You're listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I'm your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week, we decode the tools, tactics, and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body, and performance span, things you won't find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting-edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you'll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel, and perform at your best across all of life's domains. Here's a strange idea. Your voice might be a health signal that you can't fake and you can't turn off. My guest today built a platform where you talk for 30 seconds into your phone and it reads your voice like a window into your nervous system and a whole lot more. Then it tells you what's off and what you can do about it.

No blood, no wearable. Alex Fredericks spent 20 years in music before this. He's dyslexic and he sees patterns other people miss. This one gets fascinating. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Nick. Appreciate it.

For someone who's just hearing about this for the first time, what is Tonewell and what happens when I record 30 seconds of my voice?

So Tonewell is a wellness company. We use voice as an analytic. So we take a 30-second sound clip, run it through our proprietary algorithm, extrapolate around 1,000 biomarkers, and deliver a prioritized wellness report to our customer in under 5 minutes.

Let's break that down. How do you detect 1,000 biomarkers from a 30-second clip of my voice?

So this is an important distinction here. So AI is our workflow. AI is not the proprietary algorithm of our business. Our business is predicated on about 160,000 points of information database. So it is a static database that is scalable, defendable, and auditable. And what I mean by defendable and auditable are 1 equals 1. If I input 1 thing, I get 1 out. It's defendable because it is mapped against preexisting, well-established markers of what frequency, hertz, and the voice modulation is attuned to, what it is mapped to.

So what we are doing is essentially running a database faster than you can think, and we are looking for the outliers. So your voice carries your nervous system and your physiology at all times. What we do is we use modern technology, your phone, the ubiquitousness of your phone. The microphone in your phone is as good as the microphone that the Beatles used at Abbey Road by this point. So you speaking creates a signal. That signal, that waveform is converted using something called FFT, which stands for Fast Fourier Transfer, into zeros and ones. It's actually how we are having this conversation right now. It's not that my voice is going through my computer and bouncing through the satellites and then coming back to you in Oregon and going through your speakers, is that it's quickly converted into zeros and ones.

It moves very fast. And then put back together. So that's what we're doing initially. We're breaking it down into a pattern of zeros and ones, and that is then looked at by our algorithm using 160,000 points of overlay. And then it's saying it's looking for the outliers. So for example, the photo over my shoulder of the guy with his torso. Okay. If I walked into my room and that wasn't there, it'd be easier for me to say, where is that?

Yeah.

Than for me to walk in and do an accounting of everything that's in the room. Okay. So what we are really doing is we're breaking down the patterns with inside of your voice, which are your vibrato, your hertz. The hertz is literally the frequency, the breath, all of the parts and pieces. And then we're overlaying it with a database that correlates to minerals, vitamins, organs, hormones, and things of that nature. And then— Using that as an assessment and a tool, a tool that's making an analytical call on what it is. And then from there, we are making a prioritized wellness report that says, in the structures by which we are seeing our 8 categories. So of 160,000 things, you need to kind of organize them into what it would look like for the consumer.

So in our world, we, we look at energy, hydration, sleep, stress, inflammation, toxins, pathogens, mineral loads, hormones, and organs. Those are the big categories that we break everything down. So, once our analysis has happened, we say, okay, where do these things correlate to those groups that I just mentioned? And, in that, we deliver a report to people that is telling them what is going on with them in the time. Why I say it like that is this, voice is a topical opportunity right now. It's happening now. As opposed to other forms of diagnostics, which I don't use that word for us. We're an analytic. I'm telling you what's going on.

A diagnostic tells you what's wrong. Hey doc, I don't feel well. Alex, make an appointment. I'll see you next week. Hey doc, this is what's happening. Alex will send you out for blood. Make an appointment. That's the week after that.

Go in and get your blood drawn. The blood is drawn. They send it to the lab. The lab sends the results to the doctor. The doctor gives you a phone call and says, this is what we are diagnosing is going on with you. This is what is wrong. Here's the protocol. Completely valid opportunity.

Here's the thing. Today in this conversation, it's literally Monday. So what can I do on Monday? Nothing if it's about blood, because I have to go through that process to have it Looked at as opposed to your voice, which we're having a conversation, so I'm using it. If I were to speak into my phone, the ubiquitousness of the thing that we all have attached to us at all time, and it could be analyzed in a true format, meaning 1 equals 1, and then I can have a derived outcome of somebody saying, this is what we see is going on with you, and these are the steps that you can choose to have a better opportunity, feel better, High, higher energy, better sleep, less stress. That's really what ToneWell is about. It's about helping you build a better relationship with yourself by the empowerment of your own voice.

So you guys have figured out what changes in the voice correspond to what outcomes, say perhaps the hertz of my voice is different. And then as a result, you're able to determine this means that I could use some extra magnesium.

Yes. So very fortunately for us, to be honest, we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Okay? So frequency is not a new science by any stretch of the imagination. You can go back to Wilhelm Reich or Royal Rife, or you can go to Nikola Tesla, or you can then move into the instrumentation of science, meaning like who makes the MRI or the CAT scan or the CT scan or the neurofeedback machines. Those are all frequency, or there are companies that do this on the B2B. We're a B2C, meaning we're dealing with the consumer and not the qualifier of the business-to-business. There are companies that are coming out of Stanford and MIT and NYU that are also using voice as an analytic. And then there are like the Mayo Clinic since 2015, the paper they published uses voice for cardiology.

So I say that all to say, There is an agreed-upon map of what is the human physiology, nervous system, and operating system, and how that is affected by frequency and what frequency means. So, if you ever used a PEMF machine as a modality because you hurt yourself, well, that's using a specific waveform with specific bundled frequency on it to help you. There's a difference between your meniscus or dealing with Lyme disease, or it's a new moon and I'm in a weird mood, right? Those are different opportunities. So they call for different shapes of wave and different bundles of frequency. Or if you heard about something like the Havana Syndrome from years ago in Cuba, they presupposed that the embassy was being bombarded with a low-frequency resonance.

Wow.

That was making people sick. So again, frequency. If you've ever said to somebody, that didn't resonate with me, what you are really saying is that didn't move me. And why that is, is because if you've ever listened to a piece of music in the converse and had the hair on your arm stand up, it's literally a resonant factor, meaning it's moving your cells in a way that something physically is happening. It has moved you. So we use frequency every day when we talk about it. Again, we're on— I'm on a laptop connected to nothing. We're having a real-time conversation, which means that the frequency that is hosting the video and the audio, it already exists.

It's a matter of Riverside that we're recording this on, using that and amplifying the signal and translating the zeros and ones so that the photo comes out at the same time the voice comes out. So since we all accept that to be happening, so does the other side of it. Your voice box sitting right here is right in front of your brainstem, right behind it, right next to your vagus nerve right there. That's your nervous system right above your heart, right above your lungs. Pretty arguably an important part of your body. And since the voice box literally is kind of like a If you would imagine a reed on a saxophone that's just vibrating like this, that's what's happening because the resonator that is your chest and the nervous system that's creating the impulse is making this thing twitch. So the voice is coming out. That is a waveform and frequency.

It's why when you get mad, your voice might go up, or when you don't feel well, it might go down in timbre. meaning I'm very deep voiced right now. Those things are because there's a physical thing in your body happening and it's being created by the sound that's coming out. So we have been very fortunate of 100 years of peer reviews and white papers and clinical studies out of the Harvards and the Hopkins and the Mayos. And that's what I mean by standing on the shoulders of giants. It's not that we discovered Anything, is that we saw an opportunity as a company to use technology to its best suited purpose for the consumer, which is you got a phone, it's got a great microphone. We're able to build our static database because we can prove that 1 equals 1 based upon all of this work that's existing and our team of science, of course.

Mm-hmm.

And then everything becomes a process like how fast does it get to the cloud? How fast does it come back from the cloud? What's the database that's managing it? All of those, you know, modern skillset things that one would have in having a, you know, call it remote business.

You've mentioned timbre, volume is obvious, breathiness, breathiness. There's a bunch of other variables. I think when the average person thinks about speech, my voice right now, I'm not thinking about all the different possibilities that it can transmit information through. What are some of the variables when it comes to speech that you guys are able to look at and to determine that this isn't just the words that I'm speaking, but it's everything around that as well?

So interestingly enough, the actual words are the least important part of it, which is why you know, a head nod is universal. Do you know what I mean? Like, you know what I just said, right? Hey, what's up? Right?

Yeah.

Because words are hard to translate. You got the whole Babel, Tower of Babel thing going on there, right? But there are things that you don't hear. It's like, you know, that a cat and a dog have better hearing than you, right? A dog can apparently hear something from a mile and a half away. I'm lucky if I can hear my wife in the other room. But I say that to say, There's the inaudible of your speech. Like the earth vibrates at 7.83 hertz. You don't hear that. I don't hear that, but it's happening.

Mm-hmm.

So your voice also has subtones that you don't hear. It's the implied tone, which is why you might say to somebody, you better watch your tone when you talk to me. Right? It's the implied tone, not the, I heard that tone. So there's that. But there's also the, as I said earlier, the outliers, which is really what we look at. So where something should be versus where something is. So I meant to throw the pitch, but I was off by 2 degrees. That's no big deal for 20 feet.

If I was throwing that pitch over 30 feet, I would be off. And if I was throwing it for 300 feet, I would be really off. So in our world, when you're talking about your organs or your hormones or your aurora, the degree of off matters by magnitude. One of the things that people discount a lot is that everything has a resonant frequency. Everything. It's how if I'm an opera singer, I can break a crystal glass. It is not the volume. It is not how loud I can do it.

It's the fact that I've gotten the pitch of the note. properly. And that pitch is specific to that crystal. The next crystal might be a little bit different in its composite. So that pitch needs to be right. And that play right there is anything. You can break a glass as much as I can. If you've ever had a kidney stone or something and you've been put into one of those sonar baths, that they're actually sending frequency through there to break up the calcium deposit so that you can— You can pass it easier.

So, these again are things that we discount that we engage with every day. So, what we're doing is we're, again, we're taking the totality of what people are doing, the deliverable, the analytic. So, my technology actually does come out of a conversation that I had with an FDA-approved PEMF device company a couple years ago that specialized in autoimmune disease. Crohn's disease and Lyme disease, and they were FDA approved. And the conversation went very simply, this is amazing. You're delivering a specific waveform with a specific frequency to help people with autoimmune disease, and your same device is being used for new moon ceremonies as much as meniscus tears. How? And their answer was, oh, well, we've learned how to change the waveform for where we're talking to the body. Because If you've ever done PEMF, a lot of them are what I call amplitude machines.

They just try to hit you as hard as you can. You feel like you're getting a shock. Well, that's actually because your body will begin to tune out a waveform. I don't need it. Thank you. Right. It doesn't need that modality. So if you can change the waveform, you keep it a little confused and you can keep getting through.

And that's a nice gentle way to do it. So in that conversation, I simply, because I come out of the music business, And when I first started making records in the very early '90s, I would mix an album and there'd be an oscilloscope on the mix console. So you'd have an XY axis and this infinity symbol doing this. And when it was fuzzy, you would say something is out of phase.

Mm-hmm.

And you would start at the very bottom of your stack, which would, you know, 82 hertz or what have you, and work your way all the way to the top using what are called gates and limiters. A gate is something that stays closed until it opens, and a limiter is exactly that. It limits. And then when it was a— the signal was nice and clear and it was a good signal, you would say, great, I can move on. Because you knew that that sound would translate from the smallest speaker to the stadium speaker and it would be true. It wouldn't break up. It wouldn't fight with itself. So the same thing is true in your signal path.

Meaning like I'm speaking and if something is fighting with itself or it's not where it's supposed to be, it's an outlier. It's deviant from the mean. It should be here, but it's over here. Doesn't matter in this small category, but it does when I get onto a bigger scale. So something that's crunchy in a little tiny speaker, who cares? Oh, you're going to care when you put that on a stadium speaker and it's ripping people's heads off. You know what I mean? So that is baked into what your voice does. So we look at a myriad of factors that really come down to— some of them are the subtones, the things you don't hear. Some of them are where the breath is.

So there should be a space there, but it's buttressing.

Yeah.

Something else is leaking in there. Some of it is the tonality. Is it sharp? Is it pitched? For example, tonality is important. I'm in my 50s. I was raised on television. It was called the cathode ray tube. The big ones, they were heavy. That is a C2 by a note, meaning go to the middle of the keyboard, the second C, not C1, but the second C, C2.

That is a really nice warm note. Beautiful, pleasant. You can fall asleep to that note. Your phone is a C8. So go 8 octaves that direction towards the last key that is super sharp and really annoying. But that's what your phone resonates on. It's why we have anxiety of leaving them behind because it's programmed you by tonality.

Mm-hmm.

C8 sharp, anxiety-driven. And the screen that is blue, which didn't need to be blue light by any means, it could have been yellow very easily. It gives you that fear, that anxiety. What did I miss? Why did I need to check social media again? I literally just put the phone down. Why did I? Because that register was put there because of frequency, because of the tone, because of the way that the light emanates behind it. So again, the converse could be true, meaning like you can use your voice as an analytic. It has all of your information coming out. If you are a New Testament person, the Book of John, the first line is, in the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was God.

That actually means that the universe was spoken into creation. The good Lord didn't come off the mountain and toil with his hands. He created it by voice and water, and then he named the animals. This is things, again, that we accept in our— mythos in our story, but we've just excluded ourselves from them.

Yeah. So now I'm wondering, as we're having this conversation, though, will certainly be outliers in my voice and in your voice as we progress. And perhaps it's correlated with intrigue, surprise, whatever I'm feeling internally, you're feeling internally. If you were to analyze the whole conversation, which I'm sure There will be systems that can analyze entire full-length interviews in the future if it doesn't already exist, but would you be able to get any information out of that? Of course, you'll see variations from moment to moment, but isn't that what you'd expect in the course of a conversation?

Yes. So we as Tonewell are not in that business. However, there are a couple voice companies that are in that business. There's a wonderful voice company called Canary Voice, Canary Health.

Excuse me. Yep.

And they are for older set people and they're baked into televisions. So it's kind of the new version of I've fallen and I can't get up. I don't know how old your listenership is, but that's like Grandma fell down and nobody's there to take care of her. So she used to lift something called Life Alert and there's this little bracelet and they could talk. Fine. That has now moved into the television set because there's a difference between Grandma fell down, she's okay, but we have to send somebody to help her, Versus grandma had a stroke, different. And Canary Health does that for older set people baked in television sets using voice. 'Cause all I have to say is, help me, and they can tell what's going on.

There's another company out of MIT called Sonde Health, S-O-N-D-E, Sonde Health, that actually is a qualifier. So you're a big corporation XYZ and you're doing billion-dollar trades, and I don't, I gotta know if Alex is crazy or not. So Alex, you gotta talk into this thing and, and what your score is, is your level of— that's not where we are. There are EQ companies, people that use it for literally like, what is somebody's emotional state? That's not what we do. It's not our business. Our business is, is in the wellbeing side of things. I want you to live a better life, have a better sense of wellbeing, be more fulfilled. But voice is very well proven.

Because of how topical it is. So to your question and point, yes, it will change. Your baseline doesn't change. So I was saying to somebody earlier, and I don't mean this literally, just because you got into an argument with somebody doesn't mean that you might be deficient in vitamin K.

Okay.

However, if you're deficient in vitamin K, you might be more irritable. 2 things can be true. Right now, don't hold me to the vitamin K part. I'm using it as the example. But if that's your baseline, that will affect how you show up in the world, what your energy is, what your hydration is, what your sleep is, what your inflammation is. And that doesn't change. What could change are some of your emotional values. So things like your adrenaline or the, you know, the things that we know spike, like when I get into an argument, And I'm really heated about something.

Well, your mind and your body create endorphins, and those endorphins clearly change. But my vitamin D probably isn't going to change. My manganese level isn't going to change. So, there's a bit of stasis. This is always going to be true. And then, there's a bit of the moment. For example, I would highly suggest going before a blood test, you don't eat 5 bananas. You know what I mean? Before a, a urine test, though, you might want to or might not want to, I suggest you don't drink a cup of vinegar.

You know what I mean? Like that, those things have to be held accountable across anything that you do. The most true test, and I mean this genuinely, is your hair follicle because of how long the strand of DNA is connected to that, which is why like real drug tests pull your hair.

Yeah. Well, I'm thinking now through what you're saying about like the idea of being able to detect issues in real time. Say, you mentioned different vitamins, vitamin K, but what about vitamins that are actually depleted by stress? Something like, I mean, the phenomenon is called nutrient burn. Magnesium is one that is affected by nutrient burn. So, you could plausibly, I don't know the magnitude of effect, but potentially see a difference in someone's magnesium status before and after a fight if it's a large enough fight.

Oh, 100%. There's no question in my mind. So like, I'm in my 50s, I do Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I mostly use ToneWell as my recovery app. I train 7 days a week and sometimes twice a day, even when my body's like, that wasn't the greatest idea. So I will go, I will do a ToneWell and it'll tell me what I'm deficient in, my minerals, my vitamins, my organs, my hormones. It can show me where my muscles are sore. It like, Because everything is connected, right? I'll give you a different example.

If you've ever seen a yoga poster or somebody sitting in the lotus pose and they're showing you the chakras and you recognize that the chakras are different colors, that's not by mistake. It's that—

Yeah.

Color has a frequency connected to it, as do your chakras. You will never get from the root chakra to the crown chakra unless you can open up the limiting gate That has you limited, which is why it's about inner focus so that you can harmonize all frequency words so you can harmonize with yourself and get that blockage open so you're not limited and you can move through your, your 7 chakras. Well, that's also the truth in the opposite, meaning like, as you just said, if I've had an incredibly strenuous, stressful day, My body is going to burn every reserve it can have. It's going to go through the manganese, and the magnesium, and the potassium, and the boron, and the zinc, and the copper. It's going to use it all because you're a machine. So, it's going to use the parts and pieces that it needs.

Uh-huh.

So, yes, that is true. From what I get at 7 o'clock in the morning, at 7 o'clock at night could be completely different. Based upon the day. But that's actually the point. As I said earlier, the point here is to help people build better relationships with themselves, which is why we built a contextual brain in what we call our intelligence concierge layer. So now I will introduce AI. So we, we've built a contextual and temporal time and space matters. When did somebody say this to me so that I can index it? It is nighttime versus morning.

Right.

And what are they saying so I can create facts around them? Like, oh, okay. Nick said this. Let me keep that in mind. He has a really stressful week. Today's Monday. He, he has, he's really stressed out cuz he has a huge presentation on Thursday. What can we do in the next 2 days to keep his stress level down, the cortisol level down, the sleep down, the inflammation, the digestion, so that whatever the meeting is on Thursday, has an outcome that's in his favor, all things being equal, the things you can control.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So that is really important in the voice. So when I get really emotional, I get this quiver, like a vibrato, we'll call it, like a Wurlitzer speaker, right? And that then actually affects the way that my body physically is reacting. It's a visceral thing I get. I've actually done a tone bowl at that moment. You're like, wow, this is, there's a, like, I feel it obviously, but there's also a, like a chemistry thing happening.

Yeah.

Which is why you're getting, I'm getting the shakes because my adrenaline is spiking or my cortisol's dropping, or there are multiple types of magnesium. And, you know, my glycinate is totally off the, off whack right now. We do, we work with a lot of women, 35 plus, that are going through hormonal changes. Right. And all things being equal, every woman's gonna go through it, but they're gonna go through it differently. Like you and your best friend aren't gonna have the exact same menopause. It just doesn't work that way. So, and one of the issues that we have, and we get this a lot from women, is like, you know, I can go to the doctor and I go to them all the time, but when I show up, I'm feeling perfectly well.

Or by the time I went to have the blood test, like—

Yeah.

All things being equal, I was okay that day. But here's an opportunity because your phone is next to you. It's just take a snapshot when it's happening. That's the real-time opportunity and why I'm like really like bullish on what we're doing. Because most people, when they don't feel well, don't have the opportunity to act on it then.

Right.

What is going on in you internally at the moment that something is off? So, I simply believe the world is drowning in data, yet people are coming up short on the most basic question, why don't I feel well? Why aren't I functioning well? I do everything. I track everything. I eat well. I clean proteins. I exercise. All of the markers that should be helping me feel well, but I still don't feel well. Well, if you don't know that your boron is off or your zinc is low or you know, maybe eat some more bitter herbs or you have the wrong enzymes, go like the things that you actually can over-the-counter address for yourself, then it doesn't, you know, sometimes it just doesn't matter. You can track everything.

You're still gonna come up with a sleep score. It's not necessarily like telling you that your melatonin is low or that your, you know, magnesium glycinate is off and your empathetic nervous system won't let you go to sleep. Right?

So, there's a couple problems that I see with blood tests. First, like, like you were mentioning, the time horizon of the test. Doesn't always match with what you want it to be. For example, perhaps I'm looking at an average score over the last couple months, 3 months, say like hemoglobin A1C. That doesn't tell me necessarily about my blood sugar right now. And conversely, you might have a very sensitive marker like your, say, hormone levels, and those get tanked after one bad night of sleep. So, you might be great 99% of the time, but then you slept poorly last night, And therefore, you don't actually know what's been going on internally. So, there's a spectrum.

On one side, you have biomarkers that change every second or millisecond down to extremely rapidly changing biomarkers. On the other end, you have things that are extremely stable and you can't necessarily see changes very fast. It might take 3 months, 6 months, 9 months to see a meaningful change. Where does the voice sit on that? It seems to me like it is more on the rapidly changing side?

So, I think it's a little bit of both. So, I look at us as a force multiplier. Okay? So, in my own personal life, I have H. pylori, Candida, and Epstein-Barr. When the 3 of those things fire off, I have chronic fatigue syndrome. If I were to walk into my general practitioner and start talking about chronic fatigue syndrome, don't get me wrong, they'll placate me, but there's not enough information. It's a syndrome, which means there's a bunch of things happening and I don't Let's do 30 tests, Alex. But if I walked in and said, hey man, my Candida is really out of whack right now, they could say to me, here's the protocol, take care of it.

Something as simple as oregano, or we're going to do a full detox, whatever the outcome might be. So there's that. There's how do I engage with myself better and be my own advocate into the world? I'll give you an example. If I'm a woman, And I'm dealing with thyroid issues and I'm looking at my hormone panel and they say, we're going to do a T1 test. That just actually tells you if your thyroid is on or not. A T4 test tells you if it's processing what it needs to. So, yeah, it's on is different than, yeah, it's on, but it's not processing what it has to. And you having that understanding allows you then to find the answer.

So, We are medically adjacent very purposely, and I genuinely mean this. We're not a diagnostic. It is not our job to tell you what's wrong with you. We're an analytic. That means we tell you what is going on with you. Now, here's the trick. If something is going on long enough and you choose not to do something about it, you can't complain when something is now wrong. So the trick in most sense of wellbeing and what health is, not the health system, but what health is, is that the sooner you can begin to get the alarm, the less that you need the fire department, so to speak, right? You can deal with it now because your body is a move-forward machine, right? So if you can, and we are not in this space, but if you can detect cancer stage 1, you don't get to stage 4.

But if you haven't paid attention to yourself, there's an incredible company out there called Thron. No affiliation. And what they are, a toilet sensor. Okay? Because like the number one cancer in men is prostate cancer, but prostate cancer can take up to 10 years to metastasize. And it starts with a basic fissure. So like, if you analyzed your poop and you saw the tiniest bit of blood in it today, you very well could avoid cancer 10 years from now. Mm-hmm. Because it just gets worse.

So that's the same thing across the board. So we are a bit of now, oh, I didn't know that was off. Let me fix that. I feel better. And we're a bit of Long form, because you are a Rube Goldberg machine and a chemistry experiment. So the boot to kick the ball, to push the ball over, to tickle the feather, to make the balloon pop, that's kind of what we all are. But it's predicated on the chemistry experiment that first needs to go right or wrong, depends upon which way you look at it. And that's where we can get involved with people.

We, we wanna help everybody make better choices, to have better habits, to feel better and better outcomes. And inside of that is the prophylactic, like the preventative, the, oh, I didn't know that. But if I, you know, like they tell you to keep your gas tank half full at all time because it's best for your car. How many people do that? Very few. And then how many people complain when they've run their engine all the way down and now like they've burnt out valves and—

Mm-hmm.

And you're like, but it literally says keep it half full, but nobody does it. Believe me. Like, that's kind of the point. But if you did that in your own body and you started to pay attention to the smaller things, they don't become bigger things, right? Like, then now there's genetics and environment and all of the things that you can't control, but the things that you can control, you either choose to or not. Like, I, I, we were talking before this and I said to you, like, my biggest competition isn't Oura or Eight Sleep or Whoop or Ultra UltraHuman, none of those. My biggest competitor is actually the person that doesn't want to know about themselves, that would rather just blissfully be ignorant about their life and complain about why it didn't happen as opposed to take charge of themselves and be like, oh. Like when I left, I was in the music business as we said, and when I left Sony in 2007, I literally stopped drinking soda because it used to be free. It was free in the commissary, even though I knew it wasn't good for me.

I was still drinking it. It was free. And as soon as I left, I stopped buying it because I knew it wasn't good for me and you weren't gonna get my dollar or whatever. And it's just a dollar, but it's not when you like, oh, I drank 5 of them a day or whatever the heck it is. And then 5 times a week. And then you're like, wow, that's a lot of soda. One. But as soon as I stopped drinking it, 2007.

I lost 15 pounds in like 3 weeks.

Mm-hmm.

And I said to myself, man, if it was that easy, what else can I do? And then I started eating better and cooking my own food and, and, and, and, and, right? Because that's actually how your body works. Your body wants to feel better. It wants more energy. It wants to be less sluggish. It want— it wants less inflammation, but it doesn't really have that pathway. So if you can create that for yourself. There you go. So for us, we're both very topical now.

It's Monday, 3 o'clock. I have a long week ahead of me. Let me plan out my next 2 days. Or it's Monday and I want to start the next 90 days. You know, my cells replicate every 10 days. My, you know, every couple weeks everything has regenerated itself. And by the third time of doing that, I want to Be better. Okay.

You don't go to the gym today and do your personal max on your first day. That's a goal down the road, but you have to go to the gym every day or else you're never going to bench whatever that number is that's in your head.

Alex, I looked into the research around the voice and vocal biomarkers. I want to say about 6 months ago, most of what I came across seemed like it was centered around dementia. Do you know why that is and why it isn't more widely adopted in Yes.

Because EQ has been the thing that has been pushed out first. Now, it's very funny. There are more companies that have died on the roadside trying to do EQ than not, because psychiatry is an exceedingly gatekept medicine. So that's really difficult. And I'll actually use a version in my world is like the Mayo Clinic in 2015 put out a paper about cardiology. And when you really read it past their point of why, Sorry, of how, it's why, because it's much faster for you to talk to me for 30 seconds than for me to roll all of those carts in here and get you hooked up. Same thing is true in like EQ. It's way easier for us just to have a conversation and me to shut up for 30 seconds and to capture your voice than it is for me to have you do all of these tests and try to draw blood.

And what if you're having a moment? And right, so there's, there was a lot funneled into that. And I would also say that one of the reasons that we're not seeking clinical is because every time that somebody publishes a white paper, my science team and I grab it. There's a lot of intellectual property that people don't want to share. I'm just going to say it that way, as opposed to the American Psychiatric Association is so stringent that you have to. If you don't publish, you don't. So, it's just disproportionate. But, I would say if you went to PubMed and did look at frequency as a viable voice marker frequency as a viable health indicator, there's a lot of papers published. And, if you went to our website, tonewell.co/science, we have plenty of science published there.

And, not just our findings, but, you know, this paper said that and this paper said that, that type of stuff.

Perfect. Yeah. Well, to me, a lot of the— I always look into the research and then I also like to actually experiment with these things myself because no matter how compelling the research is, if my own personal experience totally differs from it, then it makes me think twice about it. But, when I took my first ToneWell scan about 6 months ago at this point, I was rather surprised at the results that came back. And I was shocked that you could get that much information about my biology, my physiology from a voice clip. And on that scan itself, the first one I took, it said for me to take magnesium. And that was at a time when I hadn't supplemented magnesium in a long time. And I actually was looking for a magnesium supplement and I just had gotten one, but I hadn't started taking it yet.

And it said that that was a critical level priority for me to focus on. And then it also said to do something that I had ironically had just started doing right after that as well. And I had it on my to-do list regardless, and that was to do some hip and neck mobility-related work. And so those were both labeled as critical actions for me to do at that point. And then it also had a bunch of other stuff that made sense to me. And I was skeptical until I read that. And then that doesn't seem like it's just a generic thing that could apply to every person who takes The test?

No. So the number one comment we get, number one is, how did you know that? To which my reply every time is, we don't know anything. We are a translation layer. You are just telling us this and you're unaware that you're saying it. It's like if you ever, you know, watch body language experts, they're typically pretty correct, right? But you don't know that you have that tell every time you scratch your nose or fix your glasses or. Like we just don't, it's baked in. So you're not paying attention to the tells that you have. Your voice is the exact same thing, right?

Well, earlier when you were mentioning the different applications for this, I was wondering if there's a future, not too distant future, in which this technology, vocal abnormalities, are used as a lie detector of sorts.

So, you know, that's a really interesting thing. My answer to you is yes. They're already used that way. They've been used that way for a very long period of time. It's not necessarily as much of a lie per se as you would say this person is having— their stress just hopped through the roof. Now, here's the thing. Most of those things are not admissible because no kidding, I'm stressed. You're sitting here grilling me.

Right?

Yeah.

They're used as indicators and they have been for a period of time. So back in the PPE days, in the COVID era, what led me to the PEMF company actually was from a PPE conversation. I was working with large-form real estate holders because my background is in consumer goods and I still have a consulting business and that's what I've done forever. And I was working with large-form real estate holders That needed to identify their tenants. And there were 2 ways to identify their tenants. One, photo ID.

Okay.

So I have an ID of Nick. He's coming to the building. I can recognize him. I don't wanna use the word facial recognition cuz that has a wrong stigma to it, but I am technically recognizing your photo. It's not really that hard. I have your photo. You're standing in front of me. That's Nick.

I recognize his face. Bunk. But the second one actually was voice because voice, anything that everything has a resonant factor. However, anything organic has a number. So flu, all things aside here, that's what COVID is. A flu I can recognize because of the frequency it sits on. It's alive. It's a thing.

It, it exists. It's a pathogen. Okay. So what we were doing for people was installing these cameras that had voice sensors on them, and you would come up and they would rec— oh, that's Nick. And then you would talk, and if you were clear, doesn't have the— in the door you went.

Hmm.

Right? So these things have been used for a while now. That's already 6 years ago, or however, you know, so the permutations, like I was saying earlier, like Havana Syndrome, like somebody just didn't come up and be like, you know what we should do? Let's go try this out. No, we've been trying it out for a while and now we're gonna see what happens. So like all things, you know, there are very few things under the sun that are new, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's ha— so that it's interesting. So the science of what we do isn't new at all. It's the delivery system. It's the fact that now processors can do it fast enough. 30 seconds of speech isn't the problem. It's how long did it take the processor to run 160,000 overlay algorithm? Oh, 20 minutes, an hour, 5 hours a couple years ago. I'll get back to you in 3 days a decade ago. Now it's 25 seconds.

That 25 seconds in the cloud with a good webhook, you know, pull it out and go to the next thing. And what do I have to automate? An email? Okay, I'll use Postmark. That's not hard.

Oh.

I got to send you an SMS. Well, Twilio's a $38 billion company. They figured that out. It's the connective tissue of technology. It's not the idea of the science. The science has been proven since Wilhelm Reich has this amazing device. Well, he's very much dead. Had this amazing device called the orgone accumulator.

His notion of Vril or chi or prana.

Yeah.

He called orgone. And you would sit in this box and it was wool, aluminum, wood, wool, aluminum, wood. It was layers like a layer cake. And you would sit in it and you would regenerate your own aura. It's like the most woo-woo thing I could humanly explain. And I could keep explaining it and I'll sound crazier the deeper I go. Here's one thing. Hundreds of thousands of people used it and swore by it.

That's how he ended up in jail for tax evasion. 'Cause you know what? Can't have free energy, can we? Nope. Not a really good idea. Or Royal Rife.

Mm-hmm.

If you are on Instagram, you'll probably have these Royal Rife machines and it gives you a specific frequency. Totally valid. The ones out there are completely junk 'cause a good one's a couple thousand dollars, but the idea is completely valid. Somebody's sitting in a, in a, in you know, in a, in a prayer ceremony with somebody playing crystal bowls, totally valid unless their bowl is terrible, right?

Mm-hmm.

Like those things matter. So for us, like the science totally validated. It's the, how do you deliver it to the consumer in a way that's actionable? You know, like I, unless I could do this in under 5 minutes, like 10 minutes wasn't valid to me. If I couldn't get you off my app in a minute, I wasn't interested. So we're trying to work on a pilot program with the VA right now. And when they ask, you know, of the bajillion questions, why did we think we could do this? My answer was, 'cause I can do it in under a minute and I don't have to ask you any questions. Like, talk about a, like a group of people that have been asked a billion questions, prodded a million different ways. Like, here, man, it's in your pocket.

I'll send you an SMS. You talk for 30 seconds, say whatever you want. Nobody's actually gonna listen. Have a nice day. Right. And here, here's how you can feel better. Oh, I'll do that.

Yeah. Alex, what do your skeptical colleagues say about this? Why would there be pushback against this idea to begin with?

Well, so skepticism comes down to point of view, I think. So I was a philosophy major. Okay. I studied philosophy and history. I found a band in college and went on the road. I'd rather have been Jack Kerouac. You know what I mean? Like just on the road, existential. Here we go.

So I don't have an argument. I don't have a horse in that race. What I have is the ability, I've read a lot of white papers and I see a lot of people in my field and doing this and you're like, okay, I'll accept that to be true. Where people have a hard time is like we live in a petroleum world, right? So like your car doesn't really need to run on gasoline. It, Corn oil worked perfectly well. You don't really need to have your medicine made of petroleum. Herbs were perfectly good. So we're in a paradigm where people just accept, like you accept what you're shown, right? Or you listen to what you're told and that type stuff.

And I'm not knocking it. That's the real issue here is that the plausibility and the possibility don't always match. So it's plausible, But how do I know it's possible? How do I know you are the guys to do it? Now, there are a lot of charlatans. There are a lot of like, and I totally get it. Believe me, I've sold a lot of product in my life and not all of it was the best. Some of it was just product, you know, like a diet pill could also be an energy pill, right? And depends on what celebrity's on the COVID So I totally understand that. But the biggest pushback is I'm gonna say, and I said it to you earlier, it's people that don't want to actually know. It's not somebody that I can validate this for you.

Here, here's a free promo code. Go try it. Okay. And what happens when we're right? You think there was a magic trick? You think like I've been following you around and be like, oh my God, his left shoulder, his neck is out of whack. I have no idea. Right. The, the issue actually becomes because we are so We look for validation in authority. It's actually why, and not to totally go left again on the COVID thing, but it's why people are so mad at Fauci, to be honest with you.

It's because there was somebody that you were supposed to be able to accept the word of, and then you realized that he was lying the entire time. So then that questions everything else that you might want to know as well. And in my world, that's kind of what you're dealing with. You're dealing with the fact that people have been told, and blood is awesome. It's actually a great way to look at chemistry. Urine is really good for what's going through you right now. Swabs, great for DNA, like really to get to the root of your genomics. Awesome.

Hair, the best if you really, really, really wanna know about, no pun intended, the root of what's happening. But none of those are topical, like now topical. Mm-hmm. Now, but your voice, and we all know this, when I'm upset, it changes. When I don't feel well, it changes. When I'm, when I've just exhausted myself, it changes. So we know, we already know this. It's like when you get on the phone with your best friend and they say 2 words and you already know how they're feeling.

I know what I'm in for. Johnny's like in a, one of his moods again. And all he said was, hey, Alex. I know exactly what I'm about to get, right? So like, that's— it's just the— it's the plausibility and the possibility. We are living in the quantum age. We are no longer Newtonian. I am in my 50s. I used to have a phone attached to the wall with copper, and that copper had more copper.

The one in the wall, the thing I had to plug into it, and I had a— 100-foot extension cord so I could get to my room and close the door so nobody could hear my conversation, except for that my sister would pick up a phone in the other room.

Okay.

And I now have a phone that they tell me has more compute power than the spaceship. So if that's possible and we're having a real-time conversation, again, I'm on a laptop connected to nothing. In real time, then you should begin to accept what else could be possible. That's the biggest pushback. 'Cause I can, I can choke you with white papers and here's the science. Nobody reads them. Believe me. Like most people that say they read them, I send them to 'em and then they say thanks.

And then I ask them a question 'cause I've read them and I, and some of them aren't even dubious enough in their own intent. Sure. Just drop it in ChatGPT and say, what do I need to know? Like, go that route, be cheap. I don't care. Right. So that's the problem. It's just like, I don't want to know what I don't know. And I'm accepting what I've already got.

And, you know, that's, that's, it's difficult. It's, you know, it's why we accept what we, what we're given.

Yeah. And I like your point about if your friend calls you and they're in a bad mood, just from the same 2 words that they always use, you don't need any more information. You can already tell the exact state they're in. And I also think this is teaching us something about like human understanding and like perhaps abilities we used to have. I call it biofeedback amnesia. Like our body would give us signals, other people would give us signals. We used to be able to pick up on them. And that ability has shrunk over time because of the lack of necessity, I guess you could say.

Look, my business partner, my co-founder is a guy named Dr. Bear Walker. He's a double PhD. He has every board accolade you want. He happens to also be an Anishinaabe First Nation raised on reservation. And he is a true pioneer in bio-tracking machines, so much so that the one he built in the '80s is called the BioTracker because there wasn't one before. And what— and he's been using it for 40 years. Celebrities, heads of state, NFL, whatever.

And what it does is he uses a metal diode and he puts a metal diode in your left hand and you close your hand because you've now completed a circuit. Because his machine is sending frequency into the metal diode. And then with a black and red conductor in his other hand, he uses your right hand and essentially is reading the I Ching off your hand, the front, the back, the fingers, because those are meridian points that have also all been mapped out. And he can do a 32-system diagnosis, diagnostic of you.

Wow.

by you holding this and doing, and he's been doing it for 40 years and has flown all around the world to do it. And it's a bio tracker. It's literally that. It is. So when we came across this, he was actually my first phone call and he's like a brother and one of my best friends, but my business partner, cuz I needed validation, like everybody needs validation. And he said, yeah, Alex, you know my machine? I was like, of course. And he said, well, okay, it's the same premise, but I'm not, you're not sending the, you know, like he sends the frequency and then reads the output. So if I put in 3 and it comes out 7, you're hyper.

If I put in 3 and it comes out 1, you're deficient. Okay. Got that. And when we first did our voice and I got the raw data and it shows the actual frequencies, he looked at it and went, before he looked at what it correlated to and went, oh, that's the kidney. That's the this, that's the that. This is the, Epithymis. That's the— because they are, you know? So like that, you're talking about somebody that like has been practicing this for 40 years, but also comes from a tradition of, right? Like, I'm, I'm a silly person and like, I, I sing the Happy Cell Song to myself every day cuz like I wanna feel good, but it's actually just cuz it puts me in a good mood. I can't be in a bad mood after singing that song.

Right? And like, I hope it's doing something to my cells, but it actually just puts me in a good mood and that's good enough for me.

Hmm.

Right? Or like they tell you that you should hum for 20 to 30 seconds a day because it reset. That's not new. Somebody wasn't like, you know what? You should hum. No, it's like why Disney says whistle while you work because you're gonna be toiling in the mines. It wasn't a nice song, but you should try to put your mindset to something that doesn't destroy you as you're working your body. So again, it just comes back to like, I, and I totally agree with you. It's things that you have forgotten.

Hmm.

I watched this funny, because it was ironically funny, Instagram video a couple weeks ago where a guy said, name me 20 celebrities. And then he stopped and just sat there quiet. And you're naming them in your head. And they said, okay, name me 20 trees. Name me 20 birds. Name me 20 flowers. Oh, you can't. At some point, that was like what you had to do.

If you lived on a homestead 100 years ago, you knew every bird and whistle, right? And we've, we've lost that, right? It's why like making sourdough is like this thing now, because like you look at bread and you're like, why are there 35 ingredients in this thing? And I can make it with 3. I think I'm going back to making it with 3.

You know, well, Alex, we will start to wrap this one up. I will put a link that shows the most recent report I did of Tonewell in the show notes for this episode. If people want to check out Tonewell, where do you want to send them?

So we are tonewell.co, T-O-N-E-W-E-L-L.co. I am, if anybody wants to find me, I'm alex@tonewell.co. I answer every email that I think I've ever received in my life. So I'm happy to help share, point in a direction. And what I really do hope for people is a sense of wellbeing. We're living in really interesting days. And I think that the more you can become centered in your own self, the better we will all be making it through.

Beautiful. For the final question, what is one thing that you wish an interviewer would ask you that we haven't covered so far yet today?

I think the One question is like, why? Right? So like everybody needs to have an origin story, good, bad, or indifferent. And I can just tell you in my own life, like I can, I'm an outsider human being. It's like, it's why I said Jack Kerouac earlier. I meant it literally. Like I'm an existentialist on the road human being. If everybody was doing it, it was not something I wanted to do. I went into the music business 'cause it was like the closest thing to being a pirate that I could think of. Like it was in the '90s, like I had a roll of quarter and a map and you'd show up someplace and, you know, go about your life and then leave the next day to the next port of call.

So I just say that to say, like, as I got older and, you know, health insurance and wellness and trends and all of that stuff, it actually became super limiting for me, right? I, I'm married, I have children, I had mortgages and la la la la la. And I just, just looked at it and went, Well, there are all these trends and I don't know if they're true or not. And then there's all of these doctors that I could go to, but honestly, like 8 minutes talking to somebody that doesn't know me wasn't just me. It's just not me. I want to go to somebody when I'm informed and I'm looking for the specialist and I do my homework and I show up with my questions and this is what I'm looking to accomplish. So when I came across this technology, I recognized that I could find a sense of empowerment. Who is this? And I really think that like we live in a world that everybody is going with the flow, and that means you fall for anything. If you learn to flow with the go, that means you wait for your opportunity.

You are willing to be okay with standing in a storm until you see your opportunity and you go for it. And I really wish that for most people. So my origin story with Tonewell, I was not an entrepreneur before this. I've been an agent my whole life. Let me build that for you. But when I saw this, it actually resonated with me. Like, that's something that I could use in my life so that I have to put less authority and belief. And again, nothing against Western medicine.

I'm not that dude, but I was tired of being just shuffled on a conveyor belt without actually having a sense of who I was. So that to me is like, why would you have done this? Well, this is why I've risked a lot to do it. And running a startup isn't easy and all of those things, everything being equal, like you could have just stayed in the briar patch. But, you know, I really do believe in a sense of wellbeing, not wellness. Wellness is a sales category. Wellbeing is what you hope for people.

Right.

I hope that you're loved and fulfilled and have a sense of ambition and fulfillment. Like that, that's what you want for people and what I want for the generations behind me is like, I want them to actually have a better sense of wellbeing. And I think that we don't have it currently. So, that's my why. And I appreciate you letting me ask my own question.

Well, Alex, thanks for joining me on the podcast today.

Thanks, Nick. I appreciate you.

And thank you all for sharing your time, your energy, and your attention with us. Until next time, be an outlier. Thanks for tuning in to High Performance Longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who's ready to upgrade their healthspan. You can find all the episodes, show notes, and resources mentioned at outlier.com. Until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.