It's incredible. And for me, as a as a heavy metal drummer and singer uh and an absolute music enthusiast, and for someone who is constantly exploring myself, this is like nirvana for me. This is a fantastic podcast. We explore all sorts of ways that he's using this to clear up past traumas and help you actually create your future. It's really powerful. I think he's just on the beginning uh phases of this.
We're probably going to have another podcast with him in the future. That's what I want to do. I want to see how things are going. And there's also a way for you to actually do uh get involved and use this technology for yourself as well. We dive that into that into the podcast. So, if you're interested in seeing how old technology and new technology are coming together to heal and to help us create a new future, this is the podcast for you.
So, there we go. Let's go explore. Mr. Horbacz, how are you? Terrific, brother. How are you? Awesome, man. We just before we got on here, I was trying to go, okay, like how do you pronounce your last name? Because mine's the same. People always totally screw up my last name. My mother-in-law still can't pronounce my last name. She goes, "Oh, Sulbin." I'm like, "No, it's Sbachin, Mom. Like, what's wrong with you?
You can't you can't get it right." But in Nor in Norwegian, it's Sulbakin. Your name, you said there was three different pronunciations. Tell me all three again. Yeah. Well, uh I would the the Jersey boy in me would have said your your name Salbachan. Yeah. Right. So for my name, the way that I grew up saying it was Horbach, which is super Jersey. Horbach. Horback. Yeah. Uh but the um Horbach is is a little bit more I guess like moving more towards proper English and then um the Scandinavian Polish is Horbach.
Yeah. Hbach. Yeah. Well, let's just call it the Horbach. Okay, dude. You and I met through an interesting connection and then we started talking about what you have going on and I'm like, "Holy crap, I want to have you on the Viking Academy." So tell me more about what you're doing cuz like that's just like what you're up to right now I think is is incredible. Oh man. Um there's a gazillion ways I could take that.
Um let's start with I think you're talking you're referring to the AI project. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The music project. Yeah. The music project. Um so simply what we discovered is that you could use melody and frequency uh using AI to deliver a song of you and so we use cognitive behavioral therapy prompts and different methodologies to pull out uh the we were trying to answer the question if you were a song what would you sound like?
That's beautiful, right? Dude, that is like as a heavy metal get like I'm a heavy metal band, right? So, I love music. I love every type of music. If you were a song, what would you sound like is like music to my ears. That's beautiful. Which I like the fun part about that is that you sound different every day. You sound different every moment, right? So, you have you have like an endless amount of sound coming through you all the time. every emotion, every feeling, every experience that you've ever had, the grief you might go through, the joy, the pain, the like the like wild um I don't know, having a baby, right?
Like that is an experience that you might want to capture in a song or a moment of you experiencing that experience. And that's something that AI can do very well. Yeah. If so, if it's more like a a movie is what you're talking about, the person is a movie going around. Is is a one song the AI will grab a song and say here's a snapshot picture of you as of this moment or does it like how can you like how do you unpack an entire human being's experience into one song?
Do you know what I mean? like that would be just that would be like make Beethoven's fifth symphony look like like kindergarten. Yeah. Uh let me give you two approaches. Um okay. One is like the technological approach that's really exciting. It's a project that we're working on. And the other one is more of the analog approach. the analog approach being um we're we're working with like addiction recovery centers, coaching, uh anyone that really like helps people move through their life intentionally or move through grief or development.
And so how do you capture that? Uh AI is really great at walking you through cognitive behavioral therapy or different like modalities around psychology. And in doing so, you grab the emotion and the beliefs and the experience. And then if you if you work with the AI, if you train the AI properly, the you can create an output of that experience tied to the beliefs, tied to the emotions. And that output is basically the story of the moment of your life and whatever that experience is with the deep emotion attached to it.
And then in creating a story then um it can create more of a like a poetic version of it or a spoken word piece and that spoken word piece turns into lyrics and then the AI is very good at recognizing the emotion behind the lyrics in order to understand exactly what tone and and uh melody to put behind it. And and you can be specific like let's say I'm feeling like um I don't know maybe I'm expressing something about nature and being a man and maybe maybe it spits out like a beautiful country song of my experience of being in nature and riding a horse or something like that.
But in the end, it's like um it takes like the once you get down to the heart of it, once you dump your like your emotional experience into the song, what we're using it is as a um as a guided meditation. So almost like so imagine creating a song that the lyrics came from you, the story came from you, the emotions came from you and you can read the lyrics that you created at the same time as your body and your mind is listening to the frequency and the melody of that experience.
It taps you into that exact emotion that you wanted to express or the exact emotion that you were feeling in that moment. So it becomes wildly cathartic. You're like taking uh current technology coupled with shall we call it ancient expression of the human condition being music right when we were in the caves and we're banging on drums right and we created all these songs and we've been song is songs move us emotionally the rest of it but you're taking you're taking the AI technology with the ancient technology of music and coupling it with our own emotional, psychological state.
And you're using you're using those two as a tool to help help heal people. And that's the thing that I just I was like, this is wild, man. Like this is like taking the old and with the new to solve an a an age-old problem, which is the human mind, right? It's the mind and the emotions and all the, you know, being a human is hard. Like it's hard, right? But the fact that you're using AI in this specific methodology is what I was so excited about and which it resonates with the Viking Academy.
You know, it's like exploring yourself to figure out who you are, why you're here, and what you're here to do. And this is like using this technology, this AI technology in the way to help heal ourselves. That's that's when my brain exploded. And it's still exploding as you're explaining this. Like, how the hell did you drop into this? like that. I like Yeah. I I'll I'll share the whole story. Yeah. The way that I've come to frame it and this is just from doing my own inner work is that oftentimes, especially probably as a man, women are probably operating a little bit differently, but um becoming aware of yourself usually starts intellectually, right?
We'll be like, "Okay, here's the thoughts or the beliefs that I have going on." Well, maybe it starts with here's the problems in my life, right? And let me understand what's creating all of that. So working through psychologically, right? So there's there's a psychological maturity that can happen. You go one level deeper and there's the emotional part. So often times we can we can tackle the psychological maturity and moving through psychological um I don't know we call them traumas or events in our lives that are shap that that shape us that create who we are today.
Um, but underneath that there's the emotional frequency part of it. And just like we have psychological patterns, we have emotional patterns. And those emotional patterns are are really a big part of what creates who we are and what we create in the world. Uh, our environment like our lives are really created in large part by our emotional patterns. So how do we attack emotional maturity? So if once we put it into song then you can start tapping into the emotional frequency of what of the psychological work that you were already doing on yourself.
So it just takes it down just that's just just that next level it goes deeper into the sematic right the physical because once you once you tap into the psychological and you can mature psychologically and then when you can mature emotionally so you're not stuck in like the the toddler phase. I I have two young boys and when they were going they're going through their toddler phases I was keenly aware of how much I operated like a toddler and like my business or relationships and so and once I got really aware of how I was operating like a toddler and recognizing this is like emotional this is an emotional pattern that I didn't move through when I was a toddler right okay so let's work on maturing myself so that I can be there for my boys when they're working through their big emotions Um, so I think that and once I started seeing that, I started seeing it everywhere.
It's like we walk around the world start seeing people as a toddler. Soon as I had a toddler and uh or at least when they come out in their toddler phase, right? Whatever you know where they hit something like the biggest one I see especially in business is the um I don't want to. Right. How many times did you get like going into a project and you're just like I don't want to.
Right. That's that's a very toddler response to doing something a little bit difficult. Yeah. Um Yeah. Yeah. So, you're moving down and maybe we can get to this this part later, but there is a third maturity which is in the physical body. These are the places that I've been going after in my curiosities and business is those three maturities. And um if you want I can share the origin story of the music product and maybe hopefully that might lead us into some of the other stuff.
Yes. Yes. Let's definitely do that. I I was just writing a bunch of notes down here in terms of you know the mind and the emotion and the body like this is so it's the mind and then we get into the emotions and then we get into the physical body right and so you're you're this this process you're doing I do want to talk about the recovery part too because like in helping people in addictions the rest of it because you know I'm a recovered alcoholic myself so very curious on what you're doing with that with that side but again more to the Scooby-Doo vending like how did you fall into this and then I want to dive into more of the the technical aspects of it.
Yeah. So, um I I'll bring you back to 2020 co I was uh just ending I was building a mobile gaming company like studying the psychology of gaming and all of that and I had to wrap up that company during COVID and uh I had some capital from building businesses and a bunch of curiosities. So I just started going wherever my curiosities led me and also I wanted to make bets right so I would ask these like I would ask big questions around what can I how can I invest my time energy and money that is most aligned with my curiosities and who I'm trying to become or you know my kids were very young at the time six six-month old so it's like what um what contribution can I make to the world was like a big big question there and at the same time I was deep into AI and blockchain and trying to understand human value and human potential and started um writing quite a bit just for fun and just like following my curiosities as I was placing my investment bets.
Um as I kept going with that, the writing kind of evolved into a whole bunch of documents that were super scattered. So it was it was me following my curiosities, using myself as a guinea pig in a lot of different ways. And then as I hit the edge, I would write and then hit the edge again and write and hit the edge again and write. And that process unfolded in what I can only call today is the the beginning of a spiritual awakening.
And so the years went by. I was still focused on uh my curiosities, but also supporting entrepreneurs and building businesses and investing. And I, you know, I I like to come at life like I'm not a victim. Right. Right. Of course, I don't want to be a victim. Right. So, I'm creating all of this. It is my thoughts. It is my emotions. It's the patterns. It's the things I'm creating. And through my writing, I kept waking up to certain things.
And as I was waking up to certain things, I was dismantling so much of my life. Dismantling it. I had businesses fall apart. I had like huge investment losses. I had um partnerships taking and stealing technology that that like was crushing. And then in 2024, I had my like my year was sandwiched between a huge business betrayal and uh a separation and divorce. And so it was like the whole dark night of the soul experience about as deep as it gets.
And then towards the end of the year, um, I was using looking for different AI tools to help me move through a lot of the grief and move through a lot of like the the stuck resentment or the stuck betrayal and just like, man, this is just like a dark time, right? And I already had quite a toolbox going on from all the other work that I've done. So I was able to I think grab a hold of the different technological tools that was helping me personally and one of them was um using AI as a mirror.
So just like creating my own AI prompts to bounce myself off of. And it was interesting because that's where I started like okay I can I'm recognizing all the changes I'm making mentally. I'm recognizing like all the different beliefs I'm coming to recognize about myself. how I created this in my life, how I created that in my life, here's some self- betrayal over here. And um even though I was seeing it all, I was still feeling the same way.
And then so I started trying to figure out how can I take the way that I'm bouncing myself off of AI and how can I hit more like an emotional resonance? And I had a friend of mine inspire me to um turning it into he was doing poetry and I was never much of a creator in that way. And and so I started turning it my story into um short stories, you know, so I can like kind of see my story as a third person with AI giving me back my story, but adding like the emotional depth to it.
And as I did that, I was like, "Oh, okay. I felt that." Um, and then it evolved from being a short story to like spoken word piece to, okay, let's turn this into into lyrics and then grab and put together some of the AI music tools out there and see if I can create a song. And so, um, again, another buddy of mine inspired me to use a service called SunnoAI.ai, which is like a badass AI music generating tool.
Um, they make like Grammy award nominate, like they're amazing songs. like you won't know that it is made from AI, right? Um, and so I started taking these cognitive behavioral therapy prompts, these ways I was helping myself move through a lot of this grief. Um, trying to understand myself, trying to like move through it, like, okay, let me learn the lessons I need to learn and move through this as fast as I can because I have a family.
I have things to do, you know, it was like, let's just go. And um and so I started taking my experiences and putting them into song. And very quickly like what I noticed in my experience um through doing the inner work that I've done is that as soon as I become aware of a pattern or something about myself, it could take like six months before I actually see change. You know, it's like um it's like you become aware.
It's like I'm probably going to get this wrong. You might know way better than I do, but it's um unconscious incompetent. Yeah. And then uh consciously incompetent and then that goes, you know, those four stages. I wish I could rattle them off right now, but I can't. Do you know? Yeah. Yeah. You're unconsciously incompetent, then you become consciously incompetent. That's right. Uh then uh you you you have to get to a point where you're consciously competent, right?
Yeah. Like Yeah. Yeah. And then well consciously competent is and then the last consciously incompetent then you're consciously incompetent and then you're consciously competent, right? Yeah. So you're unconsciously incompetent, then you're unconsciously comp Yeah. That's it. But I told I know what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. It's like you don't know what you don't know and then you find out what you didn't know and then you you fumble through that for a little bit until it becomes uh a new norm for you when you design the the way you want to be.
Right. Yeah. Anyway, so um so that could let's say that that's like a six month or eight month process for me. I noticed that change takes time and you got to have some grace in it. Um so I started taking my experiences and putting them into into song in this particular way using the intellectual cognitive behavioral therapy um and creating lyrics and then those lyrics turning them into songs that matched the melody just like we're talking about.
And what I noticed was that I would read the lyrics and listen to the song so that I would have a fullbody sematic kind of like emotional experience from listening to the song and reading the lyrics. And I started noticing changes in weeks. So something that might take months of trying to reprogram something in me, all of a sudden weeks I would be a totally different person. like I I the the triggers wouldn't happen anymore.
Like the the thought processes would completely change. I meditate and I'll sit there and watch the thoughts. Okay, this is this is one that's come up quite a bit, right? So, let's address it and I would address it in this particular way. And next thing I would know, they wouldn't come up anymore. And I I did this enough and and I did it enough through grief too, the grief cycle, like actually working myself through grief. uh and working myself through that cycle using song and AI generated song and cognitive behavioral therapy like and in weeks all of the sudden I would realize like wait a minute like I'm I moved from here to here and now I found peace and and and and quickly and it and it happened quickly as opposed to over years of therapy.
Right. Over Yeah, exactly. and and I would share kind of my story and where I was at with people and they would just be in awe like wait a minute doesn't make any sense like this happened to you just a few months ago like how is that even possible and and honestly without bouncing myself off of other people and then them being like Erik like that like how are you good yeah how are you still walking how are you still functional how are you how are you still managing to uh to be operational in the world.
That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. And then it just clicked. It was like, man, this is powerful. And not only is it like and I have to see if this works for others. So me and my business partner who him and I were now doing both of this, doing this together, him in just different ways. We decided to start doing workshops and sharing the methodology with people with the intention of learning enough around the system and process to create the song to create technology that can do it very quickly for people.
And so in the workshops, we'll guide people through a song creation process based off of their experience. And then they'll have the same cathartic kind of release because that's what it is. It is a release. You know, it's taking those stuck emotions and allowing them to move through you. Well, that's that that's what I was coming to the realization as you were talking about this. I'm going, you know, I if anybody's been around long enough on this planet, you probably done some therapy or you've worked with a therapist and you talking with the therapist, it's a lot of head knowledge and they can talk you through things.
You can get it. Okay, I get it. Intellectually, I understand it. And that's kind of those three levels you were talking about. The mind, the emotion, and then the physical, the body. Mind, emotion. Yeah. The mind, emotion, and the body. You could get this head knowledge, you understand what's going on with the therapist, but it takes forever and sometimes it never goes away and you keep repeating the same conversation, but it's this stuck energy that's in your body that is when it the trauma hits us, it it gets stuck and it gets this bad thing.
It gets stuck there. You found a way to basically unstuck the energy. That's right. by tapping into the emotion of the traditional, shall we call it, the ancient song, the songs that move us. You know, anybody knows, think of a song that moves you like um there's a song like it may sound really corny, but I don't give a [ __ ] This is my podcast. I'll tell it as it is.
Whit Snake has this song called Now You're Gone, right? And it starts off Now You're Gone. And literally every time I And it there's a weeping guitar from Steve Vi. He's got this screaming, weeping guitar. And when that song kicks in, that first few bits, I start crying. Like I start like tears come down my eyes. And so there's like an emotional release in there. So this like song is so it's so um ancient, right?
It's part of us and but you've found this way to unlock it. So is it the the release of the energy? And it's it almost sounds like you've connected the three layers together. So there's alignment now instead of it I understand it in my head but my emotions haven't caught up. And even if my emotions can catch up to my head, my physical body still thinks it's got trauma. But you're managing to actually align all three and release the music.
Like I would like when you're doing these when you were doing um any work with anybody, do they like like break down and start balling their eyes out when that happens? Because it would seem to me like 90% of the time. Yeah. 90% you'd have this total cathartic just you lose it, right? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And not only and we do the we do these workshops and you know there could be as small as like four or five six people in them and one person will make a song and everybody in the workshop will have an emotional experience.
So, it not only is it is it um helping that one person kind of move through that that energy, move through those emotions, but it's also creating a a like a group um uh what's the word like a a it's creates like this group dynamic where everyone is there supporting them moving through it. So, it's not just healing the person, but it's healing the group. And is it an empathy thing that goes on?
Is it like group think like that happens there or be because for you to have an emotional response to something there has to be something inside you that you resonate with. Do you know what I mean? Like you have to be going this resonates with me at some level as opposed to I'm feeling empathy. Yeah. Well, true. If you feel empathy for someone, it's because empathy is different than sympathy. You feel sympathy for somebody is different than empathy.
Empathy is like I know what you're going through because I've gone through it. But is it because you've brought this group together un, you know, not the same group of people, they don't know each other, but they still have this response. Well, I think it's a I think that because it's the way that we pull the story out of somebody and and they to share their story, share what the feelings that is.
So, they get the story, the intellectual story is there, which you could do with somebody just having a regular conversation, but it's still up here. And once you once you transmute that into emotion, once you transute it into into melody, it almost triggers empathy, right? Because the the emotions there behind it. So, so you've got this way now you've tapped it. So, through your own experience, through all the pain and heart and you know, I've seen this in my life too.
Like I look at all the the [ __ ] storm that I've gone in my past and I realize I went through that for a reason. like my alcoholism and my drinking and going, you know, losing businesses and all that stuff was done for a reason so that I was able to help somebody else in the future. So, you've experienced all this incredible heartache. It's like it sounds like not you didn't get punched, you got punched, kicked, dragged, thrashed from multiple different angles all at the same time to force you to find this solution that you're now able to bring to other people, right?
It's like that was that was the purpose of it. You can look back and do do you look back on and go, "Oh, that's why I went through all that [ __ ] is so that I could have found this to help other people." Absolutely. It's like I had no idea. We first of all, we didn't intend to do this to turn it into a business and even the way that I look at business is more community centric, right?
So, we're bringing this to people but also inviting people along for the ride. So um the only reason why we turned it into a business was because I recognized well one I have an entrepreneurial background so I know the lean startup and how you know the way you test stuff and I've done the adventure studio game. You're throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. This particular project was it helped me so much that I wanted to it was part curiosity part responsibility.
It's like oh wait I should share this and see if it helps other people. do it in a small container and then once you see it actually working, once you see the impact, it's like, well, you know, there's there's to throw it against the wall and it sticks. It's like, yeah, there it is. And then, so it was like it was just an obvious next step is to like figure out how to turn it into a business.
So, so that's there's a couple different angles I'd like to go down on this is one, you've you've now created this this tool. Um I'm curious how you're bringing it to the business like how you're turning it into a business model so that it can reach more people and then I also specifically want to talk about how you're applying it to uh the recovery. But let's go down the first one where we're talking about the business model like how are you how have you brought it out so far?
Like how can people find this first of all because this sounds like man this is like that the what's the word I'm looking for? I was having a a meeting earlier today with a a group of business owners. I do a mastermind call once a once every two weeks with a group of business owners from around the world and we've been supporting each other for about six years now. And and the conversation was going around kind of like we used to have the what was the fremium model on the internet and now we're getting to the point where where information and knowledge is going to be almost democratized completely because of AI is going to have this knowledge base that's going to be it's going to be everywhere. the only thing that's going to be available to actually the business model of the future is going to be our individual personalities like and that human interconnection like because everything else is going to get taken care of.
So, we were starting to talk about these different businesses that we have and we're like, well, forget it. I'm there's no point in selling my course anymore because eventually it's going to be out there anyways, right? So, I'm going to package it up differently. with with this, how are you how are you bringing it together in a business model that that makes sense? Do you know what I mean? Like that's going to be able to not be or you could be cutting edge and bringing this out and then it gets completely democratized and it goes, you know what I mean?
And then spills out. Like how do you how do you get around that? This is where we're actually playing on another edge, right? This is a different edge. Like so yeah. Um, again like I I showed I I played around like the venture studio world where we had a group of people and a couple developers and we come up with ideas and see what stuck. The um I recognized a while ago that that was so broken like most most of the startup space from the last decade or so from my limited experience anyway.
Um the training you get to build a company tends to come from the incubators. They come from the accelerators. the methodology that the incubators and the accelerator use like the lean methodology um they all are taught by somebody right all these ideas all these programs the processes they're all taught by somebody but if you look up the chain as to where the information education is coming from like when I went to school there was no entrepreneur like majors no there wasn't there wasn't no yeah now there is but they're still teaching these types of methodologies So what I noticed though was um okay we're learning this methodology that has a 5% success rate in raising capital and then even after you raise capital what's the success rate of actually taking it to the next level right so it's like we're we're learning methodologies proven to fail bingo yes and like I'm like okay that doesn't make like the add way that my brain works looks at that like that just doesn't that doesn't compute but I'm still gonna follow it because you guys told me But where does the education come from?
If you look upstream, it comes from the institutions, right? They have limited partners that need to have some sort of not guarantee, but they need to feel good about where they put their money. So if the if um if the institutional guys come together and like, okay, well, we got this program and this program has this particular success rate, which is going to increase our success rate, which going to increase your capital, you know, then then it makes us look good.
It's all just this game of looking good. So it's just like as a startup you're you're building to tell a story to raise capital to build more to continue to tell your story to raise more capital right so the game becomes completely rigged in the effort of of you know adding more creating capital creating wealth. Yes. Yes. It's like putting guard rails on the on like what they're doing is the the methodology is set up as a guard rail like you're bowling.
Say you're bowling and you don't put the little guardrails up for your kids. Have you ever done that where they so the ball the ball will not go in the gutter? Right. So they're bringing up the guardrails, but you're bowling with bowling balls the size of a [ __ ] pickup truck. And as it rolls down, it just m right over the guardrails, but the guardrails are there. It makes it feel good, but they don't do anything.
But they don't do anything because this this bowling ball is like just like it's going right over the rails, right? Doesn't matter. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So, so then so what's the solution? It's like um yeah, so we're we're raising money. We're doing all and and not only that, but if you're a type of person that wants to build something and that's mission driven, like if you're looking towards the thing you want to build to serve some part of humanity or to solve an actual problem, when you're scraping in a survival state for cash flow and capital consistently, you will lose sight of that mission.
Of course. Of course. Right. You've been reading my mail. You've been reading my mail, dude. Yeah, I've been I could go we could go down a whole conversation about failed businesses and all the rest of that and the stress that happens under that. So for for this though then what what was the approach that you've taken so far? Yeah. So um so the solution that I was playing with right this is part of the edge was community centric right creating a studio or a venture studio type of atmosphere that was community centric meaning like hey we have this mission and we want to vocalize it loud enough in our immediate community just to attract the people that can make it move forward and in doing so you create energy and belief behind it.
And when you start like when we started um bringing in people to do these workshops, we're bringing in people from our entrepreneur community first, right? There's people like a lot of them are just like very successful people and we're like, "Hey, like we we stumbled on this thing. We want to show it to you and we want to keep showing it to you until this thing like feels like it can turn into a business." So um the the foundation that what we discovered was the fuel that drives what we're doing is the workshops themselves.
Um and the reason for that is because uh okay one of the other pieces around the startup world that I recognize especially over the last three four five years is that and I've had this happen to me building AI startup is as soon as you start building something one of the big dogs comes out and does an update and the thing that you ideated the thing that you built is now garbage right and this is across across like I've talked to so many different entrepreneurs and investors that It's like there there was a period of time I think it's still happening but definitely in the last two years where there was like a freeze state right it's like okay we know we got to go build some things but we don't know what to build because everything's moving so fast right so there's like this freeze state and um so on so freeze as in freeze everybody's frozen not free as in yeah freeze like everybody's everybody's staring and that's what's h like that's still kind of happening right now especially globally, internationally, everybody's in this frozen state.
They're like, "What are we going to do?" Like all this real estate sales up in Canada basically gone flat because everybody's like freezing. They're just standing around going, "What's going to happen? What is Carney going to do with Trump? I don't know." Like, so everybody's frozen and scared, right? They're not doing anything, right? And so I totally see that in this in the space right now with AI. Like like I said with my other group, we were saying, why would I sell my course when it's going to basically be cannibalized?
My intellectual property is just going to go right. So, how do I build a different type of business model? And that's what I'm You're on it already with the with your like, so what I started playing with is what's the new moat? What's the new moat? If the old moat was data and being the first to execute, being the first to deliver, then what's the new moat? And uh I think that when I first started playing with this, it was maybe new, but now I think it's it's pretty widely understood or at least widely theorized that the new moat is community.
It's it's like-minded people working towards a a a similar mission, right? And and this kind of ties into that the whole concept of like I think it I think it also addresses the whole nature of capitalism too. I think that comes to that's a whole another topic. You know what I mean? Like instead of it like it all becomes ours instead of it's theirs and we get to work for it. It's becomes ours.
So when you're creating a community and everybody comes together to build it for the right reason, it becomes I don't want to say communist because the communism has a whole bunch of horrible [ __ ] that is attached to it, but it's more communal. Like it's like everybody's working together. So there's like if if built properly in my head, I see it being a very beautiful thing without it tipping over into a totalitarian state of communism or fascism or anything like that.
Yeah. Well, we've seen some some not just blips, but we've seen some massive actual progress in that. You look at uh I showed I went from uh like studying mobile gaming and building a mobile game company and then in 2020 um following my curiosity which led me to you know going deep down the blockchain rabbit hole and looking to discover like what is the next future of value, the new economic systems and all of that.
And just by the nature of that rabbit hole, I had to make my way to the world of memecoins just because it was so fresh, so new and so interesting. And because I was also playing around in this like community concept of like, okay, what if we were just community centric with the way that we build things? That's exactly what a memecoin community did. Or like friends with benefits or some of those NFT communities.
Essentially, what they did was they used the power of the community, the power of belief to drive value. And that's that's a memecoin, right? So the way what I started doing in like this is 2020 2021 when most people were looking at charts or most people looking at the technology behind things, I was going into and inserting myself into like memecoin communities and trying to get a pulse of like the like the the frequency of the of the community.
And if and if it felt right, right, if you if you saw the engagement, if you saw the camaraderie, if you saw them working together to build something, then it was like this thing is going to go somewhere. I end up jumping on uh early meme coins that skyrocketed and made an ungodly amount of money doing it just from studying the the elements of community. If the listener doesn't What is a memecoin?
Just so the listener understands what you're talking about. Yeah, it's a crypto. It's a token. It's a crypto token. Cryptocurrency. Okay. With nothing behind it but um belief. Belief, right? That's the power of the human belief. The imag you know that's you know everything we have in this world is made up except for the physical world. The physical world is real. But everything else that we've created money concept of everything from you know that's the United States that's France that's you know everything is all made up.
It's all made up. And the only reason why it works is because we all believe it works. And so it's the power of belief is actually what created our entire world. Everything's made up. So these meme coins that you're talking about is not it's not it's not a big leap. It's actually just a new expression of the same thing we've been doing since the beginning of time since we were able to communicate with one another and create and come up with ideas.
The the minute I come up with an idea, if you and I agree on it, then all of a sudden it has power. If I come up with an idea and you say I don't believe in it, then it becomes I'm crazy. So this, you know what I mean? Like I have an imaginary friend called Bob and he's sitting here beside me and everybody's looking at me going, "Erik's crazy. There's no [ __ ] Bob sitting here." But if everybody agrees that Bob is real and Bob is sitting beside Erik, all of a sudden it becomes real.
Well, that's what a [ __ ] border is. Like I'm looking across the ocean right now at the United States. What is that? Like there's apparently an imaginary dotted line between Canada and the United States. It doesn't exist. It's [ __ ] Bob. Do you know what I mean? It's Bob. The only reason why it has power is because everybody believes in it. Yeah. So that power of belief creates value. So we're we're So that that memecoin is that you saw value being created in a new currency because everybody believed in it.
That's exactly why the dollar the dollar in the United States or the dollar in Canada has value is because we all believe it has value. There there's no value in a dollar when you look at it. It's just a piece of paper and it doesn't even exist anymore on paper. It's on a number on a blip on a screen, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the might of the US government uh like the war machine is really what's behind the dollar.
The But it all started with a belief in a concept known as money which we created. Absolutely. Like it's all just made up. So, so let's get to let's get get to the how you how are you modeling out this technology that helps people heal themselves is you're building it on community. Yeah. So, we're building a community around it. That's step one. And there's there's a rap we can thread that to this whole memecoin world too because there's there is a trajectory.
We have a roadmap for tokenization uh for the community. But again, the foundations of of the of Corvia AI which is the the brand is these workshops. It's helping people. It's helping people heal, helping them move through things. So, um we're we're charging a membership to be a part of the community and come in and do these workshops. And then through the community, through the workshops, we learn and then we take what we learn and we are building a tech product, a product where you can actually just very quickly go in and share yourself and you have a song of yourself.
Okay. And so in these so in your workshops is the shall we call it the circle the the the circle of awesome I call it because you're going you're making money doing the workshops you get more information on people where you're then able to iterate to create a better solution to be able to start a new workshop to get people so and you're just continually the flywheel it's getting better and better ultimately you want to have it so that you have an AI tool where people don't have to physically come to a workshop they can access it online and and be able to to use it there, right?
Yeah. Which is why community becomes the mo especially when you're building technology or at least this type of uh application, right? Because it's like okay, the technology itself is way behind the scenes, right? Like the Nvidia like they're doing. But when it comes to human application, how are we going to interface with the technology in unique ways? That's where the community becomes so essential because a community is like a surfboard. You can you can you can have an idea and let it live inside a community like using AI music for healing.
You can have that idea, have it live inside a community and then plug in technology as it becomes available so that you're not beholdened to one particular platform or one particular uh piece of technology. You can just ride using the community. You can ride the wave of technology which is happening at neck break speed. So it's kind of the only way to do it without getting caught. So are you not building your platform on any specific technology so that you don't get crushed then?
Yeah, it's like um a good example of this being done and it wasn't exactly community centric but it's still a good example. Do you use perplexity? Oh yeah, that's I said if if Google and chat GPT had a baby it would be perplexity. It's such a good tool and they're getting better and better all the time. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. But Perplexity just they're focusing on one thing. They got they want to get really good at research and reasoning, right?
And as like their their target is like we just want to get good at this one thing, but if you look behind the scenes of Perplexity, they're pulling from chat GPT, they're pulling from Gemini, right? They have all the big legacy models behind it fueling it, but they but they toggle between them, right? So they're not beholdened to one thing. They're just going to perfect the interface. Right. Right. So that that's perfect.
So the community becomes the foundations of the future of whatever that interface is going to be. So when people come and work with you and go into a workshop and then they create I'm very curious like the process and for the listener too. It's like how can they use this to help them heal themselves? I kind of want to understand that a little bit more. So I come in and I do a workshop with you.
I take maybe one lifetime experience that I want to deal with or whatever. We go through your process. You create the song. I hear the song. I'm like have a complete emotional response. We'll call it the alignment of the the mind, the emotion, and the body. We have an energy release. Am I healed or am I listening to it multiple times or like how what's the functional process of of this? Like how does that work?
I think it becomes a tool in your toolbox. So the the song you downloaded on your iPad and you or your iPhone and you want to listen to it, the not the ability to make the song, right? So once you understand the prompting and and this is what we do in the workshops, right? Like Oh, sorry dude. I totally misunderstood. So you're teaching people how to use the tool to create songs to help them heal themselves so that they have a tool.
So it's not you're feeding you're not giving me a f you're not feeding me a fish you're teaching me how to fish right yeah you just come in there and yeah it's like we're not trying to like the if you look at like the mobile gaming model and all of that like they want to build something that make you stay there like you just get stuck it's like let's build this thing so that you become addicted to this thing it's like no if I'm doing my job right you come to a workshop we teach you how to make a song and given the the current tools of today that we teach you how to use you can make that song a new one every week.
You can make a new one every day. You don't need to come back to a workshop, although you probably will because they're profound and they're they're very helpful and the tools are always changing, right? So, you just come into a workshop, we teach you how to do it, and it's yours. Cool. And so then and then you're using and then when I would use this tool, use this knowledge of how to build my own song, which I still think that's the [ __ ] coolest thing ever.
If you were a song, what you would you sound like? I mean, that is just for me joy. That's absolute joy. The Viking in me and this heavy metal gadude is just like screaming right now. But I could use this. So I gotta give credit. I gotta give credit where credit's due for that. If you were a song, what would you sound like? Like I said, as we were building this and sharing it and gathering community members and interested parties, we got connected with some of the coolest people.
And one of the guys that is now partnering with us is Keith Guard. He was uh Aerosmith's longtime manager. Oh. And this guy is just so tapped into that world of creativity and he just dude it's so cool. And when we first I got I get like goosebumps when like I think about the conversations that we have together because this guy it's just it's so powerful. Um he he was taking what we were doing and he was like dude this is magic.
Like this is incredible. He's like not only is is it that but it's like and then he was like sifting through. He's like and then he just said it. He goes, "If you were a song, what would you sound like?" And then boom, we're like, "All right, tagline. It's going on the website." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's just I just It's brilliant. So, I have this skill set.
So, you're teaching you're giving us the skill set. You're creating a community around this of people that the skill set of being able to use the tools currently right now that we have to make a to make a song of an expression of an experience I had so that when I listen to it, it can heal my mind, my emotions, and my body. It's a healing. a healing tool and it's a it's a technique that you can use over and over again to help you actually heal yourself for the rest of your life.
Like so instead of you giving me a fish like I said for feeding me for a day, I learn how to fish so I can fish for the rest of my life. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Once you once you know how to make the songs and the thing is the more we do the workshops, the more we work with people, the more we it's all about prompting. It's how you talk to AI, how you train it.
So the technology that we're creating is specifically niche just like Perplexity and the way that they're doing it to this these personalized song creation. Now here's a question. Have you gone down into the science/spirituality explanation of why it works so well? Like why this creating and hearing it's like almost like seeing yourself for the first time in a mirror. Imagine if you'd never seen yourself ever and then all of a sudden a mirror pops up and you see yourself for the first time and you actually see yourself.
It would be an incredibly emotional experience. It's kind of like you're you're seeing your pain body for the first time in its rawest, purest form when you're listening to that song. And that's where that release happens, right? If that's the if that's where you want to go with it. Yeah. Because it's it's not just that. It's like sometimes it's hard for people to express joy, right? Sometimes it's hard for people to express like just pure happiness, right?
So, see, I' I've never had a problem with that. See, that's my problem is say I don't get that, right? I don't get that part. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And uh the science behind it. So, what we did was um none of it has launched yet, but we started a podcast. Um we're just like compiling a bunch of it's this is the way that we've been doing the research and collecting data. And on the podcast, we've been doing uh we've been intentionally bringing on uh psychologists, psychiatrists, people working like in deep um consciousness, AI, um sematic healers, uh yeah, that type.
And in that, we're gathering all the data and all the information around the science behind it because it's it is science. I mean, it's it's it's emotional alchemy. It's It's I like that. Yeah. That's That's a TM there all day long, man. That's a trademark right there. Emotional alchemy. Yeah. And and uh I mean, you can get into like, you know, Joe Despensza type guys, like they're they're doing a great job at bridging spirituality and and science and what goes on in the brain and all that.
And there's there's a couple different things. One is when you do something like a song creation like that where you have to be vulnerable and you're doing it in a group like that's immediate oxytocin serotonin. Like you're getting all a flood of so many different beautiful like feel-good chemicals just from being inside that group and you can just be inside that group and be a fly on the wall and still get the benefits.
Hence why when someone works on their song and they end up playing it, why other people are having such an emotional that's part of why they have that emotional response to it because they're okay. Ah, this is that this is all starting to make a lot more sense now. And I Okay. So, so then you're doing workshops. So then how well first of all where where do you do these workshops and how can people find you to do these workshops with you?
I mean ultimately I guess to reach more people is the plan to keep doing workshops and building it out more and more communities and having that as the the core baseline because I would imagine that that that's the thing is like I do coaching uh for a company called strategic coach and I also have a bunch of other businesses the accountant success formula the viking academy I do in-person coaching with groups of people there's nothing like it compar doing that versus doing something online or doing something by yourself like there's just it's a total different experience, right?
Is the plan to keep doing that because of it's so powerful be being chestto chest or hearttohe heart to people when you do the do the workshops it feels essential like I'm doing we're doing talks and stuff right so in a couple of weeks I'll be doing one for a men's group like a really big online digital men's group and it's all on zoom well we've done them in person we did an inerson one with a family office event that where their um their their more nonprofit arm was around um it was actually some of the addiction recovery stuff it's like being someone of means who come from a family office maybe like a second or third generation wealth.
There is a lot of psychological kind of pain that comes along with that. A lot of addiction and and and part of the part of our intention going in there was to help create songs about that experience because it's it's it's it's hard to find people that can resonate with that. Yes. You know, yes, there's there's some shared empathy there in creating the song. So, we do the workshops in person. We do the workshops uh um for groups and we do them um if you go to corvia.ai and just plug in an email address uh you'll get an invite to all of our workshops.
Cool. What's up? How do how do you spell it again? How the Corvia C O R V I A Okay. AI and then on that website it's also we charge $200 a year to be a part of the part of the group. Yeah. Okay. And we we we don't charge a lot mainly because we are just building a community like the intention is to build a community and help people heal and of course the benefit that we're getting on the back end is the experience of helping people heal through AI music so that we can build technology and right right yeah and so grow so tell me more about the community and how that works you know it's still it's this is like uh a few months old here Cool.
So the idea is like are you getting together on a regular basis? Are you communicating with each other? Like do you have your own private like Facebook group or what what's going on? We're get right now it's just um the emails and invites but the uh all of that is in the works like we had the admin and everything all that is is being done right now and um the simple part of it is we have regular workshops weekly workshops with different themes uh to to create songs.
So, we're doing a men's theme, a women's theme, addiction theme. We're trying to one of the things that we're really working ourselves towards right now, we have a couple of partnerships pending with addiction recovery centers. Yeah. And you asked about addiction recovery. The like the core of that is the emotional maturity, right? Is like tapping into those those those things that are really inside of you that are keeping you stuck and helping release those.
But we really want to work very closely with the psychologists and the people doing that work to create very specific song prompts which we haven't done yet but create very specific song prompts for their community. Yeah. Because having being in my own community of recovering alcoholics, it's the pains and the traumas of childhood and those things that you carry along is is ultimately why we drank, right? Then you know you tie it to the fact that when we take a drink the drink takes us because there's a mental obsession coupled with a physical allergy like physical allergy is you take the first drink now it creates craving and that's how you get going.
But it's that mind emotional body connection which is exactly what you're talking about that needs to be healed. But even people in recovery have been sober for a long time and they're going to AA and they're doing all the those things. this what you're talking about right here. We're talking about deep deep core mining like going even deeper to the core issue that you it's not even in your conscious level like it's in a subconscious level that like the true traumas that really drive us are so sub under the conscious and we don't know like people just don't know why they're acting that way.
It would seem to me that this would drill a hole in and get down into those issues and release that energy without maybe you don't even know what the specific trauma is, but it would seem to me that what you're telling me people are having the reaction to that would release some of that. Yes or no? Yeah. And that's what I've seen and experienced myself. Yeah. And it's it's actually not, you know, it's pretty logical really.
It's like the emotional patterns that we're used to is what make us comfortable, right? So that's our comfort zone with even though they're oftenimes suffering. So we're we're we're in this comfort zone of suffering and even becoming aware of it isn't really doing anything for me because I'm still in this emotional pattern, right? So the emotional pattern takes over which is me living in the past and I'm not that. Right? So in in like using the AI, using the tools, using the music to bounce yourself off of, it's giving you an emotional mirror of that experience so that you're seeing it differently.
And when you're seeing it differently, like and and you're moving through that pattern, then you can then get to a place of now, right? So you're not living that past, you're not living that emotional pattern anymore. You're moving through it. Maybe it's temporary. It could come back, but then you have the song again to listen to. So that once you become now right then you can start building a completely different future.
And that's where it gets really fun. Like I and I've done this too. This is another edge piece. But there's like what do you do when you release all of that which is this is not me, right? These are all the emotions that are stuck. This is the grief. This is the pain. This is the guilt that I'm addicted to. Like this is all of this stuff. Accumulation of past conditioning. This is my accumulation. and who I am today is accumulation all the past conditioning.
Right. Yeah. And then so then once we get to a place of just now where I'm not caught up with all of that stuff, I've moved through it. I understand intellectually I've matured that. I understand the beliefs and everything that goes behind it. And now I'm understanding the emotional frequency and the emotional pattern that's there and I've moved through that. Then what? Because you've released but you've cleaned it. You've cleansed the channel.
You're cleaning a channel out because that end that's that past the past shall we call you know I hate this this word is overused but the past traumas the things that have tra traumatized you that you're still carrying you're you've cleaned that out so there's that channel now you're a blank slate where are we going dude where going like now you got me interested so this I've tested this a few times and um I've only shared this uh with you know a handful of people Um, so where are we going?
So if you've ever listened to like a Joe Despensza thing or something, it's it's about tapping into creating your future is making sure that you're feeling exactly the state that you want to be in, right? You're feeling the success. You're feeling the deep connection or the love that you you were missing, right? You're feeling the relationship that you're trying to attract into your life. um that's really hard to do because especially when we're living mostly up here.
But if I use the same methodology, tweak it just a little bit so that I'm expressing what I want to feel and the experience I want to have and you put that through the same system where then you get a melody and lyrics based off of that future experience. And then so I've done this using myself as a guinea pig. So then you create the song and if you listen to it like a little ritual every day, it's there and now you've created now you're starting to move and creating to creating your future.
Yeah. And I've done it so much so as having an uh you know it working in a day and it working in a week. That's how fast that it it manifests. So that's you you found a way to use the Oh, you've Yeah. Did you see that? Did you see the penny drop there? It was like kathon. Yeah. You have taken you've taken the ancient technology of song coupled with the current the new technology of AI to turbocharge and enhance the law of attraction.
Thank you for simplifying it. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, you you you because that's what Joe's talking about. It's like the law of attraction. You must feel the future you wish to have. You need to feel the person you want to be. And when you feel and have that focus that I am that person, the the most powerful two words, I am that I am the name of God. I am that I am.
I am this is a current state of being. You then attract that future to your present moment. like it attracts it to you. So that's Yeah. You've just basically taken the secret and put it on steroids using technology which using ancient ancient and current and modern ancient and modern technology put them together. Yeah, that's [ __ ] cool. So I'm there's uh uh I'm I'm using this methodology too to create the business.
Of course you would. Right. Of course you would. Oh, okay. So I need to find a workshop to get my butt in there because I want to get in on this. This is like Yeah. Awesome, man. Like it's like everything everything converges. There's a convergence I feel happening in my life, personal life. And that there's just this convergence. It's this the past, the present, the future, and all these ideas are kind of they're starting to do this convergence on me where all of a sudden I'm starting to see things clearer about how things how my life is unfolding.
And it's just it sounds like you're doing you doing the same thing. It's just coming together like this. And it's coming to a like a focal point like this. And I think ultimately is my my theory here is that we're moving towards an elevation in consciousness. That human the human the human condition is in dire need of a upgrade. We need an upgrade to human consciousness and and the way we see the world because you know the way we see the world is the way we experience the world.
And if we're going to survive on this planet, never mind thrive, like even if we don't blow ourselves up, we have to have an in an upgrade in consciousness, we need to upgrade our programming. And you're doing that, man. This work you're doing is absolutely critical and [ __ ] cool. I got to say that too. Like you've taken like like it's not like you, oh, I got to go to therapy.
No, I got to go write another song. Like I got to go make another song. I got to hear what I sound like. Right. like yeah the be like what I I've always tried to like bridge myself between like between the world like here right like ground myself in what's real and let's create something very real that that connects with people but then also like I've I've always stretched as far as I can to the divine right it's like this I've always had that elongated kind of sense of being and um you know music it's funny music has always been healing like you Um, like Molly Cyrus, she's a singer songwriter.
She uh or is Molly Cyrus? Miley. Miley Cyrus. Who's the uh she she has a billion dollar? Her her brand's about a billion dollars, right? She that big. Oh, probably. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is Miley Cyrus. Okay. Yeah. So, she creates a song. She's a singer songwriter. She has an experience, whether it's in her relationships or her world, and she puts it into lyric and then she puts it into melody that comes through and channels through her.
And because of that, it resonates with people because of that. Like people will listen to it and like, "Oh, that hit like that." Yeah. Taylor Taylor Swift, that's her that's her motus operandi, too. That's like all her experiences of her life. And she just Taylor Swift, that's who I was thinking of. Yeah. Miley Cyrus is a little more edgier. Yes. She she a bit of crass, that kid. Miley Cyrus, even though she's trying to be a little more refined lately.
But yeah, Taylor Swift is the billion dollar. She's the biggest. She's the world's greatest CE like in 2024 the world's in 2025 the world's greatest CEO, right? Yeah. Brand the the Taylor Swift brand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but it's truly is like if you have you watched um what's the movie with uh Bradley Cooper? A Stars Born. No, I haven't. But I've saw the original one. Okay. Okay. Well, the new one with with Chris Kristofferson.
The Chris Kristofferson and Mar Barb Barbara Stysand was the original. I didn't even know there was an original. Oh, dude. Yeah. Yeah. But that then you see, I'm just dating myself now. Yeah. Uh in that movie, at least in the new one. I don't know if it was in the original, but uh in the new one, there's one where Bradley Cooper goes Lady Gaga and and was like, "No, it's all about the message you have." Like, "Do you have something to say?" Right.
And like that sparked her on her journey. Like, "Okay, I do have something to say and I'm worthy of saying that thing." Yeah. Right. And um you know, Taylor Swift, she's got something to say and it resonates with people and it connects with people and it built a community around her that's worth a billion dollars. Then there's um you know the Beatles. The Beatles had a message they wanted to bring to the world.
Peace, love, joy, happiness, right? Like let's let's all just get along, right? So there so music is isn't just like a way to bring people together, but it's a way to get a message out that then changes the trajectory of humanity in some way, right? Let's get this message out and let let's people feel it. But you're taking that and using it in a in a therapeutic manner. Like it's just therap music therapy, but it's not even like you're listening to someone else's music.
You're listening to you. So you're getting to see who you are through music. And that's what I love. That's like if you were a song, what would I sound like? If I was a song, what would I sound like? Is the most beautiful thing. That's so that's so awesome. you. So, this is building out. People can find you on the website, right? They can book uh So, are you doing in They're all inerson workshops, right?
No, all most some of the most online. So, you can be part of the workshop, go there. I'm going to go there. I got to figure this [ __ ] out because I want to hear what I sound like as a song and I've got a lot of stuff that I still need to to heal. But it's that clearing the past, clearing yourself, clearing yourself in the present moment of your past trauma, of your past conditioning, and then that's phase one.
Phase two is then using the technology of the ancient and the and the modern technology to create your future. That's it. That's that's brilliant. I love that. Yeah, it's bonding, too. So, we have Corvia Kids, too. So, Corvia Kids um is something I created just because my kids and I just started bonding over creating music. Once I actually got really good at it, I was able to help talk them just ask them a few questions to create a song and now it's like their favorite playlist because it's the songs they created.
So, one of the other tech products that we're coming out with is called Corvia Kids, which is really just like a parent kid bonding experience. Okay. You're gonna have to sign me up for that one, too. Yeah. I'm in I'm in on that. Yeah. Uh, well, Erik, other than having your first name spelled perfectly, like, you know, with the K, which is awesome, and being of Viking heritage as well, I can I the Scandoo and you, man, you are doing such amazing work here.
I think we're going to have to I want to have you back on the podcast once we see where this trajectory is going. We're going to stay in touch because I'm going to want to have you back on the podcast. You can tell me where this is going because you my sense of direction is you've just scratched the surface. Yeah. Do you know what I mean, dude? Like, you just scratched the surface.
And it's such powerful technology and it's healing and it's music and I'm going to say it again. It's [ __ ] cool. Yeah. Thank you. [ __ ] cool, man. Thanks for being on the podcast. Of course. Thank you for having me. I appreciate Yeah. Thanks for listening to the Viking Academy podcast. Make sure to leave us your honest feedback by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, and hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.
