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  • EvolutionFM Transcript: The Secret Dark Room Practice That Humanity Is Finally Read For (Ian Gardner)

EvolutionFM Transcript: The Secret Dark Room Practice That Humanity Is Finally Read For (Ian Gardner)

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or on your favorite podcast platform.

Ian Gardner is what happens when the path of the entrepreneur meets the path of the mystic. A successful tech founder and self described urban monk Ian shares how years of achievement led him to a deeper realization: the fulfillment we seek in the world can only be found within.

In this conversation Ian introduces one of the most mysterious consciousness practices on Earth: dark room retreats. Rooted in ancient spiritual traditions these retreats place participants in complete darkness for days at a time creating the conditions for profound healing, self inquiry and transformation.

We explore why boredom may actually be a gateway to freedom, how our thoughts reveal the hidden architecture of the subconscious and why Ian believes darkness offers a powerful path into expanded states of awareness. Ian also shares his ambitious vision to bring this once secret practice into the mainstream through technology and a global network of dark room centers.

If you've ever wondered what lies beyond meditation, psychedelics and personal development this conversation offers a fascinating glimpse into a frontier of consciousness that has remained hidden for centuries

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 1+ hour, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Scott Britton (00:00.812)

Ian, what's up brother?

Ian Gardner (00:02.377)

Just got over bronchitis after two weeks in the deeps of Mustang with the monks, the Buddhist and bun monks way out in that 13,000 feet. So I'm just back in back and fighting action.

Scott Britton (00:14.828)

Awesome. Awesome. We're definitely curious to learn a little bit more about that trip in this conversation. But, you know, I want to just start off by just sharing a little bit about my admiration for you. And then I want you to share a little bit about your background. You know, I think there's a lot of people out there who are getting on a consciousness journey waking up and they're they're trying to figure out, okay, like, how do I do this with genuine intent?

and like a level of seriousness and also thrive, thrive in the world, you know, like build companies, do cool stuff. And I honestly don't know of that many people who are holding both. And you're one of the people that I've identified who, I mean, I want to talk about your background, but like you've been really serious on your path. And you're also out there building companies and have had

Ian Gardner (00:50.45)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (01:12.694)

a lot of success. And, you know, I think it's awesome, man. I think it's incredible. And I think we need more people that are, you know, devout householders, if you will, out there doing the thing showing people that this way of living can be done.

Ian Gardner (01:17.033)

Thanks.

Ian Gardner (01:28.285)

Yeah. I I've I sort of come to call myself an urban monk because for a long time I wanted to be a monk. I went to India in 2001 to the Mahakumala in Allahabad with all the all the with all the Hindus to go look for Babaji and was going to go be a sadhu. But

I think early in my career when I started having some success, I observed that whenever I had some material corporate success, the excitement and the energy and the happiness and the joy would last for a couple of days.

And then I'd start feeling like, oh, I'm not doing enough. I got to work harder that that maybe that wasn't real or I was lucky or, know, they didn't know what they were doing when they promoted me or the rest of it. Or, then, you know, that sort of translated into the hot girlfriend or the motorcycles or the cars or the right apartment or the right, um, or the right stamps in my passport or the right graduate degrees or what have you. um, eventually I was like, I need to, I just got this intuitive nudge. was like, I need to think I need to learn to meditate.

and start doing yoga. And it was when I was in business school at UCLA. And so I started doing Vikram yoga super intensely, five or six days a week, two a day, vegan. was down to 195 now, was down to 150 pounds. And then I took the, I got initiated into Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation. And the first time I sat down and did that mantra, was like, boom.

And I was like, I just come home. This is where it is. That's like it felt so good. I sat for 20 minutes and over the course of that, that was the first step on the journey. And over the course of that journey, I realized that the happiness that I was looking for wasn't anywhere out here. It was in here. And the deeper I went in here, the happier I got out here. And so I kind of got addicted with it and eventually evolved my world.

Scott Britton (03:08.92)

Wow.

Ian Gardner (03:35.005)

view where for me personally, my metric for how successful I feel my life has been, I want to be successful in a couple of different domains. I want to be successful professionally and financially. I want to be successful physically and taking care of myself. I want to be successful spiritually in my spiritual achievement and understanding. And I want to be successful as a family man, as a father.

And so I systematically went through each of those different dimensions and very deliberately undertook efforts and work to further myself in each of those different directions to the point where I felt like I had a level of achievement and a quality of life and success that made me feel good and made me feel like I'd achieved what I wanted. so learning how to be a householder and how to do

very deep, often very challenging, very disruptive inner work was part of that journey.

Scott Britton (04:35.63)

love it, man. And I think I distinctly remember listening a conversation to you where, you know, this sounded like it might have been before you started studying Moodra Ashram. But you were like, Okay, like, I want to, I want to just like, stay up here with the masters in this, in this realm and meditate all day. And they were like, No, you're this isn't what your Dharma is, like, you got to go out and do stuff. And I'd love for you to share more about that.

Ian Gardner (05:03.11)

Yeah, was, I had rented a beach. I had rented a cottage by the beach in Ocean Beach in San Diego. I was working on a path called Echincar, which teaches a modality called soul travel.

It's a specific spiritual technique where you focus the attention in the third eye and then you move it up through the crown chakra and up into the spiritual worlds in full awareness. And then you can go to different temples and work with different teachers within that hierarchy and those spiritual worlds. And so I was managing this little cafe during the day because it was

pretty low friction, low brain power. And then I was meditating six or eight hours a day talking and taking teaching from the masters within this hierarchy and writing books about it. And I had a six book deal with Deepak Chopra's publisher and put one out and had the other ones in draft and working through it. And I had gotten within that path and tradition as far as I could go, I had hit the ceiling. And so, but I still felt like there was more for me to do.

And so I went to the hierarchy that I was working with and I said, look, I want to go.

just completely dedicate and focus myself to this. And they said, no, no, you've done that. You don't get to do that in this life. That's the old model. The new model with where the collective reality is and some of the cycles of time is that

Ian Gardner (06:32.08)

In the past, historically, it was darker times and the secret teachings and the wisdom and the light and the truth was kept in the monasteries where it was safeguarded and protected and shielded because it was such dark times. And those monastics were the servants of the light, the keepers of the light. They held those traditions and they passed it down mouth to ear and sometimes in written form.

But where we are now is all that wisdom from the monastery, all those secrets are coming from the sky to the street, from the monastery to the marketplace. And where we are in this cycle of time, the journey that we are in collectively is incorporating and embodying those esoteric principles into everyday life and living. And so their response to me was, your job is to go and live that.

as a truth, as an example, and help teach other professional Westerners who have your type of white guy, MBA, tech bro, finance dude background to like take all of that. I'm going to make as much money as I can and get the hottest wife that I can and the biggest house that I can and the fastest car that I can and translate that into an embodied spiritual living.

Scott Britton (07:33.1)

I can relate.

Ian Gardner (07:47.1)

for modern times and they said there are two teachers off on the planet that can help you with that journey. Go find one that can teach you about this very, very specific esoteric thing. And so I started searching and I found Mudra Ashram in Los Angeles and reached out and explained what's going on and then started on their path. So that was sort of how that journey happened.

Scott Britton (08:09.396)

amazing. And you know, I do want to highlight Mudra Ashram, which I actually been studying it partly inspired by you. What appeals appeals to you so much about that path. And I want to just give it a quick plug for anybody who might be curious about it.

Ian Gardner (08:26.023)

Well, know, the paths, think we call down what we need collectively for the next stage of our evolution, collectively. Right. So, you know, in the dark ages, you know, and earlier than that, you had sort of Christianity that came in and with the, you know, the rules of conduct kind of provided a civilizing.

civilizing effect for some of the chaos of those early times. And so now we're at a stage where we're ready to move beyond that. And we're calling in yoga, meditation, plant medicine, these Eastern modalities. But each of those paths are closed in the sense that

If you're a student of Buddhism, if you're a student of Ekenkar, if you're a student of Sufism or Islam or Judaism or pick your Islam, if you have the inner awareness opened on that path, you can only see the tracks and landmarks that are contained within that path. So it's like if you think about the journey to liberation as climbing up the mountain, each path has its own ladder going up the mountain.

And if you're on an ism ladder, you can't see any of the other ladders that are to your left or right because it's a closed path. You're not initiated. If you're initiated on the ism path, you're not initiated on the other ism path and you can't look in between. But the reality is, is that there's, you know, 188 paths up the mountain that are active. And the unique thing about Mudra Ashram

of all the ones that I've studied and evaluated is it's an open path. And what that means is that as you do the practices and techniques and you start to unfold and develop the awareness and go up, you can see all of the different paths of the mouth.

Ian Gardner (10:14.535)

And Mudra Ashram culminates in the final stages called Multiplane Mastery, where you develop a form on different paths so that you can minister and help people and bestow the light on different paths. So you could be a Mudra Ashram high initiate and you could administer in the inner worlds to

to Muslims, to Christians, to Jews, to Sufis, to Zen Buddhists, to Tibetan Buddhists, to Adriana Buddhists, to Bun students, to Sathma students, to Ekenkar students. And so...

In a world where we are divided based on which path we're on, which create blinders and view everybody else's enemies, right? If I'm Jewish, I'm the chosen son of God and everybody else isn't. If I'm Christian, there's one God and only one God and everybody else isn't in pick your ism.

This is a path that can unify and integrate all of the other paths in an experiential way where if you're not just taking it on faith, but you can actually see the other paths and landmarks going up the mountain and see where people are and provide service to them to help liberate them and move them forward on the path. I think.

You know, that is something that makes this path unique among all others. And I think also why it's been called forth in this time and place, particularly in California, to help integrate and connect all the other paths and reduce some of that friction as we all try to climb the mountain together.

Scott Britton (11:40.46)

Yeah, I mean, that's that's definitely something that was very compelling to me as I learned about it as well, where it was like, wow, like, you know, the highest rung of TM is not necessarily the same as the highest rung of wrench way of these other things. It's like different roads, right. And, and the notion that all potential potentialities would be accessible to you from a single unified metamot metapath, if you will.

That was like, whoa, okay, this is interesting. I wanna dig in here a little bit.

Ian Gardner (12:14.935)

Yeah, and it also has the most comprehensive map of the continuum consciousness of any path. So it's not like Christianity where you go and it's all faith based, right? You're just praying and hoping and maybe you have some kind of experience.

This is completely experiential so you can individually validate that you're making progress at each point. you do the technique, you move to the next point on the ladder, that point has these characteristics, you experience it personally and you go, okay, that's for real, I experienced it. And within the continuum of consciousness, which are strong like pearls on a string, within those are contained every state and stage conceivable and experienceable by a human and physical body.

And so as you work your way through it, you can experience the gamut of human realities that an embodied person can have and understand them in a very deep and fundamental way, which allows you when you're working in the world at large to tune into somebody and go, okay, that person is right here. This is their worldview. They think this because this is the reality of the place that they're in. And I can't expect them to be up here or down here because this is where they are.

and it enables you to meet people where they are on the journey and have much more effective and compassionate communication.

Scott Britton (13:35.95)

So let's let's switch gears to what you're up to now with dark rooms. And, you know, maybe to frame this up, but you mentioned that right now is like kind of a shift in what's happening in this in the cycle on this planet. And that, you know, there's new there's new technologies that are being brought into our awareness. I guess my question would be, you know, what like, I'd be curious to hear your perspective on that cycle. And then how did these dark rooms first get on your radar?

Ian Gardner (14:07.879)

Yeah, well, most of the great traditions have a map of cycles of time, right? And, you know, in the one that I think is probably the closest is the Hindu model of the yugas. The Buddhists have a model of time also, but in my experience exploring that, I find it to be a little bit elongated. And I think the Buddhists are, or the Hindus are probably a little closer to what's going on. But in those models, you have in the beginning of a cycle of time, you start sort of basically at top of the

then the cycles take you down all the way to the bottom of the ladder, which would be like the dark ages. And then you cycle back up as you learn things. And the whole point is designed to take a soul through that journey of all different human experience so that you season the soul and it gets experience and it has creative expression and all the rest of that. And so we sort of come all the way down and now we're starting to come back up.

And the culmination of that at the end of the last cycle is the transition collectively into an astral age. So right now we're in a physical age because we're in a world of duality. We have physical bodies. We live on a physical planet. But the astral realm is the next realm above this one, and it's non-dual, where literally you can think something or imagine it and it creates it as a reality, which is a very powerful capability to have.

And if if soul was not seasoned and matured, that ability could be abused and be quite destructive. Just like you don't give a teenager an F1 race car, you give them your old beat up Tahoe because you know that they're going to go bang around and drive over curbs and run into trees and do stupid shit. And so the whole point of this arc of this journey is for soul to get seasoned and gather wisdom so that by the end, when it's done, you give them the F1 car and they go do race laps.

And so collectively, we gather experience and knowledge and we move through that journey together. And so now as we're starting to come back up and head back up towards the Aspen age, then we're looking collectively for more sophisticated tools, deeper understanding, greater wisdom, greater awareness, greater facility, and all the rest of that, which is what you see in the West. Us, we're calling in.

Ian Gardner (16:24.357)

yoga and plant medicine and meditation and all the rest of that. And of all of those different practices, the dark room meditation is the most potent transformation. So like if you go do yoga, you can do Bhikram or you can do vinyasa or whatever you have, it'll clear out the body and it'll restructure things and it'll help you get peaceful.

And yoga was designed to prepare the body for meditation. So then you move into meditation and that helps you settle the mind and reduce the thoughts and learn to discipline your focus. But unless you are to have an advanced practice, it doesn't necessarily enable you to realize those higher states, which are in the non-dual inner worlds. Plant medicine, layered on top, provides a gateway to go experience on a short-term uncontrolled basis the reality of the inner world so you know that they're real and it's not faith-based.

And then the dark room and deep meditation teaches you to access those states under control and full consciousness. Because in the dark, after three days, your brain starts to produce DMT endogenously and it naturally opens the pineal gland and those gateways without any class four scheduled drugs, without any vomiting, without any of the rest of it in a totally natural way. If you're not prepared for that,

It can be really weird and scary. But if you are prepared for that, it can rapidly accelerate your development, which is why the Buddhists and the Sufis and the Christians have all kept it hidden in secret as part of the esoteric teachings for the last couple of thousand years. And so now, as we swing through the bottom of the curve and we're calling in these more advanced techniques to integrate that wisdom from the sky down into the street, from the monastery to the marketplace, this is one of those core practices that is is.

My purpose and journey is to make that modality available to Westerners in a safe way so they can receive the benefits without the risks of the downside of doing it properly.

Scott Britton (18:29.75)

And, you know, what what can someone expect who's maybe never heard of a darkroom retreat before like, what is the actual experience like?

Ian Gardner (18:41.403)

Well, if you've never done any meditation or yoga or anything, you shouldn't go do it.

But if you have a little bit of experience either with yoga or meditation or what have you and if you've done work in your subconscious like if you've done Byron Katie's work or pick your modality of trying to understand how the how the furniture is in the basement and rearranging it and cleaning it out then This is modality that can help for that and what happens is so usually you want to start with like five days So you go in on day one?

and you just relax, maybe get a massage, do some yoga, turn off all your digital devices, maybe read some spiritual material, go for a walk in the woods, just sit quietly. And then after dinner on day one, you turn off all the lights. So the room is completely dark and there's no light. There's no, you can't cheat. There's no light. There's not like pinholes. It's black, black, black. Like when you open your eyes and close your eyes, there's no difference. You can't tell any difference. And so you go to sleep that first night.

And then generally for the first 48 hours, people just sleep because 70 % of the stuff that goes on in our brain is through our visual cortex, stuff that we see. And when you turn that in that stuff, the input from your visual cortex overrides a lot of the other balancing functions in the body.

So visual cortex stimulation creates cortisol, it creates stress, it keeps us going, it keeps us amped up, and that prevents your body from sort of healing. That's why people in urban environments get stressed out and sick a lot.

Ian Gardner (20:23.109)

And so the first 40 hours you basically sleep and most of your biomarkers reset your testosterone, estrogen, melatonin, all your biochemistry resets. And this is also in a lot of people see the starts of the beginning of spontaneous healing because in the absence of external stimulation, your body does what it's designed to do, which is to heal itself. Like when you're sick and your doctor says, just stay in bed and sleep.

That's why he says that or she says that is because that's how your body heals. So then you go through sort of two days of sort of mostly sleeping. And then the third day, you're kind of out of that. Your body's reset, you're energized, you're stabilized, your balance. And day three to day four is when your brain starts to produce DMT. And you can do it one of two ways. You can just passively sit there and follow the breath and observe what the phenomenon that arises. This is just called.

passive observing or if you have a dedicated meditation practice, you can do your practice either on your own or with the support of your teacher or one of the teachers that you find through our platform. so generally as part of that three, four days, three and four, you will start to experience light phenomenon.

and images which is your awareness moving up out of the body and through the inner senses experiencing things that are going on in the spiritual world.

and it could be patterns of light, could be like sort kaleidoscope colors, it could be seeing your past lives, it could be viewing teachers, it could be seeing the Kundalini serpent coming up the column of light in the spine, it could be lots of different things. And some people also develop special spiritual powers called cities, like the ability to see into your body so you can see like your muscles, your tendons, your bones, your...

Ian Gardner (22:14.951)

blood vessels and cells and things like that. So it's highly individualistic depending on sort of how you're wired and what your dharma is and what you're working on. And so the day three, four, you stay in the dark and then in day five, you generally turn on the lights and come out in the morning, have a cup of tea, listen to the sound of the birds, the wind in the trees, spend some time in nature. And then it takes about 24 hours to...

to come back into your body and for that aperture of your senses, which has gotten so broad to narrow back down so that you can deal with normal physical life. Like on my last one, I did five days. came out in the morning and I was like, I'm a bad ass. I'm going to meditate. I'm going to drive down the hill and get a cup of coffee. no, I couldn't even turn the car on.

I had to go back up to the cabin, put my keys away, ask them to bring me some tea and to literally just sit there on the porch for five or six hours while reality, reality adjusts.

Scott Britton (23:14.402)

Wow, that's incredible. didn't realize, I mean, I knew that, I feel like I watched Aubrey Marcus's documentary at one point, Dark. I don't know if you've seen that. It's like his dark room experience. But that was the first time I heard of it. And I knew people like saw colors and stuff, but I didn't realize about, I didn't know that physical healing was a thing. And I also didn't know that the emergence of cities was the thing.

Ian Gardner (23:25.071)

Yeah.

Ian Gardner (23:40.711)

Yeah, that's how Joe Dispenza healed his spine in the dark. And that's how he developed that protocol, which he, which I have, know other people who have used it. There's a guy in Hawaii called Miracle King who went in in a wheelchair. He fell off a balcony, broke his spine, went in in a wheelchair, did Joe Dispenza's technique and walked out 40 days later.

Scott Britton (24:00.076)

no shit. Wow. That's so interesting. I did not know Joe dispense a dark room was how he healed himself. He kind of keeps that a little bit quiet relative to his meditations. He's slinging. Wow, that's so cool. And, you know, you guys are innovating on this space. And so like, I'd be curious to hear like, kind of like a comparison of like, let's say 10 years ago, somebody wanted to do this, what they had to what

Ian Gardner (24:09.861)

Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Scott Britton (24:28.952)

how they had to do it and now what you're bringing forth with the cryo.

Ian Gardner (24:33.413)

Yeah, so I became fascinated with this after studying the bun teachings and hearing it referenced in those teachings. And then I took the bun darkroom teachings over COVID from a teacher in the Bay Area and blacked out a room in my house and tried it for a couple of days because I was so fascinated with it. And it was hugely impactful. So I I want to bring this to a broader audience.

because I'm at the point in my journey and my career where really what I'm looking for is global impact on consciousness and in going through it and coming to the conclusion that this was the single most powerful modality for unlocking and transforming consciousness

I went to a couple of the monastics that I knew and I was like, said, what do you think about taking this to a broader audience? Cause it's been hidden and protected for years. Like they didn't, they wouldn't even give the teachings if you weren't an advanced student. And they all said the same thing. said, it's time. It's time to make this, the time to make this available. But the challenge with the darkroom.

experienced traditionally is that you were facilitated by a monk on property who gave you the teachings mouth to ear through the door every day. And so you were necessarily limited by the number of monks and the number of rooms. And so, you know, I'm a tech builder, I build scalable platforms. I'm like, that model does not scale. There's not enough monks and there's not enough rooms. And if you want to achieve global impact, you have to have people come, have the experience.

experience a change, go back to their community, have people notice that they've changed, get curious, ask them what they do, and then have them come in and have the same thing, rinse and repeat so you create a flywheel. So I went to a bunch of friends that run dark retreats, and there's not that many. Today there's maybe 10 locations in the West that you can go do this. Globally there's maybe 40 or 50 rooms where you can go do it. And I said, I asked these

Ian Gardner (26:33.851)

people who are running these retreat centers, said, have you ever facilitated somebody on the phone in a different location? And they all said, yeah, no problem, works just fine. I was like, okay, there's the unlock. So if I can build the rooms and I can build a technology system that allows a monk in Siberia or Nepal to facilitate a retreat in Cambodia, Bali, Costa Rica,

New York, Massachusetts, and Germany, then one monk can facilitate 50 people a week versus two if they have to be on site. And so since I'm a tech builder historically and I've had some success with that, what we put together is a in-room audio enabled cloud connected.

a technology platform where we use, we took sensors from the Israeli nursing home industry that are passive and hardwired into the room. So there's no Bluetooth and no Wi-Fi. And we monitor movement, temperature, heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration, perspiration, a couple other things. So we know you're safe, right? So if you're...

Israelis have developed algorithms so that they can see when anxiety is going up and you're escalating towards some sort of breakthrough break event. So first and foremost, we can make sure monitor people, the AI can monitor all their vitals and we can make sure that they're safe, which was the first and foremost consideration.

The second challenge when you're in the dark is that you receive lots of information because the mind is quieting, it opens the gateway to the higher dimensions, soul, higher aspect. And you start receiving communication and information that is quite profound. And for artists, it could be downloaded on music or songs. For writers, it could be writing ideas. For regular folks, it could be an understanding of reality. And to capture those, you either have to carry a handheld recorder with all the buttons blacked out with tape.

Ian Gardner (28:33.049)

and make hope that you're pressing, you remember which button it is, you're pressing the right button, the batteries aren't dead, it's recording and saving what you want, and you're not leaving it on when you're done. Or you have to get out of bed, you have to feel your way through the room in the dark, find the desk, find your pen, find your notebook, try to remember where you were on the page in the dark, put your finger where you think the line is, remember what your download was and start writing it in real time, which is a terrible experience for capturing your insights.

So the second thing we built was an audio system where you say, house, take a voice note and you just start talking. And you just talk stream of, you talk stream of consciousness. It captures it, it encrypts it and transcribes it. stores it in your folder. And then when you done, you just go and you download and you can say, house replay that voice note to make sure that you got it in and it was in there. So that's the second feature we built. And then the third feature we built is the remote facilitation.

Scott Britton (29:10.242)

That's incredible.

Ian Gardner (29:30.864)

So we have a plat. have a, we built basically the app store for facilitators and teachers. So you sign up for the retreat, you pick your location, your time, and then you pick your facilitator. And then you have a pre-consult with your facilitator where they help you prepare. And then while you're in the room, if you're going through something and you need help, say, how's schedule a schedule and I need to talk to Scott schedule me an appointment. And the system knows when you're asleep and awake, cause we're monitoring all your vitals.

And so it sends you a note, you get a note that says, hey, Ian's in his retreat, he needs to talk to you. It shows you my wake sleep schedule. You pick an hour that works for you and reserve it. And then at the appointed hour, it chimes me in the room. goes, ding, Ian, Scott's ready to talk. Would you like to talk to him? Now I say, yes. It initiates connection. We have our conversation. It records it, transcribes it, encrypts it, stores it, all HIPAA compliant. And if you're a Russian orthodox,

monks in Siberia and only speak Russian, or if you're a Buddhist monk in Lamontang in Mustan and you only speak Nepali or Tibetan, and translate that conversation in real time for you. And we have a speaker system. put 16 speakers in the room on the walls, on the roof and on the floor, and we use a motion tracking system to tell.

where you are in the room and the speaker system direct to direct the sound to where you are dynamically. So it always feels like your teacher's one foot away from you.

So it's a high fidelity teacher experience that feels like reality, even though your teacher could be 3000 miles away in some monastery in the middle of nowhere. So that system, which we've got applied for patent protection for, also has a research layer. So there's a bunch of Raspberry Pi compute that is connected to a HIPAA compliant timestamp so that you can do research studies in the room and synchronize the data fields from all those different inputs.

Ian Gardner (31:29.527)

and do data collection for analysis. And we've got a study we're baking with Harvard and ICS for launch that will be the first of its kind to document the physiological impact of being in the dark.

Scott Britton (31:40.086)

Wow. Yeah, that's what immediately where my mind went was like, has anybody studied this stuff? And sounds like you guys are pioneering that.

Ian Gardner (31:49.032)

Now this is Brian Johnson territory. It's never been, it's never been studied and evaluated in a clinical way. And what we're, the platform we're building will enable us to do those studies and replicate those at scale across the planet. And the goal is to build 2000 rooms over the next 15 years. So it's a 40 X increase in the number of rooms over the next 15 years and have this modality available, ideally like a yoga studio. So you'd have your, in any town, you'd have the doctor's office, the yoga studio and the dark room.

and those three would be the three pillars of your wellness regimen.

Scott Britton (32:22.222)

Let's go. I'm here for that future. So, you know, I imagine a lot of people here like hear about this and they're like, man, like, how do you pass the time? You know what I mean? Like that that sounds like, like really tough. What would be your response to that? To that objection or resistance?

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