Brain Music made with Neuroscience — John Vitale

Music producer & sound engineer John Vitale is creating music to help people optimize brain states. After co- founding Focus@Will, where he designed music and soundscape channels for flow state he moved on to found Brain Music Labs Where he’s crafting new ways to use entrainment based music and media for reducing stress, anxiety, and cravings with partners like Total Brain and Felix.

John is a great guy and I’m thrilled to be able to share this conversation about the importance and potential for audio as a technology frontier. Also, John created the intro you hear at the beginning of every Deep Future podcast and I’m super grateful to him for taking that on.

Pablos: I’ve been playing with this 3D spatial audio lounge online.

John: Which one?

High Fidelity.

John: I know Philip. I’m trying to think of the best use case for that and I was trying to get them out. In fact, Philip presented at Metal.

Pablos: I didn’t go to that one. I heard him calling for them. I’ve been playing with High Fidelity a bunch.

John: I’d love to get your take on, where do you see as a great use case for High Fidelity?

Pablos: Where Philip is coming from is about trying to develop these tools to improve virtual reality experiences with a vision towards something like second life, but in VR, where you can just walk around and hang out with people. The audio substrate is a big deal. That’s a big part of it. I’m not telling you the things you know. The neurological cues around audio are a big deal. The way I think about it for all of human history, all of our conversations were zero-latency until the last century, face-to-face. One hundred percent spatially positioned.

The sound was coming from where the speaker was sitting every time. That is not true on phones, on Zoom and on anything that’s mediated online. High Fidelity tries to use that to make you feel like the connection is more real. They’re busy trying to go further with this and develop it for VR. It’s going to be exciting to see where they get to. With the High Fidelity tool, as we know it now, we can wander around on a map and chat with people.

It’s super compelling in ways. I’ve made friends in there, which I can’t say I’ve ever done on Zoom. It feels like hanging out. If you go to High Fidelity with headphones on and you close your eyes, and you’re there with a half dozen people, it’s like we’re at a dinner table. They’re all spatially positioned in the same spot. When they speak, you can hear them as if they were there. It’s a special experience I much prefer to Zoom.

John: I like your dinner table view. You should have a dinner table there because they have different maps. What I liked is you could go there and go, “We’re going to all go see the DJ event.” You can go walk 100 feet from DJ like you’re at Burning Man and go, “That’s cool, but let’s go talk in the corner.” You and your friends go over there. That’s the magic of what’s going on.

Pablos: That is one of the experiences that I love about it. In my view, there are a lot of places you could go with it and there’s a bunch of potentials. One important thing that came out of playing with it was understanding how much better audio can be online and how much we’ve given up because of the history of audio online maps to Telecom. They have a massive network and they’re trying to reduce bandwidth consumption because they’re trying to get more users on the same amount of spectrum.

We don’t have those problems a lot of times. What we have is a problem where all the compression, bandpass filtering, and latency adds up to make you feel like you’re not fucking real when I’m talking to you on the phone. That’s not cool. My brain thinks you’re fake when I’m talking on Zoom. It’s eroding our relationships, not substantiating them. One of the metrics Philip Rosedale told me that they found was that the average Verizon call in America is 350 milliseconds of latency.

Your brain can handle about 180 before you start to not feel real. We’re talking over each other and there’s a mismatch. Your brain is cycling on like, “Am I getting through?” I’m trying to have a conversation here and your brain is stuck going, “How do I connect with this person?” I’d be better off with tin cans and string. We’ve got fucking cell phone companies that have got us down into six kilobits for audio or something stupid.

John: It takes a lot of nuance, which is important for us to have that connection and experience rather than data across like, “I can give you some information.”

Pablos: “Tell me the information.” It’s like, “I can’t get a credit card number across.” On your expiration day, “How am I supposed to get across the fact that I fucking love you guys? Before you die, I want you to know I love you.” “What’s that again? Hold on. You’re breaking up.” It’s quite sad. High Fidelity is cool because it does give people a chance to hang out again online, especially in COVID. I’ve gotten to have some cool experiences there.

John: I checked it out a few times. I got my little URL code with my little server. I got a bunch of people to show up and we’re all running around. I felt like, “It’s cool because now you can bombard any event with your friends and know that you can go disappear with them and have that conversation,” like you would end up having. I love your dinner table idea like that because we do Zoom dinners and everybody is cute into having to have the visual, but maybe just sitting around and having dinner with your friend so you can all chat in that audio spectrum is going to make you feel like you’re there.

Pablos: The cool thing about High Fidelity to me is, of course, the audio substrate they’ve built. The wandering around the map thing, I’m a little less sold on. There are probably other user interfaces that we can hook up to the audio that would be more compelling. Even if it was just a dinner party. You drop in and it automatically places you in a seat around the table or in the audio space. You don’t even need anything on the screen. Just close your eyes. It’s freeing.

John: You can be hanging out like, “I could have dinner, or I could be making dinner and be part of a dinner conversation. I don’t have to worry about how I look on Zoom and all that stuff.”

Pablos: That’s what’s working. If you look at the Clubhouse, people are hanging out. It’s freeing to not have to worry about the video aspect of it because it’s not buying you anything. It’s making things worse. Something Philip was adamant about when I talked to him was that the video detracts from the experience and just being audio. I’ve used beta versions of High Fidelity and stuff that have a video in it, and I agree.

Now I have the video back and it’s making it worse. I’d rather be on audio and have it be good. If you think about it with your headphones and in High Fidelity with your eyes closed, it’s roughly equivalent if we were hanging out at the dinner table with lights off. It’s damn close to that. That’s a real experience that we could have and have had. I don’t know how often you have dinner with lights off but I do all the time.

John: There’s an easier connection point and people know. When you do conference calls versus Zoom calls, everybody will pop in for the conference call but in Zoom call, “I’ve got to make sure I’m there. I’m going to have to be present. Who’s going to be watching me?” There are 2 different things, 2 different flavors, and 2 different purposes.

Pablos: Zoom and video conferencing, as we know it, sucks enough that a lot of times, making things worse. On the subconscious level, I can be here saying, “Cool. Awesome. Let’s do it,” but your brain is telling you, “This guy is a fucking cartoon character made up by the evil Disney corporation.” Your brain is not telling you the same thing as the person. I have a teleprompter. I have a DSLR aimed right behind your face, so when I’m talking to you on Zoom, I’m staring right in your eyes. I’m trying hard to connect.

John: I have a couple of friends that have done that and it’s a big difference because if I see you coming through your teleprompter and DSLR lens, I am getting a much better 3D representation in everything, the right aperture, and depth of field.

Pablos: I’ve got all that going. I look amazing on Zoom. If you don’t have it, your gaze is not into my eyes.

John: It’s usually off-center because everyone is over here and you’re looking at the people but the camera is here.

Pablos: Zoom won’t let you move ahead around. Ideally, you should be able to move your head under the camera. Zoom won’t let you do that. No tool lets you do that.

John: You’ve got your prompter right here. I’ve got a couple of friends who have done the same thing. You’re looking right into that camera. Do you have it right above?

Pablos: No, I have a lot of screens and shit, so I have a prompter here. When I use it, I’m looking right at it and then ignoring all the stuff.

John: It makes a huge difference.

Pablos: There are ways you could embed these cameras into displays.

John: Those cameras that you clip on top, it talks about a whole in the market. A mini prompter that has those $160 cameras sit right on top of it, that’s a goldmine on Amazon. As soon as people see the difference of like, “This is how I come off as a projection when I’m not doing that.” It’s like, “I’m talking to you and I’m looking over here.”

Pablos: Teams does it, but also FaceTime now has a feature, which will use deepfakes technology to shift your eyes. On a FaceTime call, it knows because Apple knows the geometry of the phone and everything. If you look in your iPhone settings under FaceTime, there’s a feature called eye contact. It’s established natural eye contact while on FaceTime.

John: I never even saw it before.

Pablos: People don’t even know it’s there. It’s on by default. FaceTime calls, and this is going back to those neurological cues, without even realizing it, they are better than Zoom.

John: Apple is hip to connection. That’s why their photo programs and the videos they make for you are all about the human experience and connecting with your friends. They know those nuance differences that helped.

Pablos: Let’s get on to some actual topics because that’s interesting stuff that we could talk about for seven hours. It would be super cool because I’m unlikely to have a conversation with anyone else who’s had the career you’ve had. How would you describe it? Is it audio engineering or producing music? I know music must be the unifying theme.

John: As a producer and engineer, it started out with the love of music, and then everyone said, “You can’t do that. You’ve got to go to school and get a technical degree.” I went to school and got an Electrical Engineering, Computer Science degree. In it, I was like, “It’s technical. I want to go back to music.” I ended up in the film and music lab at school. I got a double major, then I got out and I opened a recording studio because MIDI and everything was happening. My trajectory is this recording engineer, then I realized it wasn’t an engineer. Engineers are in the weeds making the audio sound good, but a producer is teaming up with the engineer and composers. Other people may have something like, “I’m probably going to be better in the producer’s spot.” I learned the engineering part to get to producing because there’s an integration theme in this too.

Pablos: Being an engineer, I always think of not necessarily music, but in anything, understanding the tools that help you to invent and create at the bounds of what’s possible.

John: At that time, MIDI was bubbling.

Is that in the ‘80s?

John: Yes. I remember I went to this electronic music expo and hybrid arts in the first Digidesign product. It was called Sound Tools. I was looking at some waves on the screen and they needed somebody to figure out how to put a wave on the screen. Until then, we’re cutting 2-inch tape with razor blades. DATS came out and you couldn’t edit a DAT yet. This was the program edit a DAT with Sound Tools that now became Pro Tools in about 1.5 years. I was mind blown. I was like, “Good thing I went to tech school because I can understand what’s going on under the hood. Now I see where all these tools are going.” I want to make records more than ever because I can see that this is going to be an integration between humans and machines in the mid-‘80s, late ‘80s, early ‘90s.

Pablos: I always thought if I had another concurrent life to live, music would be the coolest thing to work on for the reasons you’re talking about, not because I have anything to bring to music, but because this is one case where we got it right with computers early on. Partly because of MIDI. Everything can talk to everything. All these devices can talk to each other. Even though the analog gear got that corner in front of Jack or an XLR, you could plug anything into anything. I had a weird experience that I’ll never forget. It was 1983 with the first CDs. CDs, in those days, were 520 MHz.

It blew our minds because my floppy disk could hold 128,000. The first 3 to 25-inch floppy disk could hold about 400,000. Having 500 MHz blew our minds on a disk. We had Walkmans with tapes in them, but the idea that the music could be digital that lived on a CD and it could hold so much. There was no compression. The computers were too slow, hot and expensive, so you couldn’t have any compression. Uncompressed audio on a CD and you probably remember this, the first ones were glass. That was a selling point for CDs. It was like, “The last forever.” I quickly figured it out. I can make it out of plastic and you have to buy new ones.

At that time, I remember seeing like, “The music can be encoded digitally. A whole album can fit on a CD uncompressed.” We didn’t even have a notion of compression at that time because compression was too expensive. Computer chips couldn’t handle it. I wasn’t thinking of compression at all, but I was thinking, “Now I’ve got a metric. I know that a track uncompressed on a Duran Duran album is 50 MHz. I had a sense of a computer chip that could hold 128,000, about 0.5 cubic inches.” I started adding them up. I’m like, “Eventually, I’ll be able to put the track on a chip.” I added up that one album. At that time, it was going to take about a cubic foot of chips.

We didn’t have the transistor density yet, so I’m like, “With a cubic foot of chips, I can hold one album.” Moore’s law had been described, but it certainly hadn’t penetrated my mind yet. I had some visceral sense of it by now. I knew that the 128,000 chip, last year was only 16,000, the same size. I have one friend in the entire town who knew enough about computers to appreciate the idea, but I said, “Someday, we’ll be able to have a song on a chip and you’ll be able to plug all the songs together that you want. That’ll be your Walkman with no moving parts.” I didn’t envision this thing, but it didn’t have compression in my head, so it could have been better. We would go even further now, of course.

John: You can have a whole bandolier.

Pablos: That’s exactly what I was imagining.

John: All your favorite songs, you can queue it up, plug it in, and play it.

Pablos: You just get the song that you want. You plug them in back to back because chips are like that anyway. It’s like Lego bricks. You’d have this solid-state music thing. It blew his mind and nobody else could have hung in there long enough to even comprehend. I was twelve years old envisioning the future of music and portable music. All I was trying to say is you’ve got to live out like one of my fantasy careers in life, which is you get to create with all these tools and plug all this stuff together. It seems like you hit it at the right time. The synthesizer had become a thing. The sampler had become possible in the late ‘80s to early ‘90s. Music was changing from a thing that was done with instruments to a thing that was done with studios. How did you see that play out? Did you play instruments before that?

Yeah. I grew up playing guitar. I was lucky my parents saw that I could pick up a guitar and play it. They’re wonderfully like, “Let’s get some lessons.” At the lessons, I had a virtuosic jazz guitar playing wonderful teacher and I was like, “Can you teach me how to play this Eddie Van Halen song? That’s cool, but can you teach me Foxy Lady before I leave today?” Unfortunately, as a teenager, you just got to play what you know. I got enough theory to make it all work. I was not the best music student, and then later, I had to go back and learn a lot more theory.

Pablos: At least you had a guitar. I’d like a violin and clarinet and you couldn’t play anything I wanted on that.

John: I was lucky in the late ‘70s to early ‘80s playing guitar, so I had fuzz boxes. I went home and had the wah pedals. My poor parents had to deal with it. I would go to bus tables at my dad’s restaurants and he’s like, “What are you going to do with the money?” I’m like, “I’m going to buy a new four-track record.” He’s like, “What will you do?” They were supportive like, “If that’s what you think you want to do.”

Pablos: That’s how my parents felt about the computer.

John: Sooner or later, I had a mini hacked up recording studio in my basement. I had a little four-track test camcorder one, and then they have FSK code, which means that you could print that on track four. You could run the whole MIDI rig, which now became a whole virtual 99 tracks, whatever you wanted to do. That was the first thing I hacked together. I was like, “I can take the FSK code out of the drum machine, then the drum machine becomes the slave to the tape machine.” All of a sudden, it was functioning like a little mini-big studio. When I went in and tried to intern with the studios, they’re like, “How the heck are you doing these demos on these little cassettes?” I’m like, “I had this big virtual rig.” They’re like, “You have to come in here. We’re going to have you be the intern around here because you get some wack ideas how this is all fitting together.”

Pablos: That was the thing. At that moment in time, anybody who knew how to work a computer was like, “Go work the computers,” then you’ve got to play with all those toys.

John: Samplers were the mind-blower. All of a sudden, I got an Emax 2, which was the bomb because now you could skip the recording deck altogether with a sequence. You can make anything happen you want at all times. I remember going in and doing commercial spots for the local radio stations and having everything sampled on a keyboard, so they’d be like, “This is so-and-so.” As you hit each key, you can get everything you need to happen on cue. I had a whole cue system. This is before Pro Tools.

I was hacking a sampler to become the digital recorder that would happen a couple of years later in the game. Necessity is the mother invention like, “Why do I want full-on reversing a tape and all that stuff?” I’m like, “I need everything in button pushes, so I can cue them exactly what I want them.” Knowing my outcome, I was grabbing tools and making stuff happen, and then you saw the tools. One of the beautiful things is that musicians are usually tech-savvy.

Since the beginning of time, I have a feeling that science, math, and music are more related than we think. Look at the three generations of computer software and things that have been developed. Most of them by musicians because it’s pretty much the tools that they always wish they had. As coders go in, they’re like, “My coding project is going to be this. I never got a chance to have this, so I’m going to go make it.” They’re making all these killer, right now if you’re a musician, you have the cream of the crop set of tools like never before because all these couples of generations of dudes have been like, “Why didn’t they make this? I’m going to make this. I’m going to code this and make this happen.”

Pablos: That’s what excites me about it. I look at it and see all these tools, and they all work together. I remember when I first saw Reason. It was such a genius UI to have every one of those things you used to have to plug into a rack. You couldn’t even afford them all anyway, and then they’re all there. You could just plug them together with cables on the screen. That was genius. I loved it. It made me want to do what you do at that time. That’s the origin, It starts with doing ads for radio, and then you keep going and get into making music, films, and everything you can do with music, as far as I can tell.

John: I graduated from a 4-track to an 8-track, and then I had a little mini-studio. Of course, sometimes, you have these band rehearsal places. You’ll get a cube there and you’re paying a few $100 a month for it. There are sixteen bands on the floor. They’re all popping their heads and going, “What’s going on? You can make demos.” All of a sudden, I was making heavy metal records for a summer because all the bands up there were doing blast beats.

You do a set of demos there. I was connected to 2 or 3 different studios in Michigan, which is an interesting story. Four or five different home studios and we have our own little community pod of producers. There’s Ben Grosse, who later becomes a big producer out here. Mark Bass and Jeff Bass are listening to the radio one night in Michigan and they’re like, “This guy can rap his ass off. We should go and record. We’ll pick him up, John.” It’s Marshall Mathers. It’s Eminem.

John: I did some of Marshall’s first recordings in my project studio. I went to the trailer park and picked him up from the Moms. Everything you see in 8 Mile is a little bit different version of him. I’ve got a video of him somewhere in high school rapping fast, and then some singer singing these big hooks behind him. He was 14 or 15 years old at the time. My friends had the vision to be like, “This is something special,” and they stayed with it. In the late ‘90s, they worked with him for about seven years. The demo got heard by the right people and all of a sudden, it was all going out for Eminem.

They heard nos for years like, “This isn’t going to happen. He’s a white rapper.” They’re diligent about it. You see how the technical chops and everything have to come together, but people still need to see the vision and still need to see where creatively things can happen that aren’t happening yet. Marshall would show up at my studio and he had two huge notebooks full of songs. At fifteen, he had 200 or 300 songs in his notebooks. The keyword is prolific. I’m like, “I learned some people are super prolific about what’s going on.”

Pablos: A lot of times, it’s obfuscated. Nobody else knows that. Nobody else saw those notebooks. This is 30 years into his career or whatever. He probably has a lot more of those fat notebooks because that’s what it takes. It takes 300 attempts to get one good track. This is one thing I’m curious about because you’re right on the border of what would be considered a creative job. It’s about creating music. The creative element is part of what appeals to you.

That’s why you want to produce and not just be doing the engineering work for someone else’s vision. There’s a creative aspect to it that appeals to you, but it’s all super technical. We’re surrounded by as much computer gear as I do almost. Your speakers are bigger than mine. The point is for a lot of people, in a role like yours, you have to be a businessman and you’re a contractor. You’ve probably never been an employee. You’re mostly doing contracting in your career.

You’re unemployable. There is no job you can get by filling out an application. I don’t even have a resume. I know I’m unemployable. There’s no job for me, but the same for you. You have to learn about the business aspect of things. You have to learn all this technical crap. You have to figure out how to finance all this equipment or get access to it. In some sense, market yourself because you’ve got to get the next gig or job. It’s all that stuff that you have to learn and skills you’ve got to develop and substrate, so at the end of the day, be able to say, “Let’s go make some music.”

You partly take all that for granted, but there’s probably some point at which in your career you felt like you’ve got to focus on the creativity more. For me, there were times when I definitely got to focus on the creativity more, and then over time, I got more responsibilities, obligations, emails, and other crap. Sometimes, to the point where I’m like, “I’m not doing anything that I need to be doing other than paying bills.” I just get the money, and then I spend the money. There’s no point to my existence. For you, in this industry, it’s times when you feel like you’ve got to focus on being creative. What percentage is getting to be creative for a guy like you?

John: There’s a proportionality to scale too. If you’re in a bigger play, platform, or company play then you’re going to have X amount of assistance. You’re writing the cookbooks like, “Here’s how the theory works for focused music, and then here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s how we’re going to make it.” One analogy is I’m the managing editor of a magazine. I’m going to make the prototype of the magazine for the music channel, and then I’m going to hire some peeps that understand how that’s made because I don’t want to granularly make every note.

I want people to have a good reference about what we’re going to be making, and the “why” becomes very important. Why are we making this? How are we making it? If you can instill that in the assistance, then that can scale but you are doing less of it. Somehow, that’s strangely not fulfilling. When you’re creatives in this biz, like record producers are pretty auteurist, they’re a little bit control freaky and a little OCD. When we see a vision, we want to do it all ourselves. It’s interesting to get into the software game where now it becomes MVP and you have to let go of all that. It’s like Will and I at Focus@Will. We come from a music background. You get one chance to play the hit record for the guy at the label who’s going to give you a couple of million dollars to develop the band.

You’ll become like, “It’s got to be perfect for anybody who hears it,” but then in software, it’s like, “If you got an idea, put it out, and then you get feedback and you iterate.” It’s hard to go from your perfectionist plan of being a record producer to like, “Just get it out. Get it good enough.” I’m like, “That’s not good enough for anybody to hear.” They go, “It’s way good enough to get some feedback from our customers,” and then we’ll keep tuning it up. Those two worlds were very far apart. Now I’m realizing like, “That would be a great book for people to write. The Edge of Perfectionism and First MVP.” Those two concepts. If it’s a lever, how far are you shifting it to MVP? How far are you shifting it to perfectionism?

Pablos: This is the same fundamental lesson that I’m always trying to beat CEOs over the head with, which is, “Here’s why you suck at innovation. No one hired you to innovate. You’re hired to do the exact same thing you did last year a little bit faster, cheaper, and better.”

John: It’s 10% better.

Pablos: Even 1% if you’re lucky. They’re about stability and predictable results. When you’re doing new stuff, you don’t know what’s going to work. By definition, you have to discover what’s going to work and you’ve got to try a lot of things. You’ve got to get a lot of shots on goal and plan on missing most of them. This is even bigger than what you described. This is the fundamental reason why the software is eating the world.

The reason Silicon Valley has been able to take over many industries is not because we’re any good at any of them or understand them better, or whatever. We’re good at rapid iteration and we got that from software development. We’ll launch it. All afternoon, people are pissed off and emailing me about why it sucks. I’m like, “No problem. I’m going to make another version and launch it before I go to bed.” For more than fifteen years, we’ve been doing what we call rapid iteration or release cycles that are 4 or 5 or 6 versions a day. That’s your mobile apps and your web apps. It used to be eighteen months when it was on a floppy disk, shrink-wrapped.

John: Disks of Microsoft stuff coming in there, they can’t do that every day.

Pablos: Now, we have what’s called continuous deployment. If you’re at Facebook or Google or any of the major or even smaller web apps, you could build a feature, launch it to 1,000 users, and A/B test the shit out of them and see what works and what doesn’t. If it works, then you get 10,000 users. If that doesn’t break, you get 100,000 users. If that does a break, you get them all. I’m making up the numbers, but roughly, that’s the idea. That’s for every feature. You and I have different versions of Facebook on our phones because we’re both being A/B tested on different features we don’t even know exist. That’s how it works.

You don’t remember ever installing the new version of Facebook. Not unless a couple of years. That’s because it’s constantly upgrading. The whole reason I’m describing that is like, “The winners in almost every industry are the ones who figure that out and get on board with that process.” Rapid iteration fails fast, works better than any amount of OCD, any amount of wisdom from on high, and any amount of prior success. Probably you can see, knowing these guys, the producers with OCD, you can see who’s part of the future and who’s not because the ones that are hanging on kicking and screaming, trying to do it the old way, we don’t have space for them. It’s hard for them.

John: It’s an interesting paradigm. Being on both sides, one thing that I’m lucky enough to be able to integrate together is learning from software, quickener. I’d like to say for Brain Music Labs, we’re taking the design thinking approach to even music production, which is a little bit new because music production is generally an artsy approach driven by intuition and guys have music theory. I’m bringing in scientific frameworks like, “If you want to de-stress people, one of the big keys is the recipe books from guys who’ve done ten years of research on it. You do this with the tempo. You do this with the contour, melody, sound design, attacks of the instruments, and the tambours.”

John: It makes it super mellow, so it doesn’t stress anybody out, but it puts him in a state of like, “Cool. There’s the cookbook.” Now as a producer, I know that I can take that framework and design thinking approach to it like, “What’s the MVP of that going to sound like and how many people am I going to test it on?” I’m going to get it that much better, so by V3, this is fucking solid music that is going to de-stress somebody. If I was intuitively doing that, I would have said, “It goes like this. There’s my CD. Check it out on Spotify.” A little bit more design thinking iterative approach is the real next wave of music for purpose in how it works.

Pablos: Let’s back up because we’ve got three projects that I want to cover here. Focus@Will was the first big one where you were able to go in recognizing the man-made playlist on Spotify or an automatically generated playlist on Spotify had some point of diminishing returns in its ability to help you. If you’re trying to focus, de-stress, get out of that anxious mindset, or whatever you could use music for and you know that you can do it and it can help. The one size fits all thing that’s happening in Pandora and Spotify, and whatever with these recommendation engines wasn’t able to get as far as what you were able to do with a more deliberate product design. Can you describe Focus@Will and how it works?

John: My best friend, Will Henshall, is an amazing, number one hit songwriter.

Pablos: What’s a cool song that he wrote?

John: He did I’ve Been Thinking About You from the ‘90s, which is the apex iconic song for many people who met and fell in love. He gets love notes from people like, “We fell in love with your song.” What I love about Will when I met him is he has this big vision. We’re riffing, “What do we do with our strange skillsets?” The music industry is in a weird place in 2009 and 2010. We come up with a concept about, “Can we do music that helps you focus better or work better?”

We did deep-dive research on platforms, anything you can think of all the way back to Muzak. We’re like, “Why did many people do this before? What did Muzak do? What were their tricks?” Our investment pool brought us to an amazing scientist, Evian Gordon, who’s done all this integrative neuroscience. Evian had some interesting deep dives in his biggest brain database in the world about how energetically, if you can personify people and find out what people are energetically, then you know how much energy their non-conscious mind needs so that they’re not looking to distract themselves.

Pablos: What’s an example of how you classify someone energetically?

John: Think of a spectrum from left to right. On the left, you have a little bit more low energy and on the right, you have more high-energy people. You know who these people are in your sphere. Pablos would be little on the right side of the spectrum. When you walked in, I had yoga music and I’m like, “I’m not trying to calm down.” This is a total classic case. Your resonating frequency is probably a little bit more up-tempo. You could take a few questions borrowed from the Big Five personality test and figure out where you are on the energy spectrum.

If we build you a playlist, not that it’s like, “John is going to make a playlist for you,” but scientifically, energetically, we’re going to play A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Those are going to have different energy levels for you. What you’re doing is tricking your unconscious mind from getting bored, so we can give you enough energy to keep you engaged but not too much to distract you. Once we know that, we can build a 120-minute list and you’re rocking.

By the time you come out of that, you’re like, “I’ve been working for two hours.” The normal attention spans about eighteen minutes. We’ve done a tremendous value for everyone by guiding you energetically through maybe a genre that you’d like, but much more energetic play, personalized and customized to you rather than random. That’s the Focus@Will concept and there are 7 or 8 different major genres like classical, dance music, and chill out music.

Pablos: You can make it work with any genre or with any of those?

John: Yes. We figure out who you are, and then what kind of music you like and we’ll give you the best version of something that’s more scientifically designed.

Pablos: Is there speed metal for yoga or something like that?

John: We have an ADHD channel. It’s 180 beats per minute.

Science, math, and music are more related than you might think.

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Pablos: I was going to say you should call it Apperall or something. It’s like Adderall music. I’m probably not the target customer. I’m blessed with not having any real anxiety. I don’t have a problem with focus or being calm or any of the things. I’m not specifically trying to be calm, but I could do it if I wanted. I’m lucky. I have a deep appreciation for that. I dated someone who struggled with anxiety a lot from a lot of different angles and directions. A lot of things could be tough for her and she had a lot of mechanisms she’d worked out to manage that.

I started to appreciate what it would take to be able to live a life where you have those issues and have to do something about it. This is going to get me in a little trouble, but it seems to me like a lot of people are trying to live this well-balanced lifestyle. Their idea of balance seems to be finding the center and trying to stay there. If you think about balance, that’s like trying to balance a pencil on your fingertip. You can do it, but it’s precarious. Whereas, if you try to balance a barbell, it’s easy and you could do it forever because the weight is at the extremes. Balance through extremes is my idea of how to live a balanced life. I want to party all night and sleep all day. There could be variants like that.

John: You should have been in the music industry.

Pablos: It’s not that I want to party all night but I want to experience extremes and that’s working for me in a way and we’re telling people the wrong thing by saying, “Do yoga, eat organic, try to meditate for sixteen hours a day,” and all this stuff when we should have something like the antidote to yoga. There should be a class where you learn to fidget, hold multiple thoughts in your head at once, have a jackhammer going and some techno music, a baby crying and you’re trying to do the SAT. 

To me, that’s a valuable skill to learn. I’m trying to do a different thing. I’m curious because I used Focus@Will app for a bit, but I don’t think I did it right. Maybe partly because I’m not looking for the thing that was built for. The same toolkit you’re using to help someone focus, calm down, and not be anxious, you ought to be able to flip that because I know when I’m sitting down I want to put on The Crystal Method. I want to feel the adrenaline in my headphones. That’s what I’m after and you guys could do that too.

Is there a market for that? 

John: There have been almost two million people through the Focus@Will system. We’ve got many users who have been around for years and bought lifetime accounts. We have a constant feedback loop where we’re a