state of mind, we're able to read that real time. We're able then to compose unique music for you in the moment. That's called neuroresponsive music. And we can transform. We can downregulate or upregulate parts of your brain, your electrical signature, to get you to the desired state. That's what we do, and that's neurofeedback. And that's been very effective. When you go into clinicians offices, uh, there's thousands of people that do a great job of delivering that. Our goal was to take it out of the clinic. Right. Because it's when you have crisis. Yesterday I had a very tough set of meetings. And, you know, it was like, I was like, ready to break, and I could step out, put the vital headset on for 10 minutes, and I was calm and collected in my space. And so, you know, when you have to go to a clinic, you got to schedule it. Well, who can schedule anxiety, who can schedule stress? Right? So we wanted Vital to be there when you need, needed it, not when you can schedule it. And so that's been really important to us, uh, in what we've tried to do for people. So we're actually in the moment. Takes about 90 seconds to get your baseline, understand where your brain is, and then we start to transform you. The more you use it, the deeper you go, the faster you transition and the more stable you are. And so that's what we're trying to do.

Speaker A: Very cool. Okay, so I like that you're also, um, brings, you know, so much rigor to how you're tracking outcomes and how you're using that to, uh, you know, help sell into clinics, it sounds like. So can you talk a little bit about, uh, what the pitch is to clinicians and how they're seeing it, maybe particularly in the case of sedation that you mentioned.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think the definition of clinic, first of all I want to clarify. I'm not a neuroscientist, I'm not a medical doctor. You know, my background is technology and operations and um, with a lot ah, of scars, both orthopedic surgery scars and a lot of life scars. And I have a great team of folks I get to work with. As Prior mentioned, uh, Dr. Kamin Falapour and our whole team. Our first primary market is what we call the medical space. Not that Vital's a medical device. It is a consumer grade device, uh, as far as um, its registration and we like that space. But what we do is we go into physicians offices and so think about office based surgery that's becoming more and more. There's clearly almost a billion of these procedures done in the United States alone each year. And so we're talking about um, in the ophthalmology you're getting uh, cataracts, uh, Lasix, glaucoma procedures, oral surgery. Think about all the MRIs and all the different tests that we have. That's a highly stressed, anxiety ridden environment for people. And as we get more and more of those, it's harder to do. And so we target physicians who want to elevate their pain patient experience. And that's how we approached it. Right. But because we're clinical grade we can go beyond that. So when we talk about the clinician, we're talking about physicians who's an ophthalmologist or an oral surgeon or a plastic surgeon or urology. And what Vital does is vital takes on the burden of relaxing that patient without or in partnership with sedation. As I mentioned earlier, we can get somebody to a level of volume like think of the biz scale getting to an 80 or less, getting into the 70s and the high 60s. We can get somebody there in about 11 minutes, right? Consistently. So what does that do for the physician's office? They have a relaxed patient for the physician staff who's already overwhelmed and being asked to do a lot of things, they now can focus on those other things cause the patient is sitting there completely relaxed. And Chris, as you know, we all go to a doctor the morning they're on schedule, by the afternoon they're an hour behind. And now you're waiting for your procedure and you're waiting longer. Vital can create that relaxation. But we give productivity, that's the ROI impact to the staff. We take a burden off and More importantly for the physician, they can look at the vital on the iPad and they can understand the level of sedation that that patient is in with vital and they can see if they're fully relaxed. We call that being vitalized. And if they're vitalized, they know they don't need to sedate them again or even in the first place. And they know the patient's in a comfortable, good place to start the procedure. We have physicians using vital pre procedure, intra procedure and post procedure. And it's just creating a much more um, ah, pleasant experience for the, for the patient and a much more productive and easier experience on the doctor in a minute.

Speaker A: I'm going to ask you where things are headed in the next few years. But first I want to talk a little bit about what the product development process has been like for you guys. Was it, you know, I think you mentioned you've been with the company for about seven years. When you joined, was there clarity around what this device was going to be or have you learned a lot as you've kind of embarked on this journey? Um, I'm curious if there's any uh, surprising or counterintuitive learnings that you guys have um, encountered as you've developed this product.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I think um, we'd uh, be the first startup company that didn't have any surprises if we didn't have surprises. Right. So I always say that the list of unknowns is far longer than what we knew. And so the goal as a leader is trying to understand what are those critical unknowns and how do we discover them over time, what sequence and controlling investment until you fully know what those uh, unknowns are. And so we've tried to be very patient. It's not been easy, uh, but we've tried to be very patient because we have both a hardware and a software component. And so we have the challenges of that. Plus we have a new category, kind of a blue ocean space. And so all of that is been a challenge for us as a team to be patient. We've had great advisors, great people to work with, uh, the team at Vynl that does our technology, software development, engineering, our external partner who helps us on our mechanical engineering, all of our manufacturing, uh, all those building that great team to make sure that it's a safe space to say we don't know what we don't know, but challenge ourselves to create a frictionalness environment that's cool and effective, really being efficacious about the outcomes. Those have been kind of our north stars to drive where we're at. And the complexity that we had a year and a half ago has been replaced by simplicity. Not because we got smarter, we just got more experienced. And so there's sophistication that the vinyl team and others have built behind the scenes that make us look simpler to the user. And that's always important. When I know I can hit that sweet spot and the customer says it's frictionless, they just slide the headphones on and press a button and go. We know we're there, and that's what we're approaching. We have a lot more to go, and we're exciting, excited about all the evolution that's coming in front of us. But right now we're really excited about the space we're in.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's an incredible accomplishment to have gotten where you guys have gotten and how you've. You've launched and the traction that you do have so far. So, yeah, let's turn and talk, you know, a bit about the next few years. How are you seeing, you know, the sort of future progression of the product and the company and the markets as you define this new category?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I think, you know, I talk a lot about, you know, the body's the hardware and the brain's the software. Right. And, um, the beautiful thing about the human is that we get to upgrade the software. Just like Apple upgrades your iPhone, uh, every month to help you against viruses and give you new capabilities. Our goal in Vital is to help you protect against all the things that are going on. You know, you think about the evolution of AI, you think about the changes, societal changes, and the advancements of technology. All that puts a burden on our head, on our brain, our human operating system. So what's the tool? How do we equalize? How do we win in that environment? Besides grit and perseverance and, you know, sucking it up, baby, you know, we got to give ourselves something. And that's what Vital is meant to do, is to give you that competitive advantage in this new world. And so that's what we're excited about, exploring that. And so we have other form factors beyond the headphone. We have manufacturers in the medical space that are going to integrate Vital into the surgical tools. In the surgical environment, we have other, uh, professions that are going to build Vitals, uh, uh, IP into their technology, into their tools and products, so it becomes more of an immersive experience. We also, through leveraging AI and some of the other capabilities, we're going to be able to deliver Vital lots of times without Having to wear a headphone, there's some really profound things. And then ultimately we believe that we can enable artists, artists are going to be able to take a song that's commercially successful and we're going to be able, with a flip, a switch, be able to vitalize that music. So now they can not just create wonderful music that resonates with people but moves people. They don't just respond to the music, but the music responds to them. And that's our neuroresponse to music. So those are just some of the ways that we see this. I mean we, we fully believe, you know, this world of connectedness and personalization. Like, you know, I wear a WHOOP device myself. Um, by the way, Whoop, you can send, ah, my email to my email. Any kind of, um, money you want to give me for recommending it. But uh, you know, you can, um, but I wear a WHOOP device and that allows me to collect body data. Right. But WHOOP is trying to guess my stress level, my strain level. VITAL can give that. Imagine the power here. A year from now, when we combine the brain data of VITAL with the body data that people are getting, we're going to be able to create incredibly personalized, highly efficient, effective plans to help people transform themselves.

Speaker A: John, it sounds like this uh, product, this lifestyle can really address a wide range of issues, which is incredible. Uh, I'm curious how you've thought about the sort of differentiating IP that goes into vital neuro and maybe if you can talk a little bit about the patents that you guys hold.

Speaker B: Yeah. Chris, thank you. Uh, first of all, Vital today we manufacture a headphone and if all goes well, we'll be manufacturing headphone right here in the US soon, which is exciting for us. Um, but we also don't want to be in the manufacturing business long term. So we're, we're constantly looking for partners to integrate our technology into their platform. But with that said, we do have a patent on the unique design of this headphone. Right. So that is patented and it's really important to make sure that, you know, it's one thing to capture eeg, it's another thing to be able to train the brain. And you've gotta get specific spots. So a lot of people like to work on the forehead. That's a decent way to capture eeg and a lot of people do very well with that. But if you wanna train the brain, you gotta be able to capture the EEG in the spot you're trying train so relaxes in the back of your head, for example, it's hard to capture or train EEG from your forehead. Um, so we have a patent on the design. And then how we transform neurofeedback. We call it neurofeedback on steroids. So typical neurofeedback is a way of taking EEG and then playing sounds and tones and frequencies that play to the brain more than the ear to create the desired state. That's a great lots of proof, lots of studies done in that science. And so what happens is then you introduce ideas like, uh, operant conditioning, where you take things away to try to draw the brain back to the desired state. You're looking at vital takes it one step further. And this is where our other patents come into play. And this is what we call neuroresponsive music. Our trademark, um, uh, definition. And what this gets into is the that during your session, we're not just playing, uh, psychoacoustically designed music or music for your ear, but we are actually understanding and monitoring your brain throughout. And we're transforming that soundtrack, that music real time, so that it's, again, highly personalized to your brain. So you're not just listening to some sort of binaural beats or standard playlist that you might hear on a regular app. We're actually creating a playlist unique for you, a composition for you, Chris. That's how we can guarantee to get you to your desired state of mind quickly, deeply, and in a sustained way. And that's what we call neuroresponsive music.

Speaker A: That's, uh, very cool. Can you talk a little bit about how you do that? Is that, you know, an AI driven functionality? That sounds incredible.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So how do we do that? That's magic. That's magic. Yeah. So that's, uh, the wonderful team and process. You know, Cameron Falapour was part of one of the largest studies. So you got to have a really good baseline of what, what baseline EEG looks like. You've got to have really good filtering of eeg. EEG is a very complicated thing. You also have to have the ability to amplify. You got to be able to have a closed, loose system to be able to pick up the signal, uh, process it real time, very fast. Right. And then once you do that, once you interpret what the state of mind is, you got to be able to then figure out what the customer, the client's, uh, frequency is. What's their resident frequency, or we call reward tone. What's their personalized reward tone? Once we capture that, then you need to feed it into a brain training process like operant conditioning. So it's a fairly complex process. That's where I said to you earlier, like, we take this really sophisticated thing and make it simple, put a headphone on, press a button and away it goes. But it's highly personalized. And so once we can get your frequency and we understand how your brain trains, we can zero in. And then we leverage tools like AI and that to get smarter, more efficient, and to extend beyond the headphone so you can listen to music while you sleep without having to have the headphone on. But that gives you a glimpse of kind of, uh, what's going on behind the scenes.

Speaker A: John, thank you so much for joining us today. For everyone out in the product and health tech community, uh, how can they get into the vital neuro lifestyle? How can they find the headphones? Are they available for purchase? What's the easiest way to, uh, experience this?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean obviously we, we saw it online@vitalneuro.com and you can go there or you can send us an email@informationitoneuro.com and uh, we'll be happy to help you. But I think, you know, to sound less like a commercial, even though I'm wearing somebody else's headphones, I should be wearing the vital headphones. Um, I would tell you that, um, we're here for a mission, right? Like, so Dr. Cameron Fapor, he really wants to help people in pain, particularly kids with cancer. That's really important. There's populations today we reach out in the military and help people with, uh, PTSD and other TBI traumatic brain injuries that we really want to help. So we donate all of our demo headsets to these populations. We donate to the Ronald McDonald House. Um, these are people that matter. And we all know, I know me, I use vital three to four times every day, all right? It enables me to be what I am today, right? And we all need help and some of us need more help than others. And so, you know, I always say in these, if I get a chance, I'd like to say if you know somebody that could really use the help, that the noise in their head is too loud, they can't figure their way out, they're struggling. Vital can help. I'm not telling you it's answering to everything, but it'll give you at least a space to start to go do other things. It'll help. If you know of physicians who are innovators that are doing world class stuff, that are dealing with challenging cases, recommend vital to them, ask them to take a look because we'd like to help them help their patients. So this is kind of my call to action to everybody is, you know, you're not used to. Somebody doesn't say, hey, let's go buy brain training, uh, let's go do neurofeedback. Right? That's not common. Common. But I'm telling you, our job, our responsibility is to bring this to everybody because it is. It can be that common, that easy, it might solve it for you. If it won't solve it for you, I guarantee it'll give you the capacity to figure out how to fully solve it.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for joining us. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn, YouTube or on our website at, uh, productsandhealthtech.com if you have any ideas or suggestions on what you like to hear on a future episode or if you'd like to be a guest, please just shoot us an email at info at productandhealthtech. Com.