Ultrasound Vagus Nerve Stimulation Explained: Jon Hacker on Zenbud & Nervous System Tech

WELCOME TO EPISODE 298

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Freddie Kimmel (00:42)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Beautifully Broken Podcast. Today we're offering you a a beautiful conversation with my regional brother all the way from Rochester, New York, John Hacker. Welcome to the show.

Jon Hacker (00:54)
Happy to be here. You know, it's kind of crazy that we met each other in the same space and we both came from Rochester. I just don't Rochester's really not known for this sort of thing. I guess maybe you of our, right? Like with their like with their profile. but you know, it's it's kinda awesome to meet another person that understands what a garbage plate is out and about.

Freddie Kimmel (01:07)
know.

Yeah.

Truth be told, I'm I'm really between my little town was Clarendon, which is next to Holly High School, which is next to Brockport, SUNY Brockport. A lot of people know the SUNY system. But I'm kind of in between Rochester and Buffalo, but Rochester is where my dad had the Kimmel Company, which was a big H VAC mechanical engineering firm. And it's where my brother's KBK Drafting is located, right in Rochester, U New York. So I'm I'm very excited to do the show.

Jon Hacker (01:21)
Okay.

We're excited too. I mean like and that is part of the Greater Rochester area. If you look at it, though Greater Rochester area is basically all of Munroe County. So it's it's kinda like if you look at the greater New York City area, it just considers New Jersey as part of New York City. maybe that's maybe it's too broad of a reach there. But

Freddie Kimmel (02:02)
That's right. Well John, you have the perfect name

for somebody who is into health. John Hacker. Right?

Jon Hacker (02:08)
Born and raised,

my brother and father are computer scientists, man. Like, no joke, no joke. like my dad used to do like he moved jobs, but he used to do work with Harris and do a bunch of radio work back in the day. And my brother is doing more less not cybersecurity, sadly. That would that would be really cool. It'd be perfect. but he's doing a lot of work with algorithms right now and stock trading. So it's interesting.

Freddie Kimmel (02:12)
Come on.

Amazing. Amazing. Wha so what what drew you to work in the world of wellness, health, integrative technology?

Jon Hacker (02:44)
I so to be very frank with you, I wasn't drawn to work in the health and wellness world. I was drawn to work with the nervous system. And it so happened that that ended up in the health and wellness world, right? Originally, like right around when I was eleven, I started getting to one of those, you know, kind of like what's life about sort of thing, right? Like I saw how my dad went to work every single day, and it felt like there's no purpose to that, and it felt like there's no s shifts in that.

And so I made the executive decision to devote my life to something. I mean, like it was interesting. It was an interesting mindset back then. There's some interesting psychology behind that. we can dive in there if that's something useful. But in the end, I saw this really cool concept in an anime called virtual reality. Like vir it was just full dive virtual reality essentially, like fully immersing someone's senses. I think it spoke to the part of me that wanted a little bit of escapism back then. And so I said that's gonna be it.

Spent a very long time working on trying to understand how that would happen non-invasively. That was the presentation in the show. And very frankly, I I wasn't a very big fan of sticking stuff in your body that you're gonna leave there. And it seemed incredibly crude. And all the technology around reading and understanding your nervous system and your health had was been developing quite well. And you can even see some of the results of that today. Like, I mean, aura, whoop, if you want to go more neurofocused kernel, like we have a lot of great ways of measuring data.

That have integrated into our lives, like understanding our bodies, but not like our ways of interacting with it, precisely. And that's where I put my focus. And we started out actually pure med tech, and eventually we realized that that ecosystem is a little bit broken, very frankly. And so we moved towards the health and wellness sphere to provide technology to people that's still science-backed, still clinically researched, but you know, a little bit sooner, as in not in 40 years, which

Seems to be the trend.

Freddie Kimmel (04:41)
Yeah. Yeah. Talk to me about that eleven year old who developed a very mature worldview that you started

Jon Hacker (04:51)
I'm gonna

be very frank with you, Fred. I would not call that a mature worldview. it was broken in a number of different ways. like my mantra for those like from 11 to like eight, 1920, to be honest with you, stuck around for a while, was to end human suffering. Like that was what I was telling myself every day as I dove into these complicated, like, especially at start, like diving into the research, seeing people disagree each other was just crazy to me.

Like how could scientists disagree? Like they're researching the truth. how can they draw different conclusions based on similar data? But I I learned my lessons there over time. And you know, I just realistically I needed some sort of escape from my day-to-day. Like I dealt with a lot of intrusive thoughts with my OCD, and the only time I had the freedom to be anything, the only time I felt any relief from that constant cycle was when I was just

hundred percent focused on something. And I think that was part of what drove me that direction. Part of that was just not wanting to live the life that my parents did, very frankly. Like seeing how they operated day in, day out, and seeing frankly how miserable they were in that sort of lifestyle was not really inspiring to me to want to live that way. and so I made again the executive decision to do something and I chose that something.

Maybe it was kind of like, you know, fate or irony or reality, however you want to call it, that I ended up in the wellness circles where my last name seems decently well used. But who knows? I mean like the universe presents its pathways.

Freddie Kimmel (06:31)
Yeah. Yeah. Isn't it interesting as we approach the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of our country that that we are we we're in an American experiment of of capitalism, one could say unconscious capitalism. You mentioned the idea of a broken system within MedTech. Say more about that. What what what's broken to you?

Jon Hacker (06:54)
So one of the pieces was that there is, I'm not gonna call it a cult, but there's a expectation inside of academia at the very least, that you're going at it with a PhD or an MD. Right? So I actually started going to a lot of the conferences and events around like NANDs, INS, like these different neurotech events across the country, very young. Like I was starting to go there like 16, 17 years old. which I looked a lot older than my age, so

There's every free alcohol in those events, which they probably should have checked people on that, which was just its own thing. but there was a little bit of you can't innovate without A doing X amount of animal research, which a lot of that's already been done for a lot of the technologies in the space, but A here, B without having a government grant funded, and C without having a university that is the core of the technology, and D having that PhD in MD.

We work with PhDs and MGs and they can be incredible people, but it's a lie to say that you can't innovate in health tech without that degree. Like you can innovate in health tech without that degree. That you can totally do that. And people do that all the time. And if you actually look at where the real innovation comes from, a lot of times it's not from the labs. The labs are the ones that explore the base concept, but you have to build the reality out of that. And it seems like so purely on development side, there's a lot broken there.

And there's this expectation to waste a ton of money on development as in spin, you have to have three million dollars to build a prototype. No, you don't. That's not the atoms exist in reality. You can build something for practically nothing in real terms, in terms of the universe. That's one piece. And the other piece is like the incentives are highly misaligned across the board, and people end up getting punished if they work outside of those incentives, highly consistently. At least that's what I've seen and is what it seems. But

Definitely on development side, there is a lot that needs to be fixed.

Freddie Kimmel (08:54)
Yeah. And I would agree with you. I would say one area I have firsthand experience is is from going through cancer and having my lymphatic system resected and looking at the medical garments that are currently used for lymphatic flow. A lot of times i as a closed system that works together, they're still sending people home with like a single leg compression piece.

thinking that they're just gonna pump the fluid out of that one lymphedema leg like a swampy pond, not understanding that it works together. Like th the the innovation of Flopresso, what it does for full body lymphatic drainage, sh should be by design an effective outcome. That should be standard of care, but it won't be because you have to go through that design and it has to go through a med tech company and what is the insurance? I hear this all the time from people, this is the thing.

that my insurance will comp for me and it is it is indefensible how subpar it is. And that's where people are s stuck.

Jon Hacker (10:00)
Well

let's talk more about that, Freddie. Actually, so insurance itself and reimbursement. We talked a little bit about development. Some of that comes from my personal frustrations. Love it. Buffalo, you gotta love it. They get they get they get snowed in every year, man. Like they they I almost got stuck there once. we can like up for an event over in Buffalo. I almost got stuck there. They got some of my friends got stuck there for like two, three days. just 'cause of the amount of snow. But

Freddie Kimmel (10:04)
Yeah.

Buffaloes. I got a buffalo mug for everybody at home not watching this on video.

Every year.

Jon Hacker (10:31)
Anyways, like insurance and reimbursement is interesting in how it's really done. Like when you take a look at traditional med tech circles, you go to those traditional med tech events, and especially to those sort of startups and companies there, everything is around getting and achieving reimbursement. And then sales. It's not about efficacy of the technology, very frankly. It's about what's going to be defensible to an insurance company because they're your buyer. The patients aren't your buyer. And that's just really misaligned, to be honest with you.

Like there's some alignment in the fact that if insurance companies, if you have healthy people that are paying insurance companies and they don't get sick and the insurance companies don't have to pay for something, insurance companies are happier. So if it's a lower cost of treatment, they'll usually aim for it. But there's a lot of times where the incentive scheme doesn't work out really well because insurance companies are aiming to spend the least amount possible and still get their premium so that they make an in a positive return on their investment. That's the which is that's just that's how we built the system, right? And

Freddie Kimmel (11:23)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Jon Hacker (11:29)
Patients want to just feel better. They want to do the things that are necessary to heal themselves. And those incentive scanes sometimes work together, especially like with acute injuries. Sometimes it can work really well and sometimes they really diverge.

Freddie Kimmel (11:45)
Yeah. Yeah. And that the other thing I wanna name because we're in our physical working reality is is John is getting like a little pop on his microphone and I just wanna name that, that we're okay and I'm choosing I am so into this conversation right now. John, just take like a half inch back from your mic and see if the gain is still g if it pick I I I I think it would. I think it will half inch or an inch. I just wanna name that. But I I also wanna just say, you know what? Like if we were sitting in a loud

Jon Hacker (12:03)
Does does that work here, Freddie? Has that helped?

Freddie Kimmel (12:15)
crunchy diner on i in the middle of downtown Rochester and we're in garbage place and people are smoking and drinking. I guess you can't smoke in a in a restaurant, but when I grew up you could that we would still I personally would still be pulled into this conversation 'cause it's fascinating to me. So I deeply empathize right now with the broken system. And I'm gonna tell you what I've been on a soapbox for the last few days how disenfranchised disenfranchised I am.

With the, let's say, the self-starter, the longevity world, health optimization space, because within that space, with with devices going to market without studies, with no science, with no viability for a long term product, they're launching to market with a lot of claims around it. And con consumers right now, they know the legacy medical model is not working for long term care. It's clearly not delivering better health outcomes.

And many, many containers, w again, we could argue that, but also in this complimentary space where people are going off and doing it at home and buying hyperbaric chambers and you know, buying systems, you know, red light beds for their house based on these like extraordinary claims which th which the ROI a lot of times I would ch challenge. For me, it's like who is the person in front of you? It's gotta be about the person.

Because that person walks into a room or a clinic or a conversation with a unique biology, a unique background, you know, how are they breathing? How are they sleeping? What's on the end of the fork? These are things that we should be bringing into the conversation, I think, in a in a paradigm of soulful sales, which I'm really into. so so a lot of times I don't know if if this intervention or that, you know, vagus nerve stimulator or this way of of you know filtering or organizing your water is definitively like

better. but I gotta talk to you. I gotta talk to you as a person. And I do believe there is there are some major lifestyle things we can do to address a majority of the the chronic health conditions we we face in America. And for people that are beautifully broken and we're meeting them where they're at, they will do better with some type of technology. That could be a P EMF device, that could be a prescription for a prolonged fast

That could be a movement tracker. So I know you're getting your ten to twelve thousand steps and I know you're working within the right heart range. And in in this like right it's almost like a tornado of information, somewhere in the middle is your truth. Like John's truth is gonna be different than Freddie's on what our needs are. That is my soapbox for this morning. Sorry.

Jon Hacker (14:59)
No, I I find it interesting. I I'd like to actually dive into meeting people where where they are they're they're actually at, for example, right? It is well defined that at this point that lifestyle changes and improvements make a big difference on health outcomes long term. That's actually one of the biggest and well studied pieces of longevity medicine out there is if you're exercising consistently and getting good sleep, you see good outcomes.

Reality is that that most people are not going to exercise consistently and most people are not going to get good sleep. And that could be their fault or it could not be their fault. Reali the reality doesn't care in this situation. It doesn't matter if it's your fault or not. It doesn't matter if you can do the mind shit shit outfit or not. What matters is what you are going to do in your life moving forward. And meaning people where they at means building technology that meets them in their current routines without forcing a massive shift to habits that allows them to improve themselves.

Over time. Because I honestly, if self-help worked, right? Like if the self-help you have to shift your mindset, it's all in your head, made a difference, health problems wouldn't exist. As in, no one would have lifestyle problems, but we clearly do. And it's clearly not only thinking your way out of it. There's a physiological component to a lot of this. And it is our job as people trying to do what we can to help from our own health journeys, right?

To provide options that do not require extensive effort. Ideally, it should be as frictionless as a native as possible. If you look at the things that have worked, the things that people have actually adopted, it's the things that are not intrusive. It's a wristband or a ring, right? That's some of the highest adoption rates so far. and given that s I don't expect that trend to stop, to be honest with you.

Freddie Kimmel (16:41)
Yeah.

Yeah, I'm an optimist. I don't expect that trend to stop and I I think the way we are designed our like ancient branch of the nervous system, which is very reptilian in nature and will favor fear porn and, you know, being triggered because that's the part of the brain that really like that we're we're all about safety. We're all about survival, whether you want to have that in your cognition or not.

that that is part of your hardware to some degree. I don't see that changing because I don't think hardware changes that that that rate. It's really interesting. There are some things that have come in in the last two years which are definitively home runs. There's never been anything more effective at weight loss than a than the shot of of a GLP, a w a one, two, or a three, right? Like look at look at that wildfire. Look at that look at that wildfire and

Look at that incentive model. I want to just say this that like Seth Gooden talks about this, the the fallacy that it was human activism that saved the whales. He was like, It was electricity, you idiots. We had electricity. We didn't need whale blubber to keep lights on in your home, and that's why there are whales around. Otherwise we as a as a a predator, they would have been gone.

W an unconscious capitalist, they would have been gone from the planet forever. But luckily somebody invented the light bulb. So that you show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome is very true within the way the human mind operates, at least from my understanding.

Jon Hacker (18:22)
I mean, like you're also taking a look at macro versus micro, right? So on a micro level, you might be able to convince someone that hunting a whale that day isn't what they want to do. We're just using as an example, right? On a macro level, there's a hundred thousand other people that you would have to personally convince, each separately, not to do that thing. And it's incredibly difficult because even if it's il if you make it illegal, people still find ways to do something if it's not severely punished enough. And even if you severely punish it, people still find ways to do things as long as they're demand.

Freddie Kimmel (18:25)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jon Hacker (18:50)
So when you take a look at the macro level, just assume that humanity will take the outcome that benefits the individual as much as possible. So the most selfish action you can take a look at on the macro level is what will happen, because that will typically have best outcomes for the people that are taking those selfish outcomes, and those people will typically do better.

And if those people are doing better, then they're the ones that stick around. The ones that were do optimizing for more selfish act selfless actions will usually get out competed and they'll get driven off the marketplace. It's a more cynical perspective, but it seems by and large to work. That's the reason why if we take a look at the whale blubber versus electricity example, activism wasn't the driving factor. I I think you're right on that. It's not something I've directly researched, but it makes sense, intellectually speaking. it's a story like whether whether or not

Freddie Kimmel (19:35)
Yeah, it's a story I like that when I heard it makes a lot of sense

to me.

Jon Hacker (19:39)
Whether or not it's

base reality, I think it it does play out that you can typically judge human outcomes by what the most selfish action is, for self benefit. And also easy to see selfish actions, right? 'Cause like sometimes the the selfish action is the selfless action in the short term, right? Like doing actual good for people in turn means people will typically do good back for you over time. There is that, you know, give and take sort of thing that exists in the human psyche and

Freddie Kimmel (20:04)
Zig Ziggler, you

help you help enough people get what they want and you will get what you want. And I d I do find that to be true in my life.

Jon Hacker (20:13)
Yes. But it requires a certain long term mindset. I'm getting back to mindset and self-help. I mean, realistically, it does take a certain type of long term mindset, which I just think certain people are more optimized for than others. Like realistically, like if you're already thinking that sort of term, then you're it's probably right for you to act that way. If you're not thinking that sort of term, it might be very difficult to shift how your brain works. Like the people that I've met over time have not substantially changed their personality. They simply have changed their expression of their personality. Perhaps that's the only piece that I've seen shift in people.

Freddie Kimmel (20:19)
Ha ha ha

Jon Hacker (20:43)
So you're still the same person you were even as a kid, at least in my psychological model. I I d I don't think people really shift. And that's that's that can be okay.

Freddie Kimmel (20:52)
Yeah. Tell me about your tell me about your brain child. Tell me about Zen Bud.

Jon Hacker (20:59)
Sure.

So Zenbud is something called a vagus nerve stimulator. So for the audience, the vagus nerve is your tenth cranial nerve. It's when what a cranial nerve is, is just something that connects your brain and body, right? So this is one of the communication pathways between the brain, the sea of your consciousness, and the rest of your body, ensuring that information is flowing consistently. In particular, your vagus nerve has some rather important responsibilities. It's meant to keep you alive consistently. It's your steady state response, right?

And there's two responses your nervous system will activate. One is your steady state, which we is governed by the vagus nerve. And the other is something called your sympathetic or fight or flight state. I like to say survival, right? So you can think of your vagus nerve being responsible for your steady state or recover system, your fight or flight system or sympathetic state system being responsible for your survival state.

Typically you're meant to be in recover most of the time with very small periods of survival. If a bear's trying to eat you, you need to in survival. If a car's about to run you over, you need to be survival. Because your muscles will activate slightly faster and you'll be able to get out of that situation. But if you're in survival all the time, you're it's like literally just prioritizing to keep you alive. That's what your body's doing. If you're constantly are in that survival state, you're constantly that go, you can never let go or like relax even for a moment, really.

Like if you're always wired but tired, I mean, your body will optimize to survive on a consistent basis. It survived in that moment as opposed to over long term. So it's always sacrificing long-term health for that in-moment survival, for that in-moment readiness to escape the bear that's trying to eat you. Cause it you're telling your nervous system that there's a bear trying to eat you, or realistically your environment is.

Freddie Kimmel (22:42)
Say that one time, your nervous system will always choose short term survival.

Jon Hacker (22:48)
Yes. When it is in survival state, you'll always choose and optimize for survival in that moment. It's not gonna look at a week from now, it's not gonna look at a month from now, it's not gonna look at years from now. And the problem is, is there it seems to be that there's a lot of people that are stuck in the survival state for like ninety to ninety five percent of the time for years on end, if not even a hundred percent of the time. I mean, I was there, to be honest with you. The only way I could get any sort of break was just like hyperfixating on something.

and it's not healthy. I gotta be honest with you, when your body doesn't care about the present moment and it doesn't care about who you're gonna be in a year from now, it starts to it, frankly, a lot of systems start to degrade. Like a lot of the control systems your body need to feel safe and you need to be able to give them the time to recover in order to maintain cognitive performance, in order to maintain a decently high quality of life, in order to maintain the sort of muscle or the sort of body that you want.

If your body's telling itself that it doesn't have the leeway to put on muscle, if it doesn't have the leeway to grow and maintain, then it's just not going to. And I mean, like there's this is part of the reason why vagus nerve stimulation has been researched on a thousand different indications and has seen signals on them, is because it is a core system. I honestly, when I talk with people about the vagus nerve, they'll like to focus on the one thing that it's good at, right? And the one thing it's really meant for. It's not meant to do a thousand things under the sun. That's not what it is.

All it's doing is telling your body it's safe when you're stimulating the vagus nerve. And that's what Synbud does. It uses ultrasound to stimulate a branch that's located in the middle of your ear. that's part of the vagus nerve. And it's meant to be completely frictionless. It is literally just a headset. You can do it while listening to music, while listening to this, while listening to nothing. And there's no app, there's no subscription. You put it on, you plug it in.

And that's built because that's what I wanted, very frankly. it's 'cause what I wanted back in the day I didn't want to have deal with BS to try to do something to for me. I wanted to have control over my own nervous system, no one else. That's part of why it's dumb tech, but you know, that's the something.

Freddie Kimmel (24:49)
Okay.

I I I think this is really interesting and it and it solves a lot of issues for right now because I have John, I have twenty seven health apps from breath work to movement trackers to breath synchronizers to vitamin D measurement apps. The the the data tidal wave is is overwhelming. So I like that idea of dumb tech. Talk to me a little bit, and I've and I've used just for the audience, I've used

I've used Zen Bud six times and w all it is is a is a headset and if I plug it into my phone, it's working. I don't have to push start. I don't do anything. And I I notice that I would say there's a gentle after enough time, I know there's a treatment time, which I probably go beyond, there's a gentle warming in the ear, a s just a very subtle slight relaxation. I can feel a different tone in my nervous system.

But it is nice because I just plug it on and I can I can walk the puppy. I don't have to do anything extra. I'm not really logging sessions other than I'm trying to commit for moments in the day to use the the Zen bud as part of the time I use headphones. That could be at the gym, that could be writing my morning emails, that can be in front of the red light. So the integration has been really nice. I personally I need more I need more time to say, well here's how my physiology has has shifted.

And I want to, before we go on with Zen Bud, I want to talk about the vagus nerve because again, I've got other vagus nerve stimulators. You know, there's a company that was aggressively trying to get on the podcast called Pulsetto. It's a little necklace with electric diodes. I put a little gel on the diode, and I feel an actual direct electrical current that that stimulates part of my neck where where the vagus nerve should theor theoretically be wandering. What is the

And I and here's what I'll say. I have had no long term benefits within the data that I track from heart rate variability to sleep latency to HRV from that device, and I've had it for over two years. I do notice sometimes a boost in the stats, but I can't say the measurable impact has has lasted. And you know, there's some other things that I question about the physiology of the vagus nerve, i.e., from my understanding.

Yes, it goes from the brain to the body, but does the signaling of the vagus nerve is that a peripheral signal also coming from my hands and my feet and other is it what does that feed back loop look like?

Jon Hacker (27:41)
How run you through two separate things here, right? So to start, I think it makes good sense to go through the history of vagus nerve stimulation, not just the vagus nerve. And there's actually a long history to the entire concept of activating this nerve. It started with the implantables. there was implantables particularly around cluster migraine. Levinova is one of the forerunners here that you would put in your chest and it would wrap around a cervical branch. Cervical just means neck. Cervical branch of the vagus nerve.

Freddie Kimmel (27:43)
Yes.

Wow. Go on.

Jon Hacker (28:07)
Yeah, no, no, no,

no. And they found that it worked really well for treatment resistant depression, those invasive devices, and cholesterol migraines. And it was a last line treatment that companies like a billion-dollar company now, they're doing really well for themselves. last line treatment though, because it's highly, highly, highly invasive. And so the folks over at Electricor, extremely innovative folks, raised a ton of money to develop a system that could be used non-invasively. And what they said is, well, we know this branch of the vagus nerve that's been studied by the invasive guys.

runs around the neck. So what if we were to deposit a load of energy, electric shock, and the entire neck region just trying to hit it? Would we get similar effects? And your answer was yes. If you've deposited enough energy, which is above a certain threshold, I I'm not a big fan of some of the if you're doing the lower thresholds on the TrueVaga device, also run by electrical, like it's it's not what's supported by the data. It's the higher ones, like basically maxed out, which can be d uncomfortable for some people to be honest.

Freddie Kimmel (29:02)
It it feels

like an electric shock, hundred percent.

Jon Hacker (29:05)
It it does.

Well, and the thing is is Pulsetto came from Electricor. They what they did is they, and I'm not gonna get too details, but essentially Electricor and Pulsetto had a business relationship, and then Pulsetto started their own company, which was to remove having to hold it to your neck. Because you had to hold the electricor device to your neck for a significant period of time for it to start working. And that's that's fine. It was the first innovation really from the implantables. So much easier to use than implantables, still somewhat difficult to use for most people. The

Freddie Kimmel (29:11)
That's fine.

Jon Hacker (29:34)
Pulsetta device was I no longer have to hold it here, I can do other things down. Right? Like that was the main innovation space. They did tune down the intensity because a lot of people don't like having a large amount of energy deposited through the neck. So what you're feeling is even still lower intensity than what the original clinical research was on, which was very high voltage and very high current in order to get deep enough innervation for the vagus nerve. And imposition is also really crucial with any neck-based device, because if you're off, you're just not depositing the energy in the right location.

So keeping that consistent is really difficult too. So there's been some usability problems with those, but some of the that's where a lot of the non-invasive space started. And then we had some folks said, there's a prant in the ear. What if we targeted that? That seems a little bit closer to the surface of the skin and a little bit more isolated. And it only has branches going to the brain. There's a concept here that's has afferent branches to the brain, information from your body to your brain, and efferent, information from your brain out to the body.

On your neck, you have a both. You just have a ton of both, right? You've got information going up and information going down. Makes sense. In your ear, you'll have information going to your brain. Think about it. You can't just move the middle part of your ear. You maybe able move your ears, but you can't move the middle part of your ear. And that's critically important because realistically, at least some of the theory in the in the space is that that might be very important. Because we want to be influencing what the brain is doing. We want to be telling your brain that, hey,

It's time to re-regulate the system, not directly inputting signals to your body. Because we don't we don't know neural encoding right now. We don't understand what the signals in your body really mean. We have some very baseline guesses. So by giving information to your brain, helping it support its own regulation, at least at Zenbud, we thought that would be a much better approach. Because we could have built a neck device too. But we weren't as confident on the safety tolerability profile, especially with ultrasound, because you can get a lot deeper very easily. So you have to be careful.

And most recently, we came to the scene taking a different energy modality approach. Because everything to this point has essentially been electric shock, right? Whether on the neck or in the ear or otherwise, or invasively too. And the fact of the matter is that the non invasive devices, at least according to some of the leaders in the vagus nerve space, I'm really quoting the Feinstein Institute here, and Dr. Love Dr. Kevin Tracy's work, and he works with Set Point Medical, another invasive company doing work with inflamm inflammation.

and arthritis actually, which fascinating work. but our hypothesis was that electrical non-invasive is not only potentially difficult to use, but there's a very large misuse profile that's not being necessarily monitored outside of highly regulated clinical environments. Right? Like there's not a ton of that home studies with these sort of technologies that perform well because they perform really well in the clinics when you have someone monitoring and placing them properly.

But the moment you bring it home, which is where most people want to use these devices, is in the home setting, suddenly the electrical devices start to perform a lot worse. That's somewhat to be expected in general because of compliance, and somewhat to be expected because of placement. And so what we said is hey, let's take a different approach that can actually get the energy to where it needs to be without causing this massive discomfort. And that's why we chose ultrasound, and that's how we built Zenbud. I believe I actually covered both points there, because the other point I wanted to cover was the afferent efferent signaling.

Because it can be incredibly interesting. but when it comes to Pulsetto or any other neck based product, placement's critically important. Dosage is critically important. And very frankly, unless you're using the base electric core gamma core sapphire devices, not even their two various their actual medically prescribed brand, you're not getting the same dosage as a lot of the neckwork that's been shown to actually work. You're usually getting a lower dosage because it's painful at the right intensity.

Freddie Kimmel (33:19)
Yeah.

Yeah, so

so what have you seen in your users and your in your testing and your you had a theory, you had a working theory and then you put this into a product, like what are the results and and that drove you and and said to yourself, I gotta make this?

Jon Hacker (33:39)
So we started by taking a look at some different mental health indicators. A lot of those are regulated indications, but basically the same surveys that are used to prescribe the medications, right? The same ones that have been psychometrically regulated for a while. And we saw very, very good improvements there and very high tolerability. And that was when that was before we launched the series one of the product in May of last year. And once we were confident that it was tolerable.

And there was some evidence directionally, at the bare minimum, it was a lot more than that, of efficacy. We're like, okay, cool. This is something we can launch. Since then, we've had a number of independent institutions do head-to-heads, which has been really interesting to see. Efficacy is at least on part, and tolerability is much higher for ultrasound, which kind of makes intellectual sense. but it's really good to see play out. But what we've used internally, actually, to parameter set over time.

It's not heart rate. We do see a lowering of heart rate reported to us quite a bit from user base. It's not HRV, very frankly. We did run some work with that, but every wearable for HRV has a different HRV. like legitimately a different metric. They calculate differently, they use the math differently, it's not the same number. So it's it's really difficult to use in a clinical setting, or difficult to use in a data science setting, which is what you need to do with this sort of work to actually understand if it's working.

Freddie Kimmel (34:55)
Yeah.

Jon Hacker (35:04)
we use reaction time. That's what we use internally. that we use that as our source of truth because of a basically you can think about it from a top level perspective. When you take the load off the system and you allow the system to go into recovery for a little bit, you are able to start reacting faster. If you want to talk about brain circuits, it has to do with the locus Aurelius in the brainstem. But we see a very consistent shift with reaction time after around 10 minutes of use. This is a more immediate measure, not a long term measure. The mental health measures were after 10 minutes.

Freddie Kimmel (35:29)
After two months.

ten minutes, okay.

Jon Hacker (35:33)
Yeah,

so this was some this was source of truth has to be very quick. Otherwise it's not useful. Because we need to be able to change parameters in-house until we find something that works best, right? So we use reaction time as that measure. And what we do is we'd have people do 10 minutes with a device that admitted ultrasound and 10 minutes with a device that didn't, right? our sham and experimental. And we did this in 3030 groups, and we did this two times. We're doing this a third time shortly, in a more rigorous setting. we saw like a twenty-three millisecond improvement.

in the experimental group and a three millisecond proven in the control. And this is on a like base like average, like 300 milliseconds to I see a visual flash on a screen versus my finger presses it. And that seems small, but that's highly significant. And it shows good vagal innovation. At least our team believe that's the best measure you can really use. Because HRV is everyone calculates it differently and it's really annoying. It's really annoying to get people to use at home. And it's also there's so many things that impact it.

And heart rate, you could say it lowers, but also just someone thinking they're getting calmed down lowers heart rate, realistically. So they're both very messy, right? And so we wanted something that was solid. And that's why we chose reaction time as our source of truth. So yeah.

Freddie Kimmel (36:48)
I

appreciate that. I appreciate that. And I'm glad you're not using HR V because it is so subjective and I think we are in our infancy of understanding what it is. Right now it's it's constantly used really as a marketing term that we think a higher HRV for everybody is better. And and I there's a lot of people that I follow in the space that say, absolutely not. That's that's a bad way to look at it. It's subjective, it's it's more about that persons, again.

Who is the person sitting in front of you? It's like the alignment in their life than anything. It's not just like a meter on it's it's not something on the dash of your human car that we say high, high, good, low, bad. And so I'm having this conversation again and again with different people. And then the highly thing that I just want to reframe for the audience is that there are very few monitoring bands, apps, straps, sleeping systems that don't.

put you the raw data through some type of an algorithm or equation and then they're feeding you this fictitious number. The the only band I know right on the market right now is called Sensor Bio, which is not available to the plebeians. You can't buy it. It's it's a it's a it's a it's a company that says, hey, we don't want to take the data and put it through an algorithm. We want to use this band to have companies like Zenbud or

You know, Nano V or Flopresso and we want we want to give them that raw data so they can continue to improve their product. I say all that.

Jon Hacker (38:17)
Yeah.

I mean, like, realistically, that is data integrity and science. I mean, like we we could that could be a three hour discussion, Freddie. I gotta be honest with you. Like it gets decently complicated. I mean, long story short is you have to be confident what your source of truth is. That goes as a c consumer too, and as a user of these products. I think the only thing that's really been well validated, HR V side, based on our research and our literature review, and it seems scientific is actually moving away from the measure in total.

And don't get me wrong, we've been guilty of marketing around HRV2 because it works and people know about it. but the thing that we've actually seen makes any sort of impact is trend. Like, is it going up or is it going down? You might have an HRV of 16. Is it trending up or trending down over time? Maybe that's impactful, depending on how the company calculates it, which you don't have visibility on and you don't have access to the raw data. So it's it's still messy.

Freddie Kimmel (39:13)
Yeah. I I would and again, I would just be always suspect, and I'll give this as a something for everybody listening to to journal on or or think at home. Should a device one intervention a day should should that impact this like highly quantum level feedback loop? Like should that change that one number? It shouldn't, really. There's so many things that go into your

Your again, I'll go your alignment. It's like the quality of conversation, what's on the end of the fork, how did you sleep that night. All those things are uncontrolled in the general population. So I think we're we do need to find these these I love that love the way you said that, a a cleaner source of truth, you know, that w that we're saying this, and and can that be achieved more effectively with five minutes of a resonant breath? Which I would say for HRV, that's one of my faves, finding your resonant breath rate.

and checking back in with your body of which you are an active participant in that. This is really interesting to me also to explore and I and I'd love you to answer this because this is you would argue that this is essentially this is a passive therapeutic. I don't need to be with my Zen bud focusing on the betterment of my physiology while I'm doing this.

Jon Hacker (40:30)
100%. So I mean, like, one of our core philosophies here is that people have enough experiences. Right? Like, if you want an experience, you can go on YouTube, you can go on Spotify. You'll find great podcasts like this, or great listening tracks. Like the content era of humanity, this is like the content era of humanity in a lot of ways. And I don't understand how

We would provide content that's not better for you. And maybe the content you need is just getting your stuff done in the day. Like and if that's the content you need, then you need to be focusing on that. So no, this is meant to be very highly native and passive and frictionless. You put it on while you're doing whatever you want to do. don't use it with heavy machinery the first time, heaven's sakes. Use it once outside the heavy machinery environment, because some people their system has been so stressed for so long, they will fall asleep. So

They try your first time like at night for five minutes. It's it's a rarer thing, but some people do. but once you have an idea of how stimulation affects you in general, use it wherever you want, right? Like wherever makes sense in your daily life and wherever you can fit in that five, 10 minutes. And the real goal of this, the thing that's actually supported in Vegas Nerve Simulation 2, FYI, for both the invasives and the non-invasives, is consistent use. It's daily use. There seems to be an immediate effect in general, but that it

I call it acute, it immediate being as in within ten minutes. But that acute effect is not what has been most intriguing to the at least the scientific community. What's been most intriguing is the long term consequence to your benefit of training your system and helping revive that system in a lot of ways. And like that's why we built this to be frictionless in the first place. Was so that you can use it daily and so that you can actually get that benefit, as opposed to having to put gel on your neck. I mean, or in your ear.

Heaven's sakes.

Freddie Kimmel (42:24)
Yeah, that's really, really good point. You know, the other thing that I saw on your website, correct me if I'm wrong, and let me preface this question with again, there's a lot of choices for us to take to better improve our position from where we're stuck to where we wanna be. And and a lot of times people buy things and it doesn't work from their experience, right? It doesn't deliver I I wanted to jump out out of out of the chair, you know, from this supplement that was gonna cure the arthritis in my knees.

Jon Hacker (42:46)
Yeah, a hundred percent.

Freddie Kimmel (42:54)
But I yeah, I still can't go snowboarding, I still can't do this, still can't do that. So I feel like I've had a failed experiment. And then I've invested all this money into this thing, whatever it was. Whatever it was. There's actually these like compression pants. It has like little like wire mesh in them there you can crank it down and like you make like a false fascia. I mean, there's so much stuff out there, it's wild. I don't remember the name of those. But what happens when it doesn't go right? And I saw on your website that you guys do have some sort of a guarantee policy.

Jon Hacker (43:23)
Ninety days. So originally we were doing 30 days, like when we just got started out. but we saw that some people needed a week or two to get home with the device to actually spend time with it. And we wanted them to have like a full 30 days with it to really try out as part of their daily routine. So we're like, okay, well, you know what? It's part of our ethos anyway. If someone if this isn't working, you want people to send it back. It's a ninety day guarantee. If

For whatever reason you don't like it, you you don't even have to have a reason. You just send us an email and send it back. We give you back your money. It's done. Like we're not in this to like we've been encouraged sometimes by some business mentors to completely kill our return policy, but we have no plan on doing that. because we really want to give people access to these tools. And if it's not doing what it needs to do, then we want it back. so that we can figure out why, to be honest.

Freddie Kimmel (44:14)
Yeah. Yeah.

I I really appreciate that. I really appreciate that. There's a handful of companies that are currently in the space, and I mean expensive devices, above ten thousand dollars that are also offering a similar thing because they feel so confident with use with the proper adherence to the guidelines that they do get the results that they want like ninety percent of the time and I

I'm more and more I'm drawn to have those type of conversations with those devices because I do th again, I do think I think there's a handful of things, team, that are gonna you know, you've th very very high benefit with like some type of an oxidative therapy, a light therapy. I love pulse magnetics. I love a sauna. It's really hard to argue where a sauna doesn't fit in your life, be it you've got something where you don't want a heat core body temp. There's a few things out there I think everybody given the environmental burden should be doing some type of

lymphatic drainage or movement of that interstitial fluid right now. I I could go on and on. and and I think but aside from that, there's a lot of stuff out there that I would just tell you to pause and and and I go ahead and ask ask the company. It's like, hey, what happens when this doesn't work out? What do I do? What if am I stuck with this purchase? Because I think that's where the space is going and it's whatever that I'm sure you've looked at is Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Hacker (45:36)
I would say this on that, right? So sometimes

companies will advertise policies that they don't actually follow through on. And sometimes companies will advertise policies that have carve-outs. So my suggestion, first off, if you're comfortable with it and the AI overlords hasn't taken over yet, AI can do a really good job of summarizing people's feedback out in industry, out in the internet.

And the actual policy documents on the website for a company to see if that return policy is real. It might be worth taking a look at. And otherwise, just go to their settings page and find the return policy. Usually they're legally required to put it at the bottom of the page. So you'll see it. On our website, it's at the bottom.

Freddie Kimmel (46:07)
That's right.

Yeah.

The the other thing I want to speak to that I do like about this, it's not this way with every headset that that supports some level of or nervous system or reaction time, is that it really is one headset and I could share this with my partner. She doesn't need an app, she doesn't need like a data dashboard. it's kind of one of these things where I could see it going through a family where you could get away with one headset.

Jon Hacker (46:40)
Totally. I mean, and we've built it that way. I mean, like it is dumb tech, it's not gonna recognize that someone else using it. I mean, the only thing you would have to be like if someone's sanitary wise doesn't like sharing headphones, like some people, some people that's a thing, some people that is a thing. Alcohol wipes can usually get you most of the way there, sanitary wise, like base reality wise, but I understand. but past that, yeah. I mean, go ahead and share away. Like get give more people and more access.

Freddie Kimmel (47:04)
And are there are there consumables

are there consumables on the devices or things that are gonna wear out? Or replaceable.

Jon Hacker (47:08)
I would not have consumable or replaceable. So the silicone

pads, like those little blue buds, we call them the silicone buds, if you treat it right, they're not gonna break. Some people don't treat it right. Right? Some people are throwing the headset across the room and the headset itself will survive. But the most buds over time will wear down. but those they don't need to be replaced often, if at all. And if you're treating it right, they won't need to be.

Freddie Kimmel (47:29)
And and why is there a silicone

bud on the inside of that headset?

Jon Hacker (47:33)
Because we didn't want put gel in people's ears. That's why. that's what's actually actually emitting the ultrasound. And that's what needs to be in contact with the middle of your ear, not your ear canal, the middle of your ear. You'll feel a slight pressure above your ear canal when it's on properly. that actually is patent pending, and that's one of our core innervations of the company. Because like the series one, the original Zimbabwe that was released in May of last year. And we gave an upgrade opportunity for everyone that had that basically at COGS, because we wanted them to actually have the version that didn't have to do this.

but originally you had to just put gel in the middle of your ear, which was a disgusting experience. I gotta be honest with you. I was never a massive fan of it. Our customers are definitely weren't. Our patients, the people that were running through the clinical trials definitely weren't. it was kind of like a forced requirement while we were getting started out because we hadn't figured out how to bridge that air gap sufficiently yet. because ultrasound hates air. it hates differences in acoustic impedance. That just means it hates air. So you have to make sure that that there's no gap there. That's also why you have to feel that pressure above your ear canal for it it to be properly placed.

but we actually engineered around that and the silicone pads are what came from that. And also for any of our series one users, they they don't fall off anymore. 'Cause we used to have a silicone pad and gel because it was it was good time, good time. We cheers out to our series one users. You guys are awesome.

Freddie Kimmel (48:49)
I love

it. I love it. The road to the market. And then what's the investment on a pair of Zen buds?

Jon Hacker (48:56)
So MSRP is $459. past that, there's no app, there's no subscription, there's no other nonsense. It's that one price. And you can get a return within 90 days of it arriving, to be clear. Because some of our international shipping things, like that's that's one of my companies will get you, depending on how the policies ran. To be clear, they'll say you have 90 days from the day you purchase, and then they don't ship out for three weeks, and then they don't.

Freddie Kimmel (49:14)
all right.

Yeah.

Jon Hacker (49:24)
It doesn't arrive for four. Like that's that's a problem too. But yeah, no, 90 days from when it arrives and you start being able to use it.

Freddie Kimmel (49:27)
Yeah.

I love it. I love it. I've been thinking about starting like a distribution company called Integrity Medical and I'm only gonna carry things that that have like this. Like how do you how do you get something in somebody's hands where there's a low risk profile? You're you're sure it w we sure it has efficacy in most of the patient population and you know, it's it's gonna do what it says it does. Just just that.

Jon Hacker (49:52)
You know,

I I would love if someday like you could build a model where you don't even charge people to use the tech. They get to use it and then they pay if it works for them. But the logistical nightmare that would be for companies makes it unfeasible right now, sadly. But I think that's where things should go. That's kind of what insurance is supposed to be. It's not what it is. It's kinda what it's supposed to.

Freddie Kimmel (50:16)
Pay me pay me when

I'm only pay me pay me pay pay to keep me healthy.

Jon Hacker (50:21)
Yeah. Yeah.

Freddie Kimmel (50:22)
Not when I'm

sick. Yeah. I agree. I agree. That's amazing. What do you see for the future of the company? Is there anything you want to add? Is there a vision for the future of the product at some some point?

Jon Hacker (50:32)
Yeah. So I mean one piece is we want to give people we're gonna continue refining the core ultrasound tech over time. We're engineers. Of course we're gonna continue to refine it. there is a we want to eventually give people real time data, not actually EEG data, QEG data, on what their brain is doing while they're using the headset. I think that could be interesting and could be useful and it's one of the directions that we'll go with this in the midterm. That'll be probably be the series three.

But that's gonna be a bit, guys. Like that's not an easy to do that right is not easy. To do that wrong is super easy. You can just show random data. But to do that right is difficult. Past that, we have another other couple other products actually in pipeline outside of Vegas nerve stimulation. We are a ultrasound nervous system company, is the way think about it, right? Like we do work with other pieces of the nervous system. The Vegas nerve is not the only thing that needs love and care. It's one of the ones that oftentimes doesn't have it.

be honest, but it's not the only thing that needs love and care. So we're gonna continue chugging away and you know, helping people where we can.

Freddie Kimmel (51:40)
Beautiful. Beautiful. I know there is I think we have a code for Beautifully Broken on this if you guys want to use it in the cart. And it will be in the beautifullybroken dot world store as that as that evolves. I'm definitely I'm a fan of what you guys are doing. John, I'm a I'm a the second we met, I was like, Yep, hell yes. Let's get on it let's get on a let's get on a podcast and do a show. But I'm also excited to like come up to Rochester and and do some events and as you know, like the the

Jon Hacker (52:02)
Well.

Freddie Kimmel (52:10)
The silo of Austin, Texas is an anomaly. I i the things that I have access down here it does not exist in in upstate New York, and I would love to come up there and do some sort of event where we can collaborate a little bit.

Jon Hacker (52:22)
We need to build out Jefferson Swamp, man. Jefferson Swamp. That's where we are. We're around Jefferson Roads, Jefferson Swamp. it'll be the new Silicon Valley. That's what it's gonna be up here. We're gonna be helping people across the world. But you know, a little bit less nonsensical than S V.

Freddie Kimmel (52:39)
Yeah, I love that. That's exciting. That's exciting. Well, let's close it down for now. We will we will come back. You'll get a repaired microphone. I thank everybody for listening to this show. dude, no, listen. Life we're life is happening and we're recording it, and this is what I'm here for. It's really good conversations. You know, I celebrate you for following your intuition for

Jon Hacker (52:48)
Thank you for your patience on that man. I appreciate that. I I I need to figure out what's going on there.

Freddie Kimmel (53:06)
doing the Herculean task of bringing an idea to market. So I'm I'm proud of you as a fellow Rochestarian and I'm excited just to to keep the conversation going and and see where I can help.

Jon Hacker (53:19)
Awesome. Love it, man.

Freddie Kimmel (53:20)
Where do

people find Zenbud and you and what should they be reading and following and learning about their bodies?

Jon Hacker (53:26)
So at ZimbudHealth for all our socials. my socials, I actually opened socials. I I used to never do that. I just wasn't my thing as a kid. at John under dash T under dash hacker. I don't know if that'll those will go anywhere. and come visit our website at Zimbab.health. if you use the beautifully broken code in the description, you'll get fifteen percent off the Zimbud. So, you know, just trying to do so that's down to like three ninety from four fifty nine. So hopefully it ops out a little bit too.

Freddie Kimmel (53:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, great discount.

Jon Hacker (53:55)
Yeah, we're we do our best.

Freddie Kimmel (53:55)
Great discount. Yeah.

Jon Hacker (53:59)
and yeah, come free to say hi. We're we're still a small team, right? We're doing what we can to build tech that helps people. So always feel free to send us a message.

Freddie Kimmel (54:09)
Amazing. John, I will talk to you soon. We're gonna close it down for now. Everybody, thank you for listening and we will see ya on the next one. Big love.