From #1 Track Athlete to High Frequency Highway Founder: J Johnson Jr on Rewriting Success
Most people meet J Johnson Jr and immediately want to talk about High Frequency Highway, the company shipping frequency headphones and running an app that reached users in countries all over the world. Emily wanted to talk about everything that came before it. In this episode of Success, Rewritten, J traces a path that runs from being ranked number one in the nation for track at age 17, to teaching himself to code as a teenager, to an ADHD diagnosis that quietly reshaped his entire definition of success.
It is a story about sound frequency, but it is really a story about what happens when the thing you built your identity on stops fitting, and you have to decide what to build next.
Who is J Johnson Jr?
J calls himself a "multidimensional athlete," an athlete entrepreneur documenting his journey of maximizing human potential. He started early. At 14, he combined two of the biggest trends of the moment, Flappy Bird and Kanye, into a mobile game. He borrowed $100 from his mom for an Apple developer account, taught himself graphic design and video editing from YouTube, and pushed the app to number seven on paid entertainment apps. He calls it a meme now, but it taught him something he still runs on: being early beats being perfect.
By 17 he was the top-ranked track athlete in the country and headed to Division One. On paper, success was simple. Turn pro, make a lot of money, keep winning.
How an ADHD diagnosis led him to sound frequency
Between high school and college, J was diagnosed with ADHD and started taking medication. It gave him focus, and for the first time he felt a sense of normalcy. But it came with a cost that mattered enormously to a sprinter: it killed his appetite. He would take the meds and barely eat all day, right when his body needed fuel to stay explosive.
So he started running what he calls internal case studies on himself, weaning off the medication, taking it only as needed, and looking for something to put in its place. Meditation came first. Then, almost by accident, sound.
The CIA "Gateway Experience" and the idea behind High Frequency Highway
J was skeptical the first time YouTube served him a "positive frequency" video, so he decided to test it honestly. He waited until he was genuinely upset, turned it on, and it worked. That small moment sent him deep into binaural beats and eventually to the Gateway Experience, a declassified CIA document describing the use of binaural beat frequencies for remote viewing, observing something from outside your physical body. The agency, he learned, had explored it to spy on Russia and locate tanks and submarines.
That was the spark. If this research existed and worked, why was there no real home for it? As J put it, "Why are people just going to YouTube to tap into this?"
Building the app and the frequency headphones
His answer was an app so simple a baby could use it. Open it, tap a mood, and a frequency plays. No ads, no distractions. What makes it unusual under the hood is that it does not stream audio. The sound is oscillated frequency generated on your device, which means it works with no Wi-Fi or cellular connection at all. That single design choice let the app reach people everywhere, from small communities where connectivity is scarce to major cities, because all you needed was the app.
Once it scaled, J saw the next step: a wearable. The frequency headphones sit on your ear rather than in your ears, so you can hear your surroundings and hold a conversation while you use them, and the vibration becomes part of the experience. You feel the sound, you don’t just hear it.
From prototype to shipping in seven months
The momentum after the prototype reads almost unfairly fast, and J is the first to call it lucky. A week after his first prototype came together, Alibaba invited him to present at its Co-Create event in Las Vegas, where he pitched in front of 4,000 people. One of the judges, Kickstarter's Everette Taylor, tried the device and championed a launch on the spot. A Kickstarter campaign followed, funded within the first month and a half, with a launch event in Dubai. Then came an invitation to the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference on the top floor of Salesforce Tower, where billionaires tried the single prototype and pre-ordered.
Inside of two months of having a working prototype, J had backers, high-profile users, and a product ready to produce. Seven months after the prototype, he was shipping. The company now moves over a thousand devices a month. He credits a lot of it to documenting his journey publicly, and to a personal brand that opened doors revenue alone could not.
How J Johnson Jr redefines success
Ask J how success has changed for him, and he goes back to what he calls his pre-awakening self. Back then he was, in his words, a normal jock, trying to go pro and make a lot of money. Now the mission is bigger and stranger: peace on Earth and raising the frequency of the planet. He is careful about it too. He could take almost anything viral, and he knows it. He just does not want to build one more addicting product that does not move people forward.
Part of how he sustains that is a rule he lives by. He does not go below neutral. Anger, envy, resentment, all of it just sets him back and drains the energy he needs for the work. When someone stole his bike, his honest response was that he had helped a person in need.
It is the kind of steadiness that only looks effortless. And it is the through line of his whole brand, summed up in the phrase he built the company around: "You live life differently when you're at a high frequency."
Listen to the full episode
Watch or listen to J Johnson Jr's full conversation on Success, Rewritten. New episodes every Tuesday.
