Solving The Mental Health Crisis with Technology w/ Jewel | EP #66

27:15and softwood trees grew quickly and they fell over. And so I knew I wanted to be a hardwood tree. So what does that mean? How do you break that down into action and behavior? So it meant root system. And for me, that meant going down and in as a life philosophy, not up and out. And our culture is obsessed with up and out. We want growth and we want results. A pair is a side effect. It's a phenomenon of being loyal to growth. A pair happens as a side effect of good growth. You don't have to make a pair happen. You have to grow well and a pair happens with zero effort. And so if you look at the outcomes of my life, like, you know, the record sales and the music, or you can't make that happen, you can only be incredibly loyal to growth going down and into this feel like the right thing.

28:00Just that feel like the right thing. Now what feels like the right thing. It's a million very dedicated decisions to something that's very humble and very quiet. It's not flashy. There's no guarantee it's going to work out. It's a real, it's a dedication and a work ethic and a loyalty that isn't really a sexy thing and it's not very talked about but I figured that if I could stay very, very, very loyal to that, the other thing would take care of itself, the fruit as it works. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I speak about and I care deeply about is helping people shape their mindsets. You know, we're, as we're a child, we inherit our mindsets from our parents, from the people around us, from the stuff on our walls, from what we read.

28:48And, you know, most people, not you, but most people don't stop to think about what mindset do I have. And they just go with it. And that mindset makes the things they encounter in life mean different things, opportunities and hardships. When did you start realizing that you can choose the mindsets that you want? How young were you there? Because it seemed like it hit you early on, much earlier than me. I think philosophy really helped me feel that way. Everything was a question and questions are lenses. And so what questions am I asking? So if I don't, But you start to be much less concerned about the answers is like, if I asked the right question, things will start to unlock themselves.

29:39I call it filter updates. You know, once I started to realize that I had been born into a system and emotional language, a lens. And that you could choose that, just like you could choose Spanish or French. That's pretty empowering, you know, if it's for a child, that's 15 that needs a sense of power, that was a healthy kind of power to pursue, I think. And then what I noticed over time was, you know, I did get discovered and then I did become successful and I hated it. I hated it. I hated the level of fame I got. You couldn't walk down the street and have your privacy because... Yeah, the level of fame that I had achieved was on the cover of time, one of those famous people in the world and it was that type of fame where you can't walk across the street without people following you.

30:29I was having a conversation with Elon, I don't know, it's years ago and he goes, you know, only place I can go and relax is a biker bar when no one knows me. But they probably would probably know you're a biker bar. Yeah, he's a level of fame that I don't wish on anybody. I don't. It's a poison. And again, I don't know what part of me knew that, but when I was discovered at 18, I knew I was being offered a poison and it could help me and it could also kill me and I had to engage at Lake Apoison and have a very different plan about it. That's so far beyond the years I ever was when I was 18. Can you tell about what mindsets you chose?

31:09I mean, I talk about gratitude, mindset, curiosity, mindset, and abundance, mindset, that a longitude, a moonshot mindset and so forth. And I define these and they're meaningful for me. And I very carefully let ideas and people into my life that support the mindsets I've chosen, like someone who wants to eat healthy food avoids, unhealthy foods. Did you actively choose mindsets that would support your life? What were they? What are the mindsets that have brought you to where you are now? I think for me I thought in terms of postures. I called it a posture an emotional posture like a stance that I would take in life and More than mindset I was thinking about behavior.

32:00For me, I realized that my behavior drove Architecture the architecture of my life. Maybe you drove how I built built my life Which got me into mindset, I guess, you know, because then as you start to reverse engineer behavior, why am I having this behavior? What's prompting me? It was a lot of subconscious thought. I think the first time I really stumbled on this was with shoplifting. Shoplifting was a big problem in my life. How old are you now? 18. Homeless shoplifting was in a store one day. I was trying to shove these, this dress down my pants because I wanted to dress. And saw my reflection in the mirror, and I was very disappointed because I looked like a, you know, I set out to not be a statistic a few years earlier.

32:45I was homeless in shoplifting. It doesn't become a worse statistic. I was so disappointed. I didn't, didn't hit me till that moment, that image of myself in that mirror. Interesting. And I remembered like, maybe it was a stoic had said, happiness isn't what you have. It's what you think, something like that. And I was like, well, maybe I could turn my life around one thought at a time, but I couldn't perceive what I was thinking. And I didn't know the word just associative at the time, but I was so disassociative that I could not witness my thoughts in real time. And so now I had a problem. How was I going to change my life when thought at a time if I couldn't perceive my thoughts?

33:20And so I realized that my hands were the servants of my thoughts. It was my thoughts slowed down into action and to behavior. So I could watch what my hands did. And so I started a journal every single thing my hands did for two weeks. Like I'm washing my hands, I'm opening the door. It's so dumb. Exactly. I'm opening a door. I had no idea what I was looking for. I was like, maybe I'll see if I can. I mean, the analogy is, you know, it's like watch where the person is walking versus what they're saying, you know, what they're at. Yeah. Well, it had an interesting side effect. Like I sat down in the end of two weeks to look at like, all right, what does my takeaway, way.

33:57I quit believing in myself. It suddenly dawned on me. I hadn't had a panic attack in two weeks. Wow. That was like a radical side effect of a weird little scientific study I did. You know, like, was it because you were paying attention? What I stumbled on to was being wildly present. I stumbled on to it. What you might call mindfulness presence, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And just for, you know, this word mindful that gets thrown around I define it as being consciously present. So I stumbled on a way to force myself to be so consciously present that I forgot to have a panic attack. I didn't get triggered in those two weeks.

34:38Well, felt really good. And it was fascinating to me. And it really peaked my curiosity. I'm getting to mind said I promise, but kind of through this. Yeah, please. posture. So I realized that's interesting. Descartes said, I think, therefore I am, and I was like, wait a minute. I think it's, I perceive what I think, therefore I am. I'm not my thoughts. I'm the observer of my thoughts. That was a very radical and empowering thought, because if I could observe, I was sad, I was something other than sad. I was the observer of sad. And that distance between associating myself with my negative attributes, which is a self -sumptioning spiral, right?

35:17And you think you're depressed if you think you're a thief, if you think you're a piece of crap. Where do you go from there? You think that's nature. And it's not. It's nurture. And so that began to lift the skin where it could start to have a peak between nature and nurture. My psyche and how my psyche formed in context to my nurture and what was my actual nature. And so again, that meant down and in, which for me is a mindset. It's an emotional posture. when I get worried, when I get anxious, that's over -identifying with my thoughts. I have to go down and into my experience out of the idea of something, into the experience of something.

35:53That also helps you get your body and your brain into this alignment instead of going to different directions, because your body is a tremendous amount of knowledge. When did you start meditating? I had an aunt that was a Transcendental Meditation teacher and she taught me when I was 13 or 14 and then writing I didn't know it at the time but my writing was a mindfulness exercise. It caused me to go down and in and it caused me to have that little bit of a distance that serious observer, the quiet observer. It's my favorite time of the day. Are you a morning writer? Depends. I don't get up early as I can and if I'm super psyched, if I get up without my alarm at like five or five, 30 and I'll just get, you know, good 90 minutes of writing in.

36:40And it really, it's my happy time. It's reflective time. Yeah. So what I discovered, and I'll try and go through this quickly. Yeah, no, please. But I was trying to learn to stop shoplifting. I couldn't. I started to wake up after I shoplifted. And it was like, break, I did it again. And then I started to be, because I was meditating, I was doing this writing, was being the observer of my thought. I started to build the muscle, that was being consciously present where I would start to wake up during shoplifting, but I couldn't change the behavior. Then I started to wake up to the realization, the urge to shoplift, but I still couldn't intervene.

37:14But I was able to notice the urge. The very, very last thing, maybe eight months of practicing, was learning to say, I have the urge and I've got the urge quick enough that I can willfully replace the behavior with something I like. Let's choose writing. So I chose writing. This should work great. I love writing. I've had years of thinking writing was a great reward. This is going to be the perfect replacement. Didn't work. Hated it. It was so weird because as I began, I just got away from the emotional judgment of it. I tried to just be purely observationally curious. Why? Why would that be? Why would I not like writing in that moment?

37:52But I like writing in other moments. So I got out of my head into the experience, I got really present in my body and I imagined myself shoplifting. And I leaned forward and I started a rock and I noticed everything contracted. I got excited. I acted like an addiction. It was an addiction. And it had a posture. It had this posture of like excitatory, super in my head. Okay, that was very interesting. That was new experience. So now let me see what does it feel like your ability to sit and observe this in yourself is the extraordinary gift because most people are Unable they need a third person observing them or asking them but your ability and maybe it goes back to early philosophical You know Approach that's beautiful And so it's safe for my life for sure and so what happened then your your So then I thought yeah, I thought about writing what is my posture when I write?

38:53I leaned back my voice right now talking about it just Sure, my eyes are dilating. Yeah, my blood pressure is dropping I'm much more relaxed. That was so interesting to me. So then I wrote down dilated and contracted in my notebook And I was like, what if I only I started to follow myself around her in the day We have what I learned is we have two states physiologically. We have dilated and contracted and we go in and out of these two states all day long. We need to, right? Contraction can be very good. It can be focused. Sure. It can be, you know, lots of good things require. It can be determination to survive.

39:35Exactly. And it can also be a compensating method. I'll explain it a little bit. So what I did for a month was write down any time I was dilated and any time I was contracted. I used my body as my... Braader, yeah, sure. Every time I felt relaxed, I would write down I had three categories. So under dilated, I had thinking, feeling, doing, same thing under contracted. So if I just noticed I was relaxed, if I was joking with somebody, if whatever, I was able to sleep good, I would write down what was I thinking, what was I feeling, what was I doing. Same thing for contracted. Every time I noticed anxiety, worry, doubt, panic attacks, what was I thinking, what was I feeling, what was I doing?

40:19So at the end of the month, I didn't realize it at the time, but I had basically built a map of how to get in and out of my sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. I learned my idiosyncratic triggers, if you will, that could force my body in and out of these two states, which have huge physiological and neurochemical reproductions. Yeah, 20 Robbins teachers this. Oh really? Yeah, absolutely. That's amazing. Wow. Yeah. So, then I realized you can't be in two states at once. And so could, I don't believe in hacks because I don't think nature has a lot of shortcuts, but could I force my way out of a contracted state by participating something on my dilated list?

41:04And that was the first time I ever was able to ward off a panic attack. So what would you do? Was it a physiologic? Was it a physical move? Was it a imagining something? What would take you from contracted to dilated in that moment most effectively? On my dilated list was thoughts like I'll figure it out, I'll keep going, I'm not going to quit. I never quit, I will keep going. Those thoughts always relax you. Positive affirmations of control. Yeah, I wouldn't actually find that to be an interesting topic. I don't like affirmations. Well, although we might be defining it differently, to me it's truth.

41:40It's an innate in a truth that you believe in. It unlocks your system. Yeah. Because otherwise it can feel like lying to yourself. Yeah. Like one of the triggering thoughts that would really get me is I don't know what I'm doing. That was true. I had no idea what I was doing. And if I focused on that thought, it would send me into a full -blown panic attack. But the opposite of that. I'll figure it out. Was your experience was you ultimately did figure these things out? Well for me like the opposite of that thought which might have been an affirmation would have been I know what I'm doing and if I had looked in the mirror and said I know what I'm doing It just felt like a lie right my body didn't die a late so the trick to affirmations or what I call an antidote thought Is making sure you find a sentence that's so true about you?

42:24You don't feel like you're lying to yourself and you're trying to gaslight yourself into an affirmation. You're trying to make yourself believe something's true. When you know your body will respond when it's the truth, your body will unlock, it will dilate. So for me, the affirmative thought that counteracted, the contractive thought was, I won't quit. I will keep going. And that is so true about me. this day it works. Like, it's just, I know to trust that about myself. And so then you can swap the thoughts and then it's a willful act. The first time I got my panic attack to go away was a building months of awareness to notice early enough that I was starting to have these little trimmers, the precursor to a panic attack.

43:09So then I would just look on my list. On my list of dilated was gratitude. There was a rest connection to people, thoughts, feelings and actions. I chose gratitude one day. I was like, okay, let me see if I can get this to work. Can I avoid this panic attack by being grateful? I couldn't think of the thing to be grateful to work. I was so impacted and so feeling so sorry for myself, which was probably part of one of the reasons I was getting into a panic attack. So I was like, okay, what else works for me? graded curiosity. I always really worked for me. It just, it's me to soften. So I was like, be really observant and curious about my environment.

43:50So I start going like, okay, it seems like the dumbest thing I've ever done, but I see the sun going through palm trees. And that reminded me of being a kid in Alaska and really nice memory of like laying on this meadow and looking the sunlight through these birch leaves and I suddenly just thought about like that girl to this girl and what a jump it was and I suddenly was overwhelmed with gratitude. Yeah that's beautiful and it still makes me cry. Yeah it is. And it wasn't like I think gratitude has been such a misused word because it's been like hashtag right Paul Blast but it's kind of just a way to like humble brag but not look like you're bragging about your amazing lifestyle.

44:30Blast gratitude I mean like the kind of gratitude that is like honor. It should drop you to your knees. It should move you to tears. It should be your mind and your body agreeing in this behavior and thought. Suddenly I was like, I have not killed myself. I can't believe I haven't killed myself. I am so grateful to myself. And I'd never been kind to myself. I wasn't the person who went around thinking like, go you. This was the first time I had a real experience of just awe for myself, which was so abnormal. Nobody felt that way about me, least of all myself. So to have that biofeedback, basically, I gave myself biofeedback.

45:17Again, you are at this time 16. 18. Yeah. But anyway, I knew it was powerful. I I knew that if I paid very close attention to those two states, those two postures, which posture my youth like want to be. So this is like the Jewel owner's manual. Yeah, it is. Yeah. And I have a youth foundation and I teach this to lots of teenagers and for a month, everybody journals. I teach this to a lot of adults. I teach a lot of CEOs this. Yeah. Trek. It's not a trick, but watch what gets you into dilated and contracted states. And one of the best quickest ways to know is just which drugs do you like? like, because drugs do one or two things.

45:53They dilate, you re -contract, you. And they help you. So the way, like I described this is, I grew up in an abuse of household. Very intense, which is contractive, very exciting, very contractive, hypervigilance, right? You never know living with an addict, you never know what's going to happen when. And so, they always keep you in your toes. That takes being in a hypervigilant, very focused, very contracted state. So I was able to basically think of that as a bicep curl. I was able to hold an emotional posture of contraction much longer than a lot of my other classmates. Well, that's also good for practicing.

46:29I could practice longer than any of my classmates. That made me good as singing. I could study harder than other classmates. That made me good at studying. I got a reward for those things. Well, that feels really good. And so I want to hold contracted states longer and longer. Another nice thing about a contracted state and focusing is it keeps you distracted from having a feeling. You stay focused on a goal, on a prize, on being perfect, on being performative. You don't have to feel a lot of feelings. You just keep your eye on this brass ring that keeps moving. Well fast forward, a person like me, we start having a hard time sleeping.

47:04We start having a hard time. You might have a glass of wine. You might take a unissom or just an alkyve sleeping pill. That quits working and you need bigger and bigger dilators. A lot of these people become CEOs. They become highly performing, highly functional people that are so rewarded, highly intense. And they just need bigger and bigger things. And so that's where like when I work with people, I'm just like just tell me which drugs you like. It's now same thing. Like you could take my twin in a theoretical world, same childhood. This twin of mine could to handle the pressure by checking out, by just dilating, dilating into the imaginary pretend world, and just diffusing, and never really engaging, not being confrontive, not putting themselves out there.

47:53This person's gonna have a harder and harder time getting themselves to organize, getting themselves to have a self -schedule that they can keep themselves in. They're gonna be less able to focus and these people are gonna want uppers. They're going to want things that help them focus and help them contract. So a lot of my work and what I do is just helping people internally get their systems in and out of healthy, dilated and healthy contracted states. Everybody want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love.

48:31Companies called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day, when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician and they burn in the room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers.

49:09We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vascular, an AI -nabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, dexascan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup, it's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning. When it's solvable, you're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Found life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers.

49:57So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to FountainLife .com, Backslash Peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller Life Force, we had 30 ,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to FountainLife .com, Backslash Peter will put you to the top of the list. It really is something that is for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends, it's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy life spans. Go to fountainlife .com, backslash, Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners.

50:40Alright, let's go back to our episode. So, you know, I'm so impressed and I, we're going to talk about this because you've taken your teachings, your learnings and you moved them into different parts of our ecosystem from schools and such. Let's take a second. Can you give the listeners here an overview of the different programs that you've been building over the years? I want people to know the scope of your entrepreneurial efforts for uplifting humanity because they're awesome. Thanks. I first wanted to see if these behavioral tools I developed from myself could work for other, especially kids.

51:22I was very interested in the people that fell through the cracks. It didn't have access. You know, misery is an equal opportunity. It doesn't care if you're rich or poor or black or white, famous, unfamous. But if you're going to learn a new way of being, that's education and education costs money for us in our country. I haven't heard you say the word happiness yet in this conversation. And I'm super curious about, because one of the things I talk about a lot is what do we always try to optimize for in our life? And we're ultimately, everything comes down to minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure, but happiness is sort of the highest elevated version of that.

52:04Can you take one second where your conversation of happiness has been? Is it play into this? Happiness does play in. You know, my original goal was to learn if happiness was a learnable skill. You can't get happy. It's a byproduct. It's a byproduct of behaviors and choices. And so it's the fruit on the tree. You can't make the pair. You have to create an environment that

52:36Satisfaction and beauty and happiness can thrive and so you have to be much more concerned about the soil Then you are about the outcome So is that what you're teaching in these programs now? Yeah, yeah, I wanted to see if basically You know if I could use an agricultural metaphor before, I had to recultivate the soil of my being, the soil of my psyche, so that something better could grow. At a very toxic soil, at a toxic internal environment, at a toxic mindset, and learning how to recultivate that is, it's a skill -based thing. It's breaking it into steps and being loyal to one step at a time.

53:17And then trusting that if you do that, happiness is a side effect, which it is. So I wanted to see, I think the first thing was really going, all right, how can I make these tools? Are they affected without therapy? I'm not here to talk bad about therapy. I think therapy is great. It's a small rule. Not everybody has access. An expensive process. And we have a huge crisis. Like right now, we're currently 500 ,000 therapists short in America. We think if everybody sought care that wanted it, we'd be five a million therapists short. That's a bottleneck. I don't see the system fixing. It's a very broken system.

53:55Not to mention there's lots of people that go to therapy that don't get results. So that's a problem. Why is that? Why do some people get results and some people don't? There's a million factors, which I'm so well aware of, that have to do with the participant and the therapist. So how can you start to get kind of consistent results taking away some of those variables? was kind of my first question. And I wanted to work with the most difficult cases. I wanna work with kids that were trying to in their lives that were really, really unhappy. And did you do that set? Was there a particular geography you went to first?

54:26Yeah, my partner and I started in Las Vegas is where our foundation started. Mental health wasn't a word in the 90s. So we were a tennis academy and an entrepreneurship school. Okay. And we also worked on mindset. Because if you told people we're like a mental health foundation thing went, I beg your pardon. You know, I want my child to be a famous athlete and you're like, God it. So we chose tennis because it's such a psychological game. You know, it's a one -on -one game. It's you fighting you. It's your psychology. And I love entrepreneurship. I love that street hustle kids have, especially kids from reverse backgrounds where it's built into them.

55:02They're pretty, they're ambitious. They're just fueled by a chip on their shoulder, which can be used for great good. you know, if you can figure out how to channel that. So fast forward, we do nothing but behavioral tools and environment. It's our culture. It's like a very 360 approach to human development. I wanted to see if I could create high -developed, high -performing humans that came from adverse backgrounds. What was that program called? It's called Inspiring Children. We have one of the highest success rates of helping kids with suicidal ideation and... I mean, suicide, we'll talk about that.

55:41You had some suicidal ideations early on in your life. And the numbers here, you know, I mean, are pretty staggering. 800 ,000 people dying from suicide every year, one person every 40 seconds. And the number today and with children, with social media is just, you look at the graph and it's skyrocketing. So you went from Las Vegas where? What mainly had quartered there. We have a few satellites. Human development is, it's not the same thing to scale. Scaling human development, scaling healing is very difficult. It's why it's a difficult code to crack because what makes you have pain is different from what makes me have pain.

56:28What's going to help you is going to be a little different from me. So boiling these things down into things, for me, I realize the way I actually want to scale is through curriculum. It's through training. I don't necessarily want to grow my footprint bigger. I want to be more like a virus. I want to use other people's bodies to do good. And so everybody needs a mental health curriculum. Whether you're working with that risk youth or people of color or transgendered kids or people that are homeless, because everybody has to address mental health. And so I don't need to scale my footprint, I need to scale my curriculum.

57:02Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because the things we teach in school right now, the majority of them, I mean, honestly, I think are always the time. And it's, you know, we're teaching for a world of 50 years ago. Yeah. And what we should be spending our time on, including philosophy and being able to, you know, understand your mindset, your vision, your passion, your purpose and being able to debate and put forward arguments and imagine aren't the things we do. You know, when my boys last semester had to memorize the 50 state capitals and I'm like, why? That's infuriating. It is truly. We're not training our kids to inherit a gig economy.

57:43We're not training our kids to think on their feet pivot quickly and do what it takes to be very fast thinking in a very fast changing world. And using the tools that are, when people say, well, you're making chat GPT, you know, illegal in school, I'm like, huh, interesting. And you're the teacher that said, we should hand write books and not use a printing press probably five years ago. So the curriculum is in school is one of your programs. Yeah, so with the foundation, I have a program called Cella. We baked these schools into an English language arts class. It's a core curriculum. So it's not extra for the teachers They already have to learn English as a teacher as a student and so this has the addition of having some mindfulness tools built into it that are all science -based So it's basically embedding it in Something that doesn't feel threatening Just into something I'm already doing and then it is time like that's really one of the biggest problems with why I think there's a huge barrier to entry with a lot of mindfulness, especially in schools, the Olympics to curricular or additional, nobody has the extra time in school.

58:51These people are very strapped, emotionally and for time. So for me, it was just how do I be efficient? And because writing works so good for mindfulness, reading assignments work really good, it's just a natural fit for learning how to cultivate some autonomy, how to think, how to question what you're thinking, how to observe what you're thinking. So I'm curious as an entrepreneur when you're starting these programs, are you finding a partner? Are you funding these yourself? Or you talk about what your creative process is in starting these efforts. Are they nonprofits? Are they for profits? The cell of programs for profit, I partnered with a Montgomery Scound in Ohio, a Scholastic Service that builds curriculum.

59:36I don't know how to build in this class. I just know how to do the part that I do. And so we married our curriculums together and Gosh cove is slow to stand on our testing sure and so I'll be at a big educational summit, but it's through partnering It's through partnering people that do sales. I don't do sales So it's just making sure I do the part I'm good at Let's jump into inner world This is what started this conversations this podcast. We're sitting on a bench. We're until you're right You're telling me what you built and like oh my god. That's amazing would you paint the picture of when did enough become enough?

1:00:14When did you become frustrated as most entrepreneurs are to give birth to this? In our foundation, a lot of people didn't want to invest in us because they wanted scale, which can be incredibly frustrating because we have to think of the right thing at the right time, right? you can't apply the same thing to all things. And so for me, it was learning to be really patient and say, I just, I know the way to scale this isn't through a physical footprint. The way to scale this is through the virus, if you will. Helping people learn how to think. And so when VR started developing, I knew that it was getting closer to what I thought could really work, that really could scale us in a meaningful way or at least scale these tools.

1:01:01Interworld is a for -profit venture. It's a mental health intervention that happens in virtual reality. It doesn't take goggles. You can do it just on your phone or just on your laptop or just on your iPad. You know, psychology hasn't changed a lot. Psychology therapy, let's say 2 .0 was Zoom. That was the big breakthrough in COVID. it was we started to do zoom therapy, which is really helpful to people. But we don't have enough therapists, so I don't think that's going to work. And I would say number we're short again. 500 ,000 currently 5 million if everybody seeks help. So I just don't see a lot of these platforms that are building themselves to scale through online therapy working.

1:01:45I just don't see the math working out. So for us, what we did is replicate what I learned to do in our foundation, which is creating a group model. We deal with 30 people at a time and we train lay people to teach scientifically proven tools So you can take our course We can train you in CBT and DBT skills and we have a technology called cognitive behavioral immersion That basically leverages 50 years of proven behavioral Scientifically proven tools and we can teach that to lay people with the oversight of AI to lead groups So the way it works is you come in you say and by the way CBT stands for cognitive behavioral therapy and DBT is dialectical behavioral therapy super soft soft for it It's a great soft grotesque So let's say you come in I would have you choose your pain point most people know why they're there Are you having depression anxiety?

1:02:38You know what what's your biggest pain? And then you start taking the class on that and so let's say the next day at one o 'clock you want to learn about grief And you want to have a practical skill or social anxiety You'll go to a class with 30 other people. It's anonymous and virtual, which is why we have 60 over 60 % men, which is very unusual from male adoption into these types of modalities. So you're picking an avatar in the virtual world. You're giving yourself a name and you're stepping in there. And you're using your phone typically. And so you're communicating voice. And there's a proctor in this group of 30.

1:03:18either as a coordinator. There's a guide. There's a guide. Yeah, there's a trained guide who is trained in these tools and in leading these classes. And so let's say you come in for social anxiety. And one of the things we'll teach you is a behavioral tool called Solve It Ahead. So everybody will contemplate, you know, if you were to leave your house, what is the worst thing? What's your goal? And what's the worst thing you think could happen? So I might write down, I want to go to the grocery store. I'm afraid I'll have a panic attack. Public and that has kept me from leaving my home in failures.

1:03:53So we say, all right, if your worst case scenario happens, what would you do? Like what's your plan? Who would you call what would you do? We get very, very nailed down into like a really specific plan. Now we put that to the side. All right. What do you think the best case scenario is? If you went grocery shopping, what do you think the best thing that could happen is? So you write that down and I go home with no incident. and not that we get to control life, but we do get to influence it. What things could influence your best possible outcome? So you get really clear about it. I take the friend with me.

1:04:24I take the friend with me. And then you say, these are two extremes. What do you think the most likely thing to happen is? I think I'll go there. I think I'll have some anxiety. I might have a panic attack, but I might not. Great. So armed with that tool, people start going to the grocery store. So we had a woman that hasn't gone out of the house in six years. Had not even gone to her mailbox. Oh my God. And in four months, she went to a concert with 5 ,000 people. Oh my God. That's amazing. Yeah. And so we're getting incredible results. We're a clinical research platform. So we take this very seriously.

1:04:56We did beta testing for four years prior to launching. This launched, I think, as November 22. Yeah. So I mean, on the sort of the downward slope of COVID, where a lot of people needed a lot of support. So I'm curious here. So you go, you know why you're there. You register in the app. You choose from a set of situations like these are the ones that are bothering me. And then you get recommended coursework. And you're listening to videos and you're doing some exercises. Yeah, everything's live. So there's nothing you're doing on your own. It's all in this group of 30. There's a social component where you can socialize and hang out with people that's unstructured.

1:05:45There's always a guide present though. And then there's structured classes where you go for grief or for living with a long -term illness or whatever that specific skill is you're wanting to learn. And then you start to move through different classes because we need all of them. Well, and how often is someone who's joining first of all, how much does this cost you? It's costs. It's freemium. So it's free or $8 a month. Wow, so it's super affordable. It's very affordable. And if you can't afford it, it's there for you anyway. Which is amazing. I love that. And it's unlimited usage, rate bucks a month.

1:06:21Mm -hmm. Yeah. Wow. And is everybody in my cohort with my guide typically have the same situation or they sort of grouped it together? People typically are working on the same thing. They came there because they wanted to learn a tool around grief or a tool around social anxiety. And I saw some of the results. I mean, it's awesome. I mean, you moved the needle for an image. How many folks have gone through this so far? Oh my gosh, I have to ask our CEO. I should have them. And so if someone is listening and they have a friend, a family member, maybe it's themselves, where do they go to find out more?

1:06:57You go to inner .world. Inner .world. Or just go on the app store, inner .world. And like I said, you can go in with VR or without it. Just use your phone, your laptop, your iPad. I mean, you know, one of the things if I talk a lot about medicine, a lot about longevity, a lot about biotech and regrowing organs and stem cells and so forth, but the part that I don't talk about enough is mental health. And it is an extraordinary need. What's the age demographic here you're seeing? We have two platforms. One is 18 and up and the other is 13 to 17 because the growing need, I think one in four kids are having suicidal ideation right now and so we're really proud to just, we're about to launch that product.

1:07:47Yeah, covers the gamut. And at the end of the day, are there anything that you're seeing that you wish you had that you don't have, that someone wants to step in here. Is it funding for Inter .world? Is it promotion for it? What would move the needle further? We want people. Yeah, I really want to get the word out. I want more people in the platform. I want to get the word out. Right now we just got a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Health, which I'm really proud of because that takes good science. Yeah. You don't just dull that out. And the $2 million is to actually have a randomized control test so that we can really track what we're doing.

1:08:28And so that boss a little bit of runway will want funding. We haven't done a seed round yet, but we will. I'd say within six months to a year. So we definitely will want funding in a little bit. Definitely starting to set that up now. So I'd say those are the two main priorities. Everybody, I want to take a quick break from our episode. Tell you about a health product that I love and that I use every day. In fact, I use it twice a day. It's called seed health. Now your microbiome and gut health are one of the most important and modifiable parts of your health plan. Your gut microbiome is connected to your brain health, your cardiac health, your metabolic health.

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1:10:23It's like I so want to do something and I feel so stymied by it. I feel it's such a difficult complex issue from so many different approaches. Yeah, I had a moment of their day. I was walking along the boardwalk here. And there was, I don't know, she probably was late 20s and clearly she was having mental health issues. And she was homeless and I was with my friend and we're walking along and she's just sort jumping in front of us and and she just wanted to have a moment of attention. She just wanted someone to recognize that she was there and the moment and I'm sad I wasn't the one who did it first.

1:11:15My friend said, Hi, how are you? You could see our whole demeanor just relax.

1:11:25I'm curious, as an entrepreneur, I've thought about ex -prises for homelessness, but it's so many different things. It's financial hardship, it's drugs, it's family, it's a whole slew. Have you seen anything that works? I haven't seen anything with a robust enough approach. It really has to be a 360 -hole human approach. For me, it took mental health, it took safety. Something that I didn't think I'd become homeless, I always worked hard. It was a kind of shocking thing. And it's a quick sand. Pretty soon you start looking homeless and pretty soon you start going into, I would go to 7 -11 and ask for a job application and they just wouldn't give it to me.

1:12:12Or they would, but then I didn't have a physical address to put on the job application. and also was sick a lot. And so you start missing work because you're sick, and so that doesn't fly. You know, the exposure being homeless causes a whole host of problems. It causes mental health problems. It causes physical illness. It causes so much of your time to go into just living like an animal. I need food and water and shelter. You're reduced to what we were as cavemen, but there's nothing to hunt. It's an awful situation in an urban environment, I think, especially. So I was so exhausted by the end of the day that like the luxury of doing job hunting.

1:12:51I don't know if people realize how tiring be homelessness. It's really tiring. It's an every level. I remember people treating dogs nicer than me. I remember people walking across the street to avoid walking by me because it's awkward because I'd probably ask you for five bucks. It was hard and that bit of humankindness. I remember when people would look me fallingly at me and they'd say, hi, and they wouldn't give me money, but they would be like, how are you? Yeah. Hi. And just that was like holy hell. A gift. Recognition. I'm a human. I'm a human species. And that's actually why I wrote, I have a famous line in one of my songs that says, in the end, only kindness matters.

1:13:29And I was like, that's currency. People don't appreciate that currency. I am, you know, I do. So we do something called the Simoon Shot workshops at X Prize where we get together with individuals and we brainstorm what's a problem that's not been solved and what would we want teams to compete to do to solve it? And inherently, right? So we've been, we've conquered like mapping the ocean floor and desalination and pulling water out of the atmosphere and flying rocket ships and the tricorder from Star Trek and inherently every single time homelessness will be one of the top problems. problems. And it is such a real fundamental issue.

1:14:21And I really truly would love a great ex -price on this just to get more entrepreneurs working on it and thinking about it. It's an ecosystem. You know, for me, it's thinking in terms of a forest. Homelessness was the last thing that happened to me. Right. But a lot of things went wrong in my ecosystem system that led up to that one moment. And so you can't fix it by just housing somebody, or just giving somebody a job. You have to kind of put all those paper cuts back together to reassemble, but it's an ecosystem problem. It's just homelessness is the great visual final result of what happened, but it started a long time prior.

1:15:00And so you have to create an ecosystem. You have to create mental health healing. You have to create physical safety. You have to create an opportunity. And a lot of healing. It's hard work. It is. It is. And I know we used to go around with the kids and give people gift cards to 7 -11 or dominoes or whatever the case might be. So they'd have food or the holidays. But you know that it was just a moment, momentary patch. Which is good too. Which is good. Which is good. But the other leg that is stool here is addictions.

1:15:40What do you have going on there? Yeah, we treat addiction in inner world. We look at what we're doing as a scaled approach. If you don't have therapy, we think we can help you a lot. If you do have therapy, we think we can help you a lot. If you're in recovery, we think we can help you a lot. Because again, it's just coming down to like a lot of addiction is once you get sober, You have to look at all of the traits that led to you wanting to use. And that's mental health or whatever you want to call it, emotional health. It's emotional fitness. It's mindfulness fitness. What do I do when I want to reach for a negative coping mechanism?

1:16:16What positive coping mechanism am I going to teach? And that's one of the biggest problems I think with medicine too is we say you're diabetic, you don't get sugar, but we don't say you do get. And this is how you cook it. You have to teach a new form of education that this person wasn't raised with. but you can't take away a behavior or a coping mechanism without replacing it. So listen, I am a techno optimist. I truly am, but I've seen how technology helps. And I've seen how we have transformed the world through all these exponential technologies. And when I talk about where we're gonna be on the other side of AGI, I do believe that we can create a world of abundance.

1:17:05How much of you thought about AI being able to address these things? I mean, the ability for an individual to have a truly fully capable AI therapist, AI physician, AI teacher, AI coach that is there for them always understanding and being able to be a safety net. Do you buy that? I've already seen what it can do in medicine, just in helping diagnose people, really being thorough. There's a lot of human error, there's a lot of human greatness. But it's nice to have a extra pair of AI eyes on things. I'm not mad at that at all. We use AI in our platform. We use it as a lot of oversight. We make sure we're flagging words, like if somebody's talking about suicide or self -harm, we get alerted instantly so that we can make sure that we intervene.

1:18:01If somebody's often a place by themselves in our virtual worlds, we're able to have oversight, but being hip -a -compliant, we use it to make sure that there's a lot of moderator tools. So we're already starting to interface with it right now. There's something in therapy called non -specific effects, and it was studied and proven that it almost doesn't matter what type of therapy you're receiving, just having connection to another human has palliative care. It's called non -specific effects. So a big part of what we do is, again, the safe social environment where there's no trolling, there's no bullying, it's safe, and we use a lot of AI to make sure that we stay safe.

1:18:40So it's very quick. Within 20 seconds, we can identify a bully thanks to AI. But we still really think that human connection is incredibly important. And so that non -specific effect of even if you don't get into one of our groups to learn a therapeutic tool, you're going to have a benefit from meaningful connection. I'm going to read you this. I'm in the middle of writing one of my books I was working on this this morning. and just fascinated by the power of AI or providing empathy. Have you tracked any of this? What's going on? I have. So this is a study that was recently done and see, okay.

1:19:25So JAMA, which is the Journal of American Medical Association, said, Chats GPT, the out -performs doctors and giving empathetic advice. So here's the data. Panel of license, healthcare professionals preferred. The chat botz response to nearly 200 inquiries, 79 % of the time, over a physician. I find that amazing because we think about humans being empathic as sort of the last thing that we will have that is human is we're going to be empathetic and we're going to be able to connect with people and here we have these chatbots being seen as more pathetic. I also found in therapy sessions that humans tend to be, what I've read is humans tend to be much more open with an AI therapist because they don't feel judged.

1:20:19But in the day, that's going to be the cost of electricity and a $40 feature phone. Yeah Is that give you hope? Yeah, I think that it's helping. I think that Technology's upon us. It is and so how do we use it for good? How do we make it meaningful? My CEO and co -founder was a gamer. He spent 10 ,000 hours in One of the gaming world's camera member wing world of Warcraft and he was highly depressed. He was This is his own, he tells the story so it doesn't be speaking out of turn. But he came out as gay to his clan because it was safe and it was anonymous. But he was addicted to gaming. It was ruining his life.

1:21:04He was no longer participating in the real world. So his idea for forming inner world was based on, I need to do this for good. How do I create something that's virtual safe, anonymous, but doesn't cause people's real world life to suffer? And so for inner world, that's what we're solving for. How can I make your real world life better? How can I make a virtual experience deeply connected instead of deeply addictive? Right now, most people solving in virtual reality are just trying to have a deeply addictive experience. Sure. That's how you make money. Sure. Kids, gaming, mental health, as the mom of a 12 -year -old.

1:21:43How do you think about that? My son has had to read a lot of published papers on the effect of gaming on your brain and on your neural and biochemical response. It's very, very addictive. Did he reach a conclusion? Yeah. It's been shown to be very addictive. Yeah, it is. It is very addictive, period. Yeah. And it's been shown to create depressive episodes. The second you stop gaming, you'll go into this reflux of a depressive state. And so I think parents really need to educate themselves about what a little fun entertainment can do and how there's more and more addiction gaming centers popping up, just like heroin when other treatment centers are popping up.

1:22:23For me, I think that the single biggest skill that my kid and all of our kids really need to get is this idea of going down and in, in the observer of your thought, getting socialized to a dilated state as rewarding, not just an excitatory state as rewarding, and realizing that the entire world is vying for our kids' attention. Yeah. That's a distraction addiction. It's an excitement addiction. And so it feels like unhappiness to be calm. Because they want to feel excited. And so kids are confusing, a excitatory contracted state with happiness. Excitement is not happiness. It's a different physiological state.

1:23:06And so if we're not giving our kids the opportunity to be bored, we've learned, we've shown that they're not creating neural connections. Open play is a great study done, actually about open -ended toys, meaning a stick. You know, versus a toy that looks like an ambulance and is an ambulance, what they realized. And actually, it's a really cool study. So they took bit of theory that open -ended toys, creative play and boredom was good for brain development. Which is a pretty safe theory. Yeah, but it was radical because as parents, we feel so much pressure. like if I don't get my kid up on the latest everything and over schedule them and teach him French and Uniro, I'm behind his parents.

1:23:50And so they did a study where they took, they found kids in a village that were living a rural life that had no access to computers. They had your average 16 -year -old in America. They gave both control groups, computer programming, and the Indigenous kids won. They outperformed the kids who had been highly educated and highly tech educated. What they learned basically is that open -ended play forces you to create neural pathways. If I have to turn the stick into a plane, into a boat, into a bridge, my brain is doing that. Sure. And if you have the toy, do it for you, it won't. So I think it's just going, what kind of human do I need to build?

1:24:26What kind of future is my human going to inherit? How do I educate my human for that? That, as we mentioned in the beginning of all this, isn't being done and parents have to take that on. Yeah, I'm, there are two systems I want to you destroy and crush my listeners know it, it's the healthcare system, the education system. They need so much reinventing. It needs disrupting. And you know the music business deserved disruption. These things don't fail because they're efficient. Right, this is entropy. This is nature doing what it's built to do, which is break things down and build a more efficient model.

1:25:00So where is Jule going next? You know, you've lived out maybe a third of your life. You have a good amount left. So I follow all your advice. Yeah, well, hey. You're young enough to intercept all these technologies. What beckons you? Is there something that like, you know, man, I can't wait to have the time. You're probably a person who does it right away if you feel that all of a sudden, but where are you going next? I love what I'm doing. You know, there was a moment when I was trying to decide if I should sign my record contract where I was like, pull out. Like why would the succeed? And for me, like I saw a graph in my head of what am I and what is culture and where do I intersect in an authentic way?

1:25:47And where I intersected was I'm in pain now, what? Grunge was addressing pain. It was a revolution. It was Nirvana saying I'm in pain and it feel awful. Well, you can only feel awful so long to take it yourself. I had just gone through it a little bit younger. So by the time Nirvana was big, I was already asking now what and that's why I wrote, we'll save your soul and that's why I wrote hands. So I knew I had a shot because of that, where I saw that graph. And then when I was 40, divorced, didn't want to be just a touring musician as a mom, as a single mom, I went again, like where am I? Whereas the side here was like, oh my god, it's the same thing.

1:26:24I'm in pain now what? But it's not going to be through music, it's going to be through behavioral tools. So I just had fun. It's in, I have no idea what I'm doing. It's just every day. I never have known what I'm doing though. So it's just every day asking myself a good question and seeing what comes up That's a beautiful place to To close this out I Think it's a beautiful blessing to give people You know, I tell my kids my drop -off at school ask great questions today. Yeah, it's like the most important thing for all of us I jewel Joy to spend time with you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

1:27:00Thank you. Thank you for the work you're doing So folks, if you haven't read Never Broken, it's a beautiful voice and I particularly commend the audible which you read and do some singing in there as well. And it's a gorgeous story of perseverance, just absolute perseverance against all odds. You want to say spoiler alert? Happiness is a learnable skill. Yeah. Yeah. Being dysfunctional is very hard work. Learning how to be happy is very hard work, but being dysfunctional is exhausting. So it's worth it. It isn't quick, but it's really worthwhile. And inner .world, share it. I'll tweet it out as soon as we're done here, but when you're ready for it to hit prime time.

1:27:55I mean, honestly, there's a massive need that tech is here. It's working. When do you expect to have the science, the study completed? We just published two papers. The results are. That we're showing as effective as traditional therapy. Now we just got funding to do that. And let's do a quick calculation here. You know, a thousand times cheaper than traditional therapy. It is. Yeah. Yeah, that was a big goal. There are other people solving for this and they're trying to make prescriptions that are very expensive through medical systems. I think it's criminal. We can figure how to do this affordably.

1:28:34That's my commitment. But you know, the beautiful thing of course is it's cohorts. It's people helping people. Yeah. And we all have those individuals in our lives who were at the right moment in time that just made that small gift and let us in the right direction. And now let's just flex up in a natural system. If we have a national emergency and we suddenly need to scale up, we can send a text out to more guides and we can instantly do more classes in a day. It's a really fluid thing because of technology. And I bet you that the people who benefit and come out the other end from Inter .world are likely to be the strongest teachers in that community.

1:29:19And the most willing to give back. Yeah, a lot of people have quit their jobs because in a world save their life and they quit doing their other job. And they made this third full -time job to be a guide. It's really neat. I mean, we're helping veterans. We're helping 70 year olds that are alone and all their family and friends have died, which just kills me. We're helping housewives that have very young children and don't have time to go out to a therapist. or helping young kids that live online. It's the, I love being a rock star. It's a very fun job. Saving lives beats it 10 million fold. It puts a huge smile on my face.

1:29:55Oh, that's awesome. It's solvable. This is a solvable problem. Joel, thank you. Thank you.

1:30:13And Doug, here we have the Lemo Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their core insurance and save hundreds with liberty mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally Doug! Uh, Lemoo? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual .com. Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings very underwritten by LibertyMutual and Churns Company and affiliates Excludes Massachusetts.