Revolutionizing Wellness: A Conversation with Henry Penix, CEO of Soaak Technologies

0:28Welcome to the AI Chat Podcast. U.S. Air Force contract. Welcome to the show, Henry. Thank you, Jaden. How are you? I'm doing fantastic. I'm really excited to have you on the show today. Would you mind telling everyone a little bit about your background and what got you interested in the tech space to begin with? Yeah, well, I've got sort of an entrepreneurial background starting when I was very young, mowing yards, saving money for my first car. And I told somebody the other day in an interview, I never remember not working. Okay. So the accumulation of everything that I've learned and, you know, kind of leading up to today, I find that technology has the most significant impact in helping others.

1:13And I really keyed it on that. I had a technology company a few years back. We were on Shark Tank. Shark Tank actually sought us out, wound up not getting a deal there. uh but it propelled us to you know we were in every apple store across the world of the world uh with our product and so i really enjoyed technology and when i was introduced to sound frequencies and what they were doing in lieu of traditional medicines and therapies and things like that it really struck a chord so i studied it you know obviously i would never put a name on anything that i didn't fully believe in that was backed by science white papers clinical studies all that.

1:51And when all of that checked out, we actually took sound frequency therapy that was started in a clinic, proven in a clinic for about five years. And I was able to give it sort of the technology end and bring everything together where you can actually get the efficacy of what they were getting in clinic using sound frequency therapies to help with anxieties, depression, low energy, low libido, enhanced energy, all those things, we could actually transfer that from an in-clinic experience to your mobile phone. Two years and a ton of money, and we're there. That's kind of the 30 ,000-foot view. Yeah, that's incredible.

2:37Well, I would love to dive in just a little bit deeper on kind of your journey getting started with Soak Technologies. So you had other entrepreneurial endeavors. What was kind of your first step when you were looking at this? I'm assuming you kind of saw some of this clinical evidence and some of the potential here. What were your first steps when you decided you wanted to build out this company? Did you go and start looking for a team? Were you looking for investors? What did that process look like at the beginning for you? Yeah. So yeah, most of your audience is entrepreneurs, a lot of entrepreneurs, investors, and yeah, people in the AI space.

3:15Yeah. Yeah. So I'll kind of tell it from that perspective. So with anything that I do, I always find that, you know, if I can sell it or if it works with me or on me or for me, then I can get behind it fully with my name, my credibility, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Because when I go all in on something, I go all in. Like I think people that do things half baked and say, well, let me just see. Let me just test the waters. If it works out, no big deal. I'm opposite of that. I test it all first and it takes longer for me to commit to something. But once I do, I'm all in. So with SOAK, my wife actually had a clinic and she had MDs, DOs, chiropractors, people that did cranial sacral body work, cranial sacral body work, all these different modalities.

4:06And she started seeing how using sound frequency therapy, which is a compilation of sound frequencies. It's not like the binaural beats you can find on YouTube. It's not like getting a single frequency generator. It's opposite of that. It's combining 8, 10, 12, 15 different frequencies for a specific outcome. So in this case, for anxiety, depression, low energy, brain fog, one of our best ones are the sleep well frequencies. When I started doing a deep dive in all of those, I thought, okay, we have something that works. We have something with five years of successful outcomes. And this was before COVID even hit.

4:45So we didn't go digital because of COVID, but because COVID happened, it really, really put us in the forefront. We were getting calls from people like Amazon, Alexa team. And as you mentioned earlier, this deal that we did with the US Air Force. so when I knew I had a viable product when I knew I had something that would work that I could really get my name behind I then went in and set up the infrastructure for it so doing things like securing the name securing the website making sure there's no conflict there's a thing you can get called freedom of operations or freedom to do business it's kind of short of a patenting your process okay where I wanted to look to see if all that was clear check names bought websites states incorporated in certain states that were better to incorporate than others to really get the solid foundation set up.

5:39And then I started looking for the best people in the world to implement. So obviously looking at marketing, looking at our COO, chief operations officer, fantastic person, surrounding myself with people who were passionate about the same thing and also had the skill level to execute. I love to work with people. I give people second and third chances, but I like to go in before I even hire someone and see if they do have the level, the skill to actually execute. Because a lot of people you can get with passion, but passion without skill is like you're wasting everybody's time. Skill without passion, you're also wasting everybody's time.

6:22So it's kind of the thing to, you know, it's almost an art to pick out that right person with an equal amount of passion and skill. And the educational part, you know, I can teach, I can train. But once you start assembling those people and they start feeding off each other, even this team just begins to flourish. So those were some of the early on things that I did. Fortunately, I had made an exit from another company where I was able to put a couple of million dollars in this of my own money. So I was able to finance it. And now we're taking additional steps to even take that a lot higher that I really can't divulge right now.

7:07But I was able to finance it myself so I didn't have to mess with investors. If I did bring investors in, and this may be something your audience would like to hear. You always want to make sure they also have a passion for your product and they're not there just to turn a quick dollar. I always tell people I invite smart money, just not any money. Because smart money in, you've got people who will connect you with other people to help your service and your product get out there in the market. And you want somebody that's both vested and invested in you and your company and your product. So again, it's kind of an art.

7:47I do it secondhand because of how long I've been doing it. Um, and when you get it, it's like, I don't know if you play golf, but you know, if you golf ball perfectly or a baseball perfectly and you don't have to swing that hard, but it just goes forever because you've hit the sweet spot. Like when you hit that sweet spot in business, you feel it and your team members come together, financing comes together. All of a sudden your product is being accepted by, you know, people like Amazon, US Air Force, et cetera, and things begin to get a life of their own. That's incredible. And yeah, that's really amazing to hear.

8:26I'd be curious, right now in tech, obviously startups, tech, the big hot topic, of course, is artificial intelligence and how that's being integrated into things. What are ways that you have started thinking about how artificial intelligence plays into this startup? Have you started integrating it? What role do you think just plays in in this yeah we we actually have and and the the public will know about this soon enough but we're actually coming out with an upgrade to our app that will include ai in machine learning and something that i wasn't completely aware of is how different ai is from machine learning yeah so ai you can ask it a question uh you know how do i lose 10 pounds in two months and it will give you an answer.

9:12But if you go ask it 10 seconds later, it may give you a little bit different answer because AI, artificial intelligence is constantly pulling from the latest data. Machine learning, however, is a system where you feed it information that you've already approved, medical journals, things on frequencies, holistic health and wellness, Like you feed this machine learning system all the information that you want it to pull answers from so that if you ask it, how do I lose 10 pounds in two months? It's going to tell you the same thing because it's pulling from information that you've already pre-sorted.

9:56So I saw the opportunity to use both. So like I was saying, our new app coming out will actually be able to pull from the latest in artificial intelligence. and give you, like, let's say, for instance, that at 5 p.m. your heart rate is elevated, and our app will also be able to read biometrics. So from an Apple Watch bit or a ring, it'll read your biometrics. So at 5 o 'clock every afternoon, say your heart rate starts to elevate some. Maybe your blood pressure goes up a little bit. Whatever you tell us we can read, we will read, feed it to our AI and machine learning, and it will give you the latest, greatest recommendation at five o 'clock every afternoon.

10:40So if you're in traffic stressed out, we might suggest the anti-anxiety frequency. But if you're working out and you need to get your heart rate up and you need some energy, we'll submit the high energy. We'll say, make sure you're hydrated. Make sure you're watching your stretching. Like we're using AI and machine learning with our technologies now to provide this digital concierge in your hand where before you may had to Google search some stuff and it wasn't intuitive. It wasn't as easy. It didn't flow together with your life as easy. But now with the most recent updates in technology, AI, machine learning and reading biometrics, we can do that.

11:23And it's very exciting. Like it's, that's super cool what you can do now. That's incredibly exciting. Something that I absolutely love that you said there is the fact that you pull in their biometrics to give them the recommendations, because I think one of the big problems when you're looking at things like just exact, for example, your Google example, like if I have a problem or an issue and I have to go to Google, it's like, I have to take the time out of my day to stop, focus on what is my issue? What's the search that I need to do about this, then find the solution and kind of work through it.

11:50That's incredible. If you can have like that whole system completely automated, where essentially your biometrics are being read. It knows when you're stressed. It knows when you're struggling with something. And it's able to just immediately give you those recommendations, take out all of that work in the middle, and you're immediately able to kind of start focusing on your recovery or whatnot. And that's incredible. Are you guys looking at like, are you training your own AI model? Or are you integrating something like ChatGPT, you know, from OpenAI into there to have sort of like a chat functionality?

12:20Without divulging too much of our secret sauce, we're doing a little of both. And then on the machine learning side, we're absolutely training that and feeding that information that we wanted to pull from that we know was true and accurate. Because that's the worst thing about Google. You can get on and say, I've got a bump on my right hand and you can get 50 different reports and you're getting ready to chop off your hand on one end and on the other end it's saying, no big deal, put a bandaid on it. This helps work through all that when you can have a trained system working in conjunction with a raw AI system and doing things like chat.

12:56Yeah. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Talk to me a little bit about this US Air Force contract you have with SOAP Technologies. Obviously incredibly impressive. I mean, I think I'm very big testament to the efficacy of your technology and what's going on there. How did that come about? How did you begin those conversations? Talk to me about that, the story of that? Yeah, our COO actually began to involve us in that. And there was a bunch of applications to be able to do business with the Air Force. I don't know every detail. I kind of leave that to them to run. But in essence, we won out over a very large group of people who were applying to do business with them.

13:40And it goes in three phases. So phase one, you're accepted. They like your technology. They want to know if you can prove that it works. Phase two, you've proved that it works. They start enlisting you with actual customers and using it within the armed services. And then phase three, it's like it goes out to tens of millions of people. It starts to elevate kind of on a low level, and then you go up to phase two. It's a higher level in phase three. So he's taking us through those levels. We're at the phase two level now and complying with everything that they have asked. And so it's a huge testament to the efficacy of not only our technology, but in general, some organization like the Air Force looking at new technology, just in general, because sometimes you see companies that get paralysis from analysis.

14:49They don't want to do anything. Oh, is it proven? Have you taken it through 10 years of this, 10 years of that. And there's a fine line. You certainly want something that's proven, but if you get paralysis from analysis, it never launches. So this has been a great program to walk that line of being able to provide what you have in terms of scientific literature, customer testimonial, and then the actual implementation of a new technology without having to wait 10 years. So that's kind of the best I can summarize it. But it's very exciting for our company. It was a huge win for us. And we've been launched into several other things just because of that.

15:36Very cool. How do you kind of see the landscape, this whole digital health kind of landscape shifting? You mentioned a number of things, right? We have AI coming out. We have biometrics. We have all these different areas. how do you see the whole landscape shifting are we going in a direction that embraces more of those what are what's the implications um i mean from your own company like what are the the pivots changes and directions you guys are planning on making but overall on the industry how do you think we're going to see things change yeah things are already changing and if you're not all in my opinion if you're not already using ai and or machine learning you're behind the curve used to when we would write something.

16:20We do positive mindful intentions as part of our process. So when a customer becomes a member of SOAP, they listen to sound frequencies. We've got a library of 30. We've got positive mindful intentions. It's a positive affirmation every day that you kind of reset your mind. And we have 21-day programs that experts in every field kind of it's kind of like a master class speak into uh whatever you're interested in so you 21 days you can go on for three minutes a day listen to them speak to you and and you can actually train from some of the masters uh in around the world and any particular thing but in all that you know you write copy you do marketing you do all this and that and when we start first started using like chat gpt it was like this is heaven like how can you think something so succinct and I think if people, I don't think people should be afraid of it.

17:15You've heard about the big bad AI monster coming in, taking over the world, replacing drugs and all that. I think we don't replace jobs. I think we can resource different people's skill level. So if you're a writer and you think you're gonna be replaced by ChatGBT, for instance, just learn how to ask it better questions and use it in conjunction with what you already do to support you not fight it because it is inevitable it is already here if you're not using it you're already behind the curve so so come into it with an open mind in my opinion use it use it together with because it's only as good as the questions you ask it for sure as well like i'm going to do it for you uh so if you can sort of train your mind to think that way to ask good questions, set around in a think tank.

18:11I think it's very valuable and I think every company should be using it. The whole story about it overtaking the world and all this stuff, like hopefully some of our people and scientists and technologists are smart enough to write code that will sort of keep that from happening, you know, like conspiracy theorists and all that. uh so i'm i'm comfortable with that but but again if you're not using it uh start it's inevitable it's already happening 100 agree with you there um i would be super curious when you know talking about building out soak technologies and and what you guys are doing here what have been some of the biggest difficulties you've had to overcome in building out this platform in this app what are what are the what were some of the the hardest parts about this this company i think building the efficacy to give it the same efficacy that if you went into one of our clinics and sat down and did a sound frequency session uh that took probably the longest uh and making it accessible 24 7 from anywhere in the world that was important to us and and just you know having it at a at a price also because unless you're willing to invest heavy on the front end and get paid back over a long time.

19:32For instance, our sessions in clinic would be about$800 to$1 ,000 a month, and people would come in for three, four, five months. This way, we've reduced that to like$29 a month for everything we were doing in clinic, and you can do it from anywhere in the world 24-7. So in my experience, like if I have trouble sleeping or I'm anxious about something, it usually doesn't hit between eight and five during a typical day that some office would be open or a clinic would be open. Like it'll hit me at 10 at night, midnight, in the morning, I can't sleep. And if I can reach over in my hand and dial in the sleep well frequency and listen to that and, and just doze off and have greater REM sleep and all that, like, like to, to duplicate that from an in-planning experience to be in the palm of your hand, accessible 24-7 and for less money was sort of our big, big, big challenge.

20:35And again, it took two years and a lot of money, but we're finally there and excited to get it out. That's incredible. What do you think really differentiates yourself? I actually went on your app and gave it a try. Really cool app, really cool technology. I feel like when you go on the app store, there's a lot of different apps that talk about like frequency apps and things like that. What would you say is your biggest differentiator, kind of what sets you apart from other people that might be in this space or trying to be in this space? Yeah, we actually grew from the efficacy of a clinic. And to my knowledge, none of our competitors have done that.

21:15You know, you look at Calm that just does more meditations. They don't have frequency aspect like we do. And to my knowledge, again, maybe something new has come out in the last week or two, but to my knowledge, none of the other apps are HSA and FSA approved, meaning health savings account, flexible savings account that you can actually pay for it with pre-tax dollars. And a lot of people have these health savings account where you can use those pre-tax dollars to pay for things that help you personally and that have been approved. We've been approved and we're sort of at that level, which sets us way apart from our competitors.

21:59Second thing would be the MDs and DOs that actually put these things together using years and years of experience to have frequency compilations compilations and not just single frequencies. That's probably the other biggest differentiator and some of our greatest secret sauce that gives us the positive outcomes that we get. And by the way, you're using the version we have now of our app. Again, mid-November, we're coming out with the AI machine learning and biometrics that will blow you away. So So make sure you continue using that all the way through to our new app version. I think you'll really love it.

22:43That's cool. Yeah, that definitely would be, I'm excited for that. What would you say, you have like a really big, vast experience in entrepreneurship and kind of starting and growing these companies. You've done some really impressive stuff. What's a piece of advice that you could give to perhaps, right now there's a ton of developers working on new AI technology, new AI applications. to listen to this podcast, starting out new businesses, what's a piece of advice you could give to them as what to focus on or look at in this space? I think what we said earlier is follow your passion. In all of my entrepreneurial endeavors, I've always looked for something that either hasn't been done that I would benefit from myself or something that is being done that I could improve and make better.

23:32But whatever area that I've ever went into, if I didn't have a passion for it, I wouldn't do it. I mean, there's nothing worse than waking up Monday thinking, man, I got to go to work. This sucks. I don't know why I'm doing this. Like when you're starting to ask yourself those questions, that's a discomfort that's coming into your life, in my opinion, on purpose, for the purpose of making room for something that you are passionate about. And that you can really put your life behind. So I tell people never to ignore change or reject it or chaos or whatever's coming into their life, but embrace it because that's trying to tell you something.

24:13It's either trying to tell you to kind of change up the path you're on a little bit or stop, turn around and go the opposite direction. So I think if you really intuitively listen sort of to yourself, you'll always know the right path to get on. And don't get me wrong. Sometimes you have to do things to pay the bills that you don't like doing. And I've had to do that plenty of times. Like I said earlier, mowing yards, I hated it. It was hot, but it got me my new car that I saved for. So there are times in your life that you have to do that. But ultimately, to have like a vocation and something that you want to do for the foreseeable future, do it because you love it and and if you love certain areas of ai get into that move forward in it as as hard and as fast as you can if it's machine learning do that if it's a combination do that or if it's just making something better like us we had the soap clinic but there was no way for people to access it digitally and nobody had ever done it before so my big challenge was I love helping people.

25:23I love getting positive outcomes. I love getting, getting positive results. And when they started working in my life and proving my focus, my creativity, um, I started using these things. And then I thought, man, I've got to share this with the world. And when you do other people sort of get into that, like right now we're in over 133 countries and we started out and could barely get out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, you know, like we We followed the passion and we followed what we thought people would love and the positive outcomes. And that led us down a very productive path. So specifically, if you've studied something in college, don't be afraid to back up and look at something else.

26:07The AI machine learning are going to be around for the foreseeable future, but do whatever you're doing because you love it. That would be my, it'll all come back down to that, to following your passion. I love it. amazing advice. Henry, thank you so much for coming on the show today. You've shared so much incredible advice. Your story is very inspiring. If people want to get in contact with you, try Soak or find out more about it. What's the best way to do that? Yeah, just go to our website, Soak.com, S-O-A-A-K. We've actually created a promo code for your audience. It's A as in Aiden, AC3030.

26:50So AC30. And we want to give your audience members 30 days free to check out our sound frequencies. Let us know if you like them. And you experience those positive outcomes that we were getting in clinic and that people in 133 countries are using now. It's interesting, and I'm very proud of my team for this. I'm not trying to pat ourselves on the back, but out of... All of our customers that we surveyed, over 97 % said that as they use these frequencies over time, that 97 % had at least one area in their life that was a measurable difference for the good. And that blew us away. I was hoping to get over 80 % and 97%.

27:35So I would suggest going on, getting it, listening to four or five minutes at a time. If you can work up to 10, 15, 20 minutes, it's great. If you're having trouble sleeping, my challenge is always try to get through 10, 15 minutes of this. And if you're still awake, I would be surprised. I'll just say that. And we found on that sleep frequency, and I don't mean to throw us off topic here, but on the sleep frequency, when people would come in for anxiety, depressions and all that, we would ask them in a survey, are you sleeping well? And no, they're not. And we found that when people get a good night's sleep, a lot of REM sleep, a lot of deep sleep, the anxiety and depression start to go away.

28:19So instead of throwing a bunch of medication at stuff, and I'm not against it. If you need it, take it. That's great. But we take more of a holistic approach. And if you can use a non-invasive sound frequency to get a good night's sleep, that'll relieve you from these anxieties, depressions, give you more energy the next day. Like we're all about that. And I think society as a whole is sort of going that direction. all of that could not be possible without what you study technology amazing thank you so much for coming on henry i really appreciate your insights i will leave uh that promo code in the description of this podcast so for anyone listening to the to the listeners uh thanks so much for tuning into the ai chat podcast make sure to rate us wherever you get your podcasts and have an amazing rest of your day.