Pod Insights Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Solving The Mental Health Crisis with Technology w/ Jewel | EP #66 About this episode In this episode, Peter and the renowned American singer-songwriter and actress, Jewel, discuss the topic of mental health, emphasizing its significance and the challenges associated with addressing it on a large scale. They highlight the potential of technology to be a force for good, especially in the realm of mental health.
14:06 | From Homeless to Fame
30:10 | The Power of Mindful Presence
58:59 | A Mental Health Revolution
Jewel is an American singer-songwriter and actress. With four Grammy nominations and over 30 million album sales by 2021, her debut album, "Pieces of You" (1995), is among the best-selling debut albums ever, achieving 12-times platinum status with hits like "Who Will Save Your Soul." She’s the co-founder of Innerworld, a social-virtual platform offering mental health resources through trained non-professionals using cognitive behavioral tools. Innerworld is a peer-based model serving as a valuable complement to traditional therapy and structures, enhancing the spectrum of mental health support.
Try Innerworld (1-year Premium for free): https://www.inner.world/app/register/moonshots_pod
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Transcript 16,404 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:57 Peter Diamandis? So 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.
1:09 Speaker 04 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. What's going to help you is going to be a little different from me.
1:22 Speaker 04 You don't get to choose how life changes. You only get to choose how it changes you. Inner World is a for-profit venture. It's a mental health intervention that happens in virtual reality. Technology is upon us. It is. And so how do we use it for good? How do we make it meaningful? It's worth it. It isn't quick, but it's really worthwhile. 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. It's solvable. This is a solvable problem.
1:55 Peter Diamandis? Welcome to Moonshots. My guest here today is an extraordinary American singer, songwriter, and actress, has sold over 30 million albums, four Grammy nominations. You know her as Jewel. What you might not know is that she's an amazing entrepreneur. You know, the journey she's had in her personal life, from being, you know, homeless, to success on the cover of magazines around the world, is an inspiration for everybody. You might not also know that her moonshot is to deal with the epidemic of mental health disorders. She's built a number of companies. One of them is InnerDotWorld. It's an extraordinary combination of VR and social networks to help anyone struggling with mental health.
2:38 Peter Diamandis? If that's you, if that's a member of your family or a friend, please check out this episode. You know, in the show notes is one free year of her InnerDotWorld premium service. You can check it out. And as always, if you enjoy the conversations we have here in Moonshots, the extraordinary people I love in my life I can bring to you, please subscribe. It lets me know that you care about this and encourages me to go out there and find incredible moonshot entrepreneurs and bring them to you. All right, let's jump into this episode. Hey Jewel.
3:10 Speaker 04 Well, hi.
3:11 Peter Diamandis? So, last time I saw you was on a porch in Telluride, where our dear friends home. You were teaching us how to yodel, which was fun. I'm not going to try it right now. But then we started talking about your moonshot, your, the gift you're giving the world right now, and I don't mean your music, and I don't mean your incredible book, which I read, which I commend, Never Broken to Everyone. It's an amazing book. Actually, I've recommended it to, in particular, women who are searching for their purpose in life, or anybody searching
3:51 Peter Diamandis? for their purpose. But it's the gift you're giving the world in addressing mental health. And I want to get into that, because it's one of the biggest unknown problems on the planet, and it's something which we, you know, we encounter it every day as we, as we struggle with life, or as we meet people struggling with life. And I want you to tell people what you're doing and how they can get involved in that. But this is a show on moonshots. And when I read your story and I hear it from you, I listen to it in your book. Your life's a moonshot.
4:32 Peter Diamandis? I mean, truly, from one end to the other. Yeah, I remember my dad grew up in a small village in, in Mitroini, an island in Greece. And he's tending goats and picking olives and barely surviving. And to go from there to a successful New York physician was like this arc of this career. And I remember thinking, that's like me going to Mars. And when I think about what you've done. Could you take a second and just for a moment? I want people to understand.
5:10 Peter Diamandis? You know, they look at you and they say, oh, my God, this amazing, successful artist with 30 million records and Grammy nominations and and and the multitude of of of awards, but it wasn't, you weren't born into it. I mean, the arc of your career was insane.
5:31 Peter Diamandis? If you were going to paint one extreme and the other. Could you just take a second? And share that?
5:39 Speaker 04 Like two little snippets?
5:40 Peter Diamandis? I don't know. I mean, it's like, it's like, it's like, people don't, unless they've read your biography and they know your story, which many people do. I mean, they just know the success story.
5:54 Peter Diamandis? But it wasn't always that way. Talk about some of the low points, would you, a moment?
6:00 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think maybe to take people over a little arc quickly.
6:04 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
6:06 Speaker 04 I'm from Alaska. Uh, my mom left when I was eight. My dad and I became a duet. Uh, I started bar singing with him when I was eight. So growing up singing for pretty rough places, in pretty rough places in Alaska. I was raised on a homestead. Um, it's a place with no electricity. We didn't have grocery stores. We only ate what we could kill or can. That was my family's uh tradition. My grandfather helped settle Alaska. So when my mom left, that's just sort of where my dad took us. Cause it was kind of the only place, you know, we could all figure out to go. So I was raised with an outhouse, no running water. Um, and singing in pretty rough places. And I realized
6:49 Speaker 04 because my mom left and I was in a lot of pain, my dad started drinking. He started becoming physically abusive. And as I sang in these bars and watched people, I realized I had a lot in common with these people. I was in pain and I didn't know what to do with it. And that was what the pattern that I could see with everybody there. Everybody was in pain and they were finding ways of dealing with it. And so I got a front row seat to what now I would call coping mechanisms. But back then I just could see where ways people were trying to bury pain.
7:18 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
7:18 Speaker 04 And I remember writing down on my journal, nobody outruns pain. Um. I saw people doing PCP or heroin or you know, sex or volatile relationships. You would see all that play out. And I sang in there for years. So you would see it didn't work. So I made myself a promise that I wouldn't drink, I wouldn't do drugs, and I would try and understand what I did with pain. And why on earth wasn't anybody teaching me about it? Why wasn't anybody teaching anyone about it? That really bothered me. And so flush forward a couple of years, I moved out at fifteen and I knew that that's a very risky thing. Like you don't go from being in an abusive household to moving out in that movie ending well. And I knew that statistically I should end up repeating the cycle.
8:03 Speaker 04 And I wasn't moving out because I wanted to repeat a cycle. I was moving out to do better for myself. But I didn't have any logical reason to assume I could do better than myself. It might get me away from physical violence, which was a win.
8:16 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
8:16 Speaker 04 But a win for what? If I couldn't do better? And so I just really started thinking about.
8:25 Speaker 04 Nature versus nurture, you know, was the type of abuse that I suffered going to obscure me from knowing my nature. Um, would I ever get to know my real nature if, you know, now what we call trauma was obscuring that from me, um, my nurture was so bad. And so I really started to look at the problem and try and look for patterns before I let myself move out. And what for me I found was I had just been learning in science class about genetic inheritance. We have a predisposition for heart disease or diabetes. I realized I had an emotional inheritance and that was very interesting to me. In my head, it looks like a constellation or like you're in the middle of a Milky Way is the image I had. I'm really visual.
9:05 Speaker 04 So that's like what I saw in my head and I was like, just as much as we can decode DNA, I bet there's going to be a time when we can de- decode these emotional inheritance. It's a language.
9:17 Peter Diamandis? Sure.
9:18 Speaker 04 And it has syntax and it has colloquial terms. It has all of these idiosyncratic, uh, things, just the same way our genes express. And so for me, I felt like I needed to learn a new emotional language and that seemed like a clear objective. The problem, of course, was there was a place I could go to learn Spanish, but there was no place to learn an emotional language. And so I was like, what, what would I do? And I was like, maybe I can piece it together. I'll look for people with traits I like and I'll learn a word from them as it were, a a trait, a sentence from a different way of emotionally relating to the world. And so my job became kind of this mission of can I learn a new emotional language? Is happiness a learnable skill? Is it a teachable skill?
10:02 Speaker 04 Is happiness for people like me that don't, aren't raised with it? Is it something that can still be taught or learned? And that at least felt intriguing. I felt like I had a clear objective and while that isn't exactly a plan, it at least helped me feel like I had a clear thing that I was working toward.
10:18 Peter Diamandis? And this is when you're fifteen, leaving home.
10:20 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
10:21 Peter Diamandis? What's driving you at that point? Is it a search for safety? It wasn't a search for significance yet, was it? It was a search for happiness? What was, what was driving you before you intercepted your career?
10:37 Speaker 04 I think the thing driving me was I was in a lot of pain and I didn't wanna kill myself. And so if you're not gonna kill yourself, you have to do something different today than you did yesterday. If you want a different outcome. And so I felt like.
10:50 Peter Diamandis? By the way, that's a pretty advanced. S- simplistic but very advanced thought. Right, I mean, people tend to not appreciate the fact that. It what I've been doing isn't working, I need to try something new and try something new and try something new. Because get they get trapped in repeating. The only thing they know or what they saw their parents do. What gave you that that sort of internal philosophical reflection? Because as I hear your story and I like I said, I've I've listened to many hours. I was amazed at um sort of the the. Philosophical, psychological introspection you went through in this process.
11:34 Speaker 04 I was given the best weapon a few years earlier by a teacher in Anchorage, Alaska. That started a non-traditional class for kids that were really struggling. And he was basically teaching college-level philosophy to middle schoolers.
11:50 Peter Diamandis? Mm hmm.
11:50 Speaker 04 And um.
11:51 Peter Diamandis? By the way, we have we have children, boys the same age. And I wish they were taking philosophy.
11:58 Speaker 04 Yeah. Yeah, I was raised moving schools once or twice a year. I was dyslexic, I had a very hard time reading, I had missed. Huge sections of curriculum and then I would come in not knowing the new school's curriculum. So I was so far behind in school then. And you know, when you're raised in an abusive environment, you feel dumb anyway, you feel. Really worthless and then that on top of being dyslexic and always. Not knowing where I was in school. Obviously really made me feel just stupid and so applying myself in school was really hard. And for some reason, when this philosophy teacher came, you know, he would talk quite a lot. So it got me out of reading in the beginning.
12:39 Speaker 04 And I was so fascinated by the Socratic method that two people can talk and a third thing is known. It was like a magic formula. And I remember sitting up and going, I need to pay attention. My life is about to change. I have chill bumps like thinking about it. And then when I realized I could ask myself a question and I would hear an answer from inside myself. I was like, this is a superpower. And it really motivated me. I wanted to understand what these writers and authors were saying so badly that I figured out a system to help me read. What I did was I would, I don't see the black on the page. I see the white. And so I see these little vertical white squiggles going down through a book page.
13:20 Peter Diamandis? Through the spaces.
13:21 Speaker 04 Yeah. And so my brain just wasn't recognizing the right pattern. And so I, you know, made a white, I took a white piece of paper and would cut a sentence width out.
13:31 Peter Diamandis? Wow.
13:31 Speaker 04 And I learned if I limited my vision to that extreme where I could only read one line at a time. I had it, it stayed put. It didn't jump around on the page. And then I couldn't keep it together for, and philosophy is very dense. It's very long sentences that are pages long often. And so I would make notes of putting everything into my own words in the margins or in a whole separate book. So I basically rewrote everything in my own words in a separate notebook, basically. So I would take whatever the symposium and then rewrite it in the way I thought.
14:05 Peter Diamandis? And this is as a young teenager?
14:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'd say thirteen and fourteen.
14:10 Peter Diamandis? Well, there's some inherent brilliance there for sure.
14:12 Speaker 04 I don't know. I think it's just survival is, you know, and curiosity. I think it was sheer curiosity. I was so intrigued by, I wanted to know it so badly. But luckily this teacher took an interest in me. He saw me really applying myself and he gave me more and more leadership roles. He let me lead a symposium. He let me lead my own group of seventh and eighth graders. And ultimately, I think by fifteen, I was teaching teachers. And it was very empowering. You know, it was an incredibly empowering thing to have, uh, to be valued for my thoughts. And for me, when I started thinking of moving out, it was just, I, I could go live in a cabin with a guy that's mean to me. Or I could just go live in a cabin.
14:52 Speaker 04 And that seemed better as long as I felt like, I don't know, I had some kind of groundwork that would keep me nailed down to doing better.
15:02 Peter Diamandis? So you do move. And at sixteen, you're just now starting your singing career. But you're homeless.
15:13 Peter Diamandis? You're what's going on then? I mean, I just I just find the arc just continuing to surprise uh in a way that is like, oh, my God, the what was stacked against you. Can you just share just a little bit more?
15:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, so I moved out. I started paying rent. I want to say it was four hundred dollars a month. So getting jobs obviously was really paramount. I was cleaning buildings.
15:36 Peter Diamandis? Were you living now?
15:37 Speaker 04 I'm living in Homer, Alaska this time in a little one room cabin. Um, I would hitchhike to work. I was cleaning buildings. A dance teacher came from out of state and I bartered with him. If I clean your studio, can I take your workshop? I was a terrible dancer, but he was a teacher at a fine arts high school that was very prestigious. And he had heard me saying, and he goes, you should apply for a scholarship. So he helps me figure out how to apply for a scholarship. And I get a partial scholarship and I still have to earn ten thousand dollars in I think two months or something like that. So I didn't think there was a shot for me. I was barely making rent. So earning ten thousand dollars seemed hard, but these uh six women took me under their wing and they were like, you can earn this.
16:20 Speaker 04 I was like, how? They're like, you could do a fundraiser. And I was like, what is that? And they helped me. They're like, can you do anything? And I was like, I can sing. I hadn't written yet. Um, so I did a show of cover songs. They taught me how to go business to business and get donations that I auctioned off during the intermission. And I earned up enough money. My little town sent me off to school, basically.
16:42 Peter Diamandis? Nice.
16:42 Speaker 04 And I got a full scholarship. The second year I got to graduate this very prestigious school. You know, also, I was having panic attacks for the first time. I didn't know what those were. They were really scary, very disorienting. I started having health problems. I started having kidney infections and kidney problems. Clearly, I mean, I had no help though, so I I didn't have insurance. I had a medical help. Um, I started, I couldn't afford to go home on spring breaks from the sporting school in Michigan. And so I started hitchhiking around the country. And to earn money, street singing, I started playing guitar because I was raised singing. And so that's what I started doing to kind of get by on these trips that I would take.
17:26 Speaker 04 And it was easier to write. It was really, people laugh at me, but it really was laziness. Like it was, it was the path of least resistance to write than to learn somebody else's song. I'd written my whole life. I'd sung my whole life. I'd improvised a lot in these bars with my dad. And so improvising lyrics about people seemed way easier than trying to learn the chords and go through the effort of learning someone else's song. And that became my first songs, but it wasn't to start a career. It was, um, it was really just, yeah, two things it ended up doing. It ended up, you know, obviously I was just trying to get food. And the second thing was it was a tremendous pain relief. And that's what I learned when I moved to fifteen was writing. So it didn't suppress the pain. It actually diminished it. Yeah.
18:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, it just was like a pressure valve and it felt like, okay, that took some pressure off. Didn't fix everything, but it took pressure off. And so it became a positive coping mechanism.
18:20 Peter Diamandis? I mean, it's interesting, right? Uh, what we do to minimize pain in our life. Um, and all this will come back again to the, to the work that you're doing today in, uh, in mental health.
18:35 Peter Diamandis? You're at this point, how old? Sixteen, seventeen?
18:38 Speaker 04 Sixteen.
18:39 Peter Diamandis? Sixteen. Five years later, you have, you're selling a million albums a month.
18:49 Peter Diamandis? I I'm right?
18:52 Speaker 04 Yeah.
18:53 Peter Diamandis? Twen- at twenty one?
18:54 Speaker 04 Something like that, yeah.
18:54 Peter Diamandis? Thereabouts.
18:55 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
18:56 Peter Diamandis? And uh in between then, you're literally almost dying in the hospital parking lot. I remember that incredible story. The kindness of a physician and you've had the kindness of strangers and your turnaround and paying it forward, you know, multiple fold. And living in the back of a car.
19:18 Peter Diamandis? I I'm still just blown away by uh uh the ability to pick yourself up and keep going. All right. I mean, one of the things that that I know from some of the best entrepreneurs out there, and I think of you, do you think of yourself as an entrepreneur?
19:38 Speaker 04 I do.
19:38 Peter Diamandis? Good, because I very much think you are. Your your your singing career was maybe your your first entrepreneurial venture. And then multitude since. Um, just the drive to keep going after adversity and adversity. What was that besides pain? Was there a point at which you had a vision of what you could achieve and and and set out a desire to achieve that?
20:08 Peter Diamandis? Or do you was it just luck? Did you just happen to luck into all of this and just?
20:12 Speaker 04 It's a little bit of both. Uh, I don't, I wasn't a kid that thought I'm gonna be famous one day, even though people, I sang for people as a kid. You get any kids singing, it's gonna be cute. Like, I didn't take it really personally. Um, I didn't think that could happen to someone like me. Um, so I was much more just kind of, how do I get by? And I I got discovered by accident. Um,
20:38 Speaker 04 for me, uh, yeah, it was really just that. And then at some point, it was actually while I was homeless, when I started to get a following, even though I didn't, I didn't do it to get discovered. I did it, I was, I ended up homeless because I wouldn't have sex with a boss and. I've had men try to leverage me my whole life since I was very young. You know, like in bars, I remember when I was like nine or 10 and a guy put a dime in my hand and he said, "Call me when you're 16, you're gonna be great to fuck when you're older." Wow. I remember a guy when I was 12, I was going to the bathroom in a bar and he was coming out and he kinda pushed me up against the wall and he measured my esophagus with his fingers and he said, "Have you been cheating on me?" I'm still not entirely sure what that means, but I think it's a blowjob reference.
21:21 Speaker 04 I mean, the amount of predatory behavior that I had endured by the time this boss propositioned me, I had learned the bomb disarmament of protecting a man's ego, using humor, being really careful not to offend them so badly that it gives you negative repercussions, but being able to also just laugh it off and say no. So, it wasn't a hard no. I'd been doing this for a long time and it honestly went really good. Nothing clocked me that I set the bomb off, as it were. Uh, but the next day, my paycheck was due, my rent was due and he wouldn't look at me, wouldn't talk to me, acted like I was a ghost in the room, wouldn't even acknowledge my existence and I knew we'd get kicked out. It was my mom and I.
22:05 Speaker 04 Um, but I've really found, and I think I had found a little bit by then, that your character is like a stock market. It's the best stock market in the world and if you invest in your character, there are magical dividends and you never know how they're gonna pay off. So it isn't that I thought this would be a great payoff. I knew it would be painful. I knew I would pay a huge short-term price, but I felt like it was worth it. I felt like investing in my humanity was, that isn't up for sale and I've always had that feeling. I don't know why. Um, and so I started singing in a coffee shop, literally just to get by and uh, but once I started getting this following and once I started seeing people's reaction to me, I could tell. I could tell that something was special and I could tell that I had a shot at something.
22:51 Speaker 04 That I should take very seriously. But it also really scared me because again, somebody with my emotional background, God forbid I get famous. That's every biopic you've ever seen on every musician as well.
23:03 Peter Diamandis? Drugs and everything.
23:04 Speaker 04 Misery.
23:05 Peter Diamandis? Misery.
23:05 Speaker 04 Greater need for fame, greater need for power, greater insecurity.
23:09 Peter Diamandis? Hey everybody, Peter Diamand is here. I've been asked over and over again, what do I do for my own health? Well, I put it down in this book called Peter's Longevity Practices. It's very readable in just an hour. In the book, I cover longevity diet, exercise, sleep, my annual found upload, meds and supplements, longevity mindset. It's literally consumable in just an hour's time. Hopefully to incentivize you to make a difference in your life, to intercept the technologies coming our way. If you want this, it's free. Just check out the link below and download it right now. Yeah, I think about some of the most extraordinary people on the planet and reading about their childhood. It was tough. It was harsh.
23:51 Peter Diamandis? Oh, so much character formed during those difficult years. And then I think about our kids. And though our desire to give them every opportunity and to protect them and coddle them. And I'm like, damn, I need to create some hardship for them someplace somehow. Do you ever think about that with your son?
24:15 Speaker 04 Definitely. It's something that really has been at the forefront of my thoughts as a parent of, you know, how do you give children appropriate amounts of stress to build their system? It's like an immune system, you know?
24:29 Peter Diamandis? I remember, I remember, I have to, I'm going to be at Necker in a couple of weeks. And I remember Richard Branson and one of his.
24:36 Speaker 04 Is it for the tennis event?
24:37 Peter Diamandis? No, no, no, this is, we're doing an X Prize fundraiser and he's hosting us. But I remember a story I want to ask him that his mom like dropped him off in the woods, like a mile from his home when he was like nine and said, find your way home. It's, you know, sort of creating that kind of.
24:59 Peter Diamandis? And I think about this, I mean, our boys are 12, they're about to go into puberty and manhood, and there are very few manhood rituals in society today. Uh, maybe in Alaska, there's more, maybe we'll put them in sort of bear-lid woods next year. But I think about our, our kids growing up today, and we're lucky. Um, and there's plenty of hardship in the world. But, uh, how much did that, your early childhood hardship, um, shape the rest of your life?
25:36 Speaker 04 It definitely shaped everything about me. Um, for me, it's this fine line of saying, you don't get to choose how life changes, you only get to choose how it changes you. And that kept my focus off of trying to control uncontrollables, which is a waste of time, and keeping my energy focused where I could get a real return on that investment, which is how am I gonna let this change me? Will this make me more yielding, more resilient, more kind, more determined? Or will this make me more bitter, more cynical, more power hungry? It can go either way, and I don't think people take enough credit for that, that accountability, that that's all it is. Bad things happen, bad things are gonna happen. What am I going to do about it has to perpetually be the question.
26:19 Peter Diamandis? The self-reflection you were going through, uh, in those years, um, understanding the meaning you were giving to things, and you know, that we humans are meaning-making machines, and you have a choice of what you make things mean. Um, can you share a little bit about what your insights were? Cause I mean, you have them on your website and you, you speak about them and they're, they're extraordinary.
26:46 Speaker 04 One of the things that really helped me was being faithful to growth and not outcome. I didn't have that language in when I was younger, but I called it hardwood grows slowly. I think nature's, nature taught me how to be a human. Nature taught me everything I know and I realized pretty young and I was raised around big nature. So it was a really big relationship in my life, luckily.
27:09 Speaker 04 But you would see hardwood trees grew slowly and they lasted a long time. 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. You know, a pear is a side effect. It's a phenomenon of being loyal to growth. A pear happens as a side effect of good growth. You don't have to make a pear happen. You have to grow well and a pear happens with zero effort. And so if you look at the outcomes of my life, like, you know, the, the record sales and the music career, you can't make that happen.
27:54 Speaker 04 You can only be incredibly loyal to growth, going down and in. Does this feel like the right thing? Does 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 were.
28:28 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, yeah.
28:30 Peter Diamandis? You know, one of the things I, I speak about and I care deeply about is helping people shape their mindsets. You know, we're, 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. And 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.
29:07 Peter Diamandis? Did, when did you start realizing that you can choose the mindsets that you want?
29:16 Peter Diamandis? How how young were you there? Because it seemed like it hit you early on, much earlier than me.
29:20 Speaker 04 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 that you start to be much less concerned about the answers is like if I ask the right question, things will start to unlock themselves.
29:38 Speaker 04 I 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, it's for a a child that's fifteen that needs a sense of power. That was a healthy kind of power to pursue, I think. Um, and then what I noticed over time was, you know, I 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.
30:11 Peter Diamandis? You couldn't walk down the street and and have your privacy because.
30:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, the level of fame that I had achieved was on the cover of Time was one of the most famous people in the world. And it was that type of fame where you can't walk across the street without people following you.
30:27 Peter Diamandis? I was having I was having a a conversation with Elon. I don't know, this is years ago. And he goes, you know, the only place I can go and relax is a biker bar where no one knows me. But they probably they would probably know you at a biker bar.
30:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, he's a level of fame that I don't.
30:42 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, don't don't don't wish on anybody.
30:45 Speaker 04 I don't.
30:45 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
30:45 Speaker 04 It's a poison. And again, I don't know what part of me knew that. But when I was discovered at eighteen, I knew I was being offered a poison. And it could help me and it could also kill me. And I had to engage it like a poison and have a very deliberate plan about it.
31:01 Peter Diamandis? That's so far beyond the years I ever was when I was eighteen. Can you talk about what mindsets you chose? I mean, I I I I talk about, you know, gratitude mindset, curiosity mindset, and abundance mindset, longitude of moonshot mindset and so forth. And I define these and they're meaningful for me and I I very carefully.
31:24 Peter Diamandis? Let ideas and people into my life that support the mindsets I've chosen like, like someone who wants to eat healthy food avoids unhealthy foods. Did you actively choose mindsets that would support your life? What what were they? What were the mindsets that have brought you to where you are now?
31:49 Speaker 04 I think for me, I would 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. For me, I realized that my behavior drove architecture, uh, the architecture of my life. My behavior drove how I build 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. Um, I think the first time I really stumbled on this was with shoplifting. Shoplifting was a big problem in my life. I was homeless.
32:25 Peter Diamandis? How old are you now?
32:26 Speaker 04 Eighteen. Homeless shoplifting was in a store one day. I was trying to shove these this dress down my pants because I wanted a dress. And uh, 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. I was homeless and 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. And I remembered like, maybe it was a stoic had said, uh, 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 disassociative at the time, but I was so disassociative
33:11 Speaker 04 that I could not witness my thoughts in real time. And so now I had a problem. How was I gonna change my life, one thought at a time, if I couldn't perceive my thoughts? And so I realized that my hands were the servants of my thoughts. It was my thoughts slowed down into action, into behavior. So I could watch what my hands did. And so I started a journal, every single thing my hands did for two weeks.
33:34 Peter Diamandis? Like I'm washing my hands, I'm opening the door.
33:36 Speaker 04 Like, it's so dumb, exactly. Like, I'm opening a door, I'm closing. I had no idea what I was looking for. I was like, maybe I'll see it.
33:42 Peter Diamandis? 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, yeah.
33:48 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, it had an interesting side effect. Like, I, I sat down at the end of two weeks to look at, like, all right, what is my takeaway? I quit believing in myself. It suddenly dawned on me, I hadn't had a panic attack in two weeks.
34:02 Peter Diamandis? Wow.
34:02 Speaker 04 That was like, a radical side effect of a weird little scientific study I did, you know, of like.
34:09 Peter Diamandis? Was it because you were paying attention?
34:12 Speaker 04 What I stumbled onto was being wildly present.
34:15 Peter Diamandis? Ah.
34:16 Speaker 04 I stumbled on.
34:17 Peter Diamandis? You might call mindfulness, presence, right?
34:19 Speaker 04 Yeah. Yeah. And just for, you know, this word mindfulness gets thrown around a lot. 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. Well, it felt really good. And it was fascinating to me, and it really piqued my curiosity. I'm getting to a mindset, I promise, but kind of through this lens of posture. Um, so I realized, that's interesting. Uh, 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 empowering thought.
35:01 Speaker 04 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, self-shaming spiral, right? If 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? It's you think that's nature and it's not, it's nurture. And so that began to lift the skin where I 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.
35:46 Speaker 04 I have to go down and into my experience out of the idea of something into the experience of something. That also helps you get your body and your brain into this alignment instead of going two different directions. Cause your body has a tremendous amount of knowledge.
36:01 Peter Diamandis? When did you start meditating?
36:04 Speaker 04 I had an aunt that was a transcendental meditation teacher and she taught me when I was thirteen or fourteen. 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 curious observer, the quiet observer.
36:21 Peter Diamandis? It's my favorite time of the day. Uh, are you a morning writer?
36:26 Speaker 04 Uh, depends.
36:27 Peter Diamandis? No, I, I, I'll get up early as I can. And if I, if I'm super psyched, if I get up without my alarm at like five or five thirty and I'll just get, you know, a good ninety minutes of writing in. And it really, it's my happy time. It's reflective time.
36:41 Speaker 04 Yeah. So what I discovered, and I'll try and go through this quickly.
36:45 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, no, please.
36:45 Speaker 04 But I was trying to learn to stop shoplifting. I couldn't. I started to wake up after I shoplifted and it was like, oh frick, 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 of 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. But I was able to notice the urge.
37:14 Peter Diamandis? Right.
37:15 Speaker 04 The very, very last thing, maybe eight months of practicing was learning to say, I have the urge and I've caught 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 gonna be the perfect replacement. Didn't work, hated it.
37:37 Peter Diamandis? Huh.
37:38 Speaker 04 And that was so weird because as I, again, I just got away from the emotional judgment of it and I tried to just be purely observationally curious. Why? Why would that be? Why would I not like writing in that moment? But 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 to rock and I noticed everything contracted. I got excited. I acted like a drug addict.
38:08 Peter Diamandis? It was an addiction.
38:09 Speaker 04 It was an addiction.
38:09 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
38:10 Speaker 04 And it had a posture. It had this posture of like excitatory, super in my head. Okay, that was very interesting. That was a neat experience. So now let me see, what does it feel like?
38:21 Peter Diamandis? By the way, your ability to sit and observe this in yourself is the extraordinary gift. Uh, cause most people are unable, they need a third person observing them or asking them, but your ability, and maybe that goes back to your early philosophical, um, you know, uh, approach, that's beautiful.
38:43 Speaker 04 It should save my life, for sure.
38:45 Peter Diamandis? And so what happened then? You're, you're feeling this posture.
38:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, I thought about writing. What is my posture when I write? I leaned back. My voice right now talking about it just dropped an octave.
38:58 Peter Diamandis? Sure.
38:58 Speaker 04 My eyes are dilating.
38:59 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
39:00 Speaker 04 My blood pressure's 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 during 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 focus.
39:28 Peter Diamandis? Sure.
39:28 Speaker 04 It can be, you know, lots of good things require.
39:31 Peter Diamandis? It can be determination to, you know, survive.
39:33 Speaker 04 Exactly. And it can also be a compensating method. I'll, 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.
39:47 Peter Diamandis? The barometer, yeah, sure.
39:48 Speaker 04 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. Uh, 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. Uh, what was I thinking? What was I feeling? What was I doing? So at the end of the month, what I re- 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.
40:27 Speaker 04 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.
40:39 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, Tony Robbins teaches this, uh.
40:41 Speaker 04 Oh, really?
40:42 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, absolutely. It's amazing.
40:44 Speaker 04 Wow.
40:45 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
40:46 Speaker 04 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?
41:02 Peter Diamandis? Hmm.
41:03 Speaker 04 And that was the first time I ever was able to ward off a panic.
41:06 Peter Diamandis? So what would you do? Was it, was it, 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?
41:18 Speaker 04 On my dilated list was, uh. Thoughts like I'll figure it out, I'll keep going, I'm not gonna quit, I never quit, I will keep going. Those thoughts always relax.
41:28 Peter Diamandis? Positive affirmations of control.
41:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, I wouldn't, actually, I find that to be an interesting topic. I don't like affirmations, although we might be defining it differently. Um, to me, it's truth. It's a, it's a, it's an anecdote.
41:41 Peter Diamandis? Innate truth that you, that you believe in your heart.
41:44 Speaker 04 It unlocks your system, because otherwise it can feel like lying to yourself. 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.
41:57 Peter Diamandis? But the opposite of I'll figure it out.
42:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
42:00 Peter Diamandis? Was your experience was you ultimately did figure these things out?
42:04 Speaker 04 Well, for me, like, the opposite of that thought, which might have been an affirmation, would have been, um, 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. My body didn't dilate. So the trick to affirmations, or what I call an anecdote thought, is making sure you find a sentence that's so true about you. Where you 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.
42:43 Speaker 04 I will keep going. And that is so true about me to 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 tremors, the precursor to a panic attack. So then I would just look on my list. On my list of dilated was gratitude, there was, uh, rest, um, connection to people. You know, thoughts, feelings, and actions. I chose gratitude one day. So I was like, okay, let me see if I can get this to work. Can I avoid this panic attack by being grateful?
43:25 Speaker 04 I couldn't think of the thing to be grateful for. I was so impacted and so, feeling so sorry for myself, which was probably part of, one of the reasons I was heading into a panic attack. So I was like, okay, what else works for me? Gratitude, uh, curiosity always really worked for me. It just gets me to soften. So I was like, be really observant and curious about my environment.
43:49 Speaker 04 So 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 a 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.
44:14 Peter Diamandis? With gratitude. That's beautiful.
44:16 Speaker 04 And it still makes me cry.
44:18 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
44:19 Speaker 04 And it wasn't like, I think gratitude has been such a misused word because it's been like, hashtag grateful, blessed, but it's kind of just a way to like humble brag, but not look like you're bragging about your amazing lifestyle. Blessed 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 can't, 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
44:55 Speaker 04 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.
45:16 Peter Diamandis? Again, you are at this time sixteen.
45:18 Speaker 04 Eighteen.
45:18 Peter Diamandis? Eighteen.
45:19 Speaker 04 Yeah. But anyway, I knew it was powerful. I knew that if I paid very close attention to those two states, those two postures, which posture am I in?
45:28 Peter Diamandis? So this is like the jewel owner's manual.
45:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, it is. 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
45:40 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
45:41 Speaker 04 trick. 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? Cause drugs do one of two things. They dilate you or contract you. And they help you. So the way like I described this is. Uh, I grew up in an abusive household, very intense, which is contractive. Very exciting, very contractive. Uh, hyper vigilance, right? You never know, living with an addict, you never know what's gonna happen when. And so that always keeps you in your toes. That takes being in a hyper vigilant, 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.
46:24 Speaker 04 Much longer than a lot of my other classmates. Well, that's also good for practicing. I could practice longer than any of my classmates. That made me good at singing.
46:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:32 Speaker 04 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 wanna 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. We start having a hard time. You might have a glass of wine. You might take a Unisom or just a Anokiu sleeping pill. That quits working and you need bigger and bigger dilators.
47:13 Speaker 04 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. Now, same thing, like you could take my twin in a theoretical world, same childhood. This twin of mine could 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. This person's gonna have a harder and harder time getting themselves to organize,
47:56 Speaker 04 getting themselves to have a self uh schedule that they can keep themselves in. Um, they're gonna be less able to focus and these people are gonna want uppers. They're gonna 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.
48:20 Peter Diamandis? Everybody, I 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. The company is 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 where you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency 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.
49:03 Peter Diamandis? So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We 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 vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. Hundred fifty 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 gonna find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics.
49:47 Peter Diamandis? 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. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/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/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends.
50:27 Peter Diamandis? It's a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. You know, I'm so impressed. And we're gonna 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 here, because they're awesome.
51:11 Speaker 04 Thanks. I first wanted to see if these behavioral tools I developed for myself could work for other, especially kids. I was very interested in the people that fell through the cracks, that didn't have access. You know, misery is an equal opportunist. It doesn't care if you're rich or poor, or black or white, famous, unfamous.
51:32 Speaker 04 But if you're gonna learn a new way of being, that's education. And education costs money for us in our country.
51:36 Peter Diamandis? I haven't heard you say the word happiness yet in this conversation. And I'm, I'm super curious about, cause you know, one of the things I talk about a lot is, what are we always trying to optimize for in our life? Right? And, and we're ultimately, everything comes down to minimizing pain and maximizing, you know, pleasure. But happiness is sort of the highest elevated version of that. Um, can you take one second? Where your conversation of happiness has been? Does it play into, into this?
52:11 Speaker 04 Happiness does play in. You know, my original goal was to learn if happiness was a learnable skill.
52:19 Speaker 04 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.
52:27 Peter Diamandis? Mm hmm.
52:28 Speaker 04 You can't make the pear. You have to create an environment that
52:34 Speaker 04 satisfaction and beauty and happiness can thrive. And so you have to be much more concerned about the soil than you are about the outcome.
52:46 Peter Diamandis? So is that what you're teaching in these programs now?
52:49 Speaker 04 Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to see if basically, you know, if I could use an agricultural metaphor. I had to recultivate the soil of my being, the soil of my psyche, so that something better could grow.
53:02 Peter Diamandis? Hmm.
53:02 Speaker 04 I had a very toxic soil. I had a toxic internal environment, I had 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. And then trusting that if you do that, happiness is a side effect, which it is. Um, so I wanted to see, I think the first thing was really going, all right, how can I make these tools? Are they effective without therapy? I'm not here to talk bad about therapy. I think therapy is great.
53:32 Peter Diamandis? It's a slow
53:32 Speaker 04 Not everybody has access.
53:34 Peter Diamandis? And expensive process.
53:35 Speaker 04 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 million therapists short. That's a bottleneck I don't see. The system fixing, it's a very broken system. Not 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? Um, was kind of my first question. And I wanted to work with the most difficult cases.
54:17 Speaker 04 I want to work with kids that were trying to, in their lives, that were really, really unhappy and didn't.
54:22 Peter Diamandis? Was there a particular geography you went to first?
54:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, my partner and I started in Las Vegas is where our foundation started. Um, mental health wasn't a word in the nineties, so we were a tennis academy and an entrepreneurship school.
54:33 Peter Diamandis? Okay.
54:34 Speaker 04 Um, and we also worked on mindset. Because if you told people, we're like a mental health foundation, they went, I beg your pardon. You know, I want my child to be a famous athlete. You're like, got it.
54:45 Speaker 04 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. Um, and I love entrepreneurship. I love, I love that street hustle kids have, especially kids from adverse backgrounds where it's built into them. They're gritty, 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, uh, we do nothing but behavioral tools and, uh, environment. It's our culture. It's like a very three sixty approach to human development. I wanted to see if I could create high-developed, high-performing humans that came from adverse backgrounds.
55:27 Peter Diamandis? What was that program called?
55:28 Speaker 04 It's called Inspiring Children. We have one of the highest success rates of helping kids with suicidal ideation and.
55:34 Peter Diamandis? I mean, suicide, um, I will, we'll talk about that. Um, uh, you had some suicidal ideations early on in your life. And the numbers here, you know, I mean, are pretty staggering. Eight hundred thousand people dying from suicide every year, one person every forty seconds. Um, and the number today with children with social media is just, it's, you look at the graph and it's skyrocketing.
56:02 Peter Diamandis? Um, so you went from Las Vegas where?
56:06 Speaker 04 We're mainly headquartered there. We have a few satellites. Um, human development is, uh, it's not the same thing to scale. Scaling human development, human, scaling healing is very difficult. It's why it's a difficult code to crack. Cause what makes you have pain is different from what makes me have pain. What's gonna help you is gonna be a little different for me. So boiling these things down into things. For me, I realize the way I actually wanna scale is through curriculum. It's through training. I don't necessarily wanna grow my footprint bigger. I wanna be more like a virus. I want to use other people's bodies to do good. And so, everybody needs a mental health curriculum.
56:48 Speaker 04 Whether you're working with at-risk youth, or people of color, or transgendered kids, or people that are homeless. Everybody has to address mental health. And so I don't need to scale my footprint. I need to scale my curriculum.
57:00 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because the things we teach in school right now, the majority of them, I mean, honestly, I think are a waste of time. And it's, you know, we're teaching for a world of fifty years ago.
57:10 Speaker 04 Yeah.
57:10 Peter Diamandis? And what we should be spending our time on, including philosophy, and being able to, uh, you know, understand your mindset, your vision, your passion, your purpose, and being able to debate and put forward arguments and imagine, uh, aren't the things we do. I, I, one of my boys last semester had to memorize the fifty state capitals. I'm like, why?
57:37 Speaker 04 It's infuriating.
57:38 Peter Diamandis? It is.
57:38 Speaker 04 We're not training our kids to inherit a gig economy. We'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.
57:50 Peter Diamandis? And, and using the tools that are, are, uh, when people say, well, making chat GPT, you know, illegal in school. I'm like, huh, interesting. And you're the teacher that said we should handwrite books and not use a printing press probably five or years ago. Um, so. The curriculum is in school is one of your programs.
58:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, so we have the foundation. I have a program called Sela. We baked these schools into an English language arts class. It's a core curriculum, so it's not extra for the teachers. You 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.
58:30 Peter Diamandis? So it's basically embedding it in something that doesn't feel threatening.
58:37 Speaker 04 It's just, and it's something I'm already doing. Nobody has 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. You'll have extracurricular or additional. Nobody has the extra time in school. These 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.
59:10 Peter Diamandis? So I'm curious, as an entrepreneur, when you're starting these programs, are you finding a partner? Are you funding these yourself? Are you, talk about what your creative process is in starting these efforts? Are they nonprofits? Are they for-profits?
59:28 Speaker 04 The Sela program is for-profit. I partnered with a Montgomery scan in Ohio, a scholastic service that builds curriculum. I don't know how to build an English class. I just know how to do the part that I do. And so we married our curriculums together. And, uh, gosh, COVID slowed us down on our testing.
59:45 Peter Diamandis? Sure.
59:45 Speaker 04 And so I'll be at a big educational summit, but it's through partnering. It's through partnering with people that do sales. I don't do sales. So it's just making sure I do the part I'm good at.
59:55 Peter Diamandis? Uh, let's jump into Inner World. Um, this is what started this conversation, this podcast. We're sitting on a bench, we're in Telluride, you're telling me what you've built, and I'm like, oh my God, that's amazing.
1:00:08 Peter Diamandis? Would you paint the picture of, of when did enough become enough? When did you become frustrated, as most entrepreneurs are, to give birth to this?
1:00:20 Speaker 04 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. Inner World is a for-profit venture. It's a mental
1:01:04 Speaker 04 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, you know, therapy, let's say 2.0 was Zoom. That was the big breakthrough in COVID 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
1:01:32 Peter Diamandis? What's the number? We're short again?
1:01:34 Speaker 04 500,000 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. I 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 laypeople 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 laypeople with the oversight of AI to lead groups. So the way it works is you come in, you say-
1:02:19 Peter Diamandis? And by the way, CBT stands for?
1:02:21 Speaker 04 Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And DBT is dialectical behavioral therapy. Super soft spot for it, because it's very Socrates. Um, 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, you know, what, what's your biggest pain? And then you start taking a class on that. And so let's say the next day at one o'clock, you wanna learn about grief. And you wanna have a practicable skill or social anxiety. You'll go to a class with thirty other people. It's anonymous and virtual, which is why we have sixty, over sixty percent men, which is very unusual for male adoption into these types of modalities.
1:02:59 Peter Diamandis? So you're picking uh, an avatar in the virtual world, you're, you're, you're giving yourself a name and you're stepping in there.
1:03:06 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:03:06 Peter Diamandis? Uh, and each, you're, you're using your phone typically.
1:03:09 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
1:03:10 Peter Diamandis? And so you're communicating voice. Um, and there's a proctor in this group of thirty, there's a coordinator.
1:03:18 Speaker 04 There's a guide.
1:03:19 Peter Diamandis? There's a guide.
1:03:19 Speaker 04 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, um, 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 wanna go to the grocery store. I'm afraid I'll have a panic attack in public and that has kept me from leaving my home in four years. So 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.
1:04:04 Speaker 04 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. 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. Uh, I take a friend with me.
1:04:22 Peter Diamandis? Stack the deck in that favor.
1:04:24 Speaker 04 Exactly. Um, and then you say, these are two extremes. What do you think the most likely thing to happen is? Uh, 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, hadn't even gone to her mailbox.
1:04:43 Peter Diamandis? Oh my god.
1:04:45 Speaker 04 And in four months, she went to a concert with 5,000 people.
1:04:48 Peter Diamandis? Oh my god, that's amazing.
1:04:49 Speaker 04 Yeah. And so we're getting incredible results. We're a clinical research platform, so we take this very seriously. We did beta testing for four years.
1:04:57 Peter Diamandis? Wow.
1:04:57 Speaker 04 Prior to launching.
1:04:58 Peter Diamandis? This launched, I think it was November 22.
1:05:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:05:01 Peter Diamandis? So, I mean, on the sort of the downward slope of COVID, where a lot of people needed a lot of support. Um, so I'm, I'm curious here. So you go, you, you know why you're there. Uh, you, you register in the app. Uh, you, do you choose from a set of, you know, situations like these are the ones that are bothering me? And then you get recommended coursework.
1:05:28 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:05:29 Peter Diamandis? Uh, and you're listening to videos and you're doing some exercises.
1:05:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, everything's live.
1:05:35 Peter Diamandis? So there's not, there's nothing you're doing on your own. It's all in this group of 30.
1:05:38 Speaker 04 There's a social component where you can socialize and hang out with people that's unstructured. There'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.
1:05:59 Peter Diamandis? Wow. And how often is someone, uh, who's joining, first of all, how much does this cost you?
1:06:04 Speaker 04 It's cost, it's premium, so it's free or eight dollars a month.
1:06:07 Peter Diamandis? Wow. So it's super affordable.
1:06:10 Speaker 04 Very affordable.
1:06:10 Peter Diamandis? And, and if you can't afford it, it's there for you anyway.
1:06:14 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:06:15 Peter Diamandis? Which is amazing. I love that. Um, and it's unlimited usage for eight bucks a month?
1:06:19 Speaker 04 Mm hmm. Yeah.
1:06:22 Peter Diamandis? Wow. And is everybody in my cohort with my guide typically have the same situation, or are they sort of grouped together?
1:06:30 Speaker 04 People typically are, they're working on the same thing. They came there because they wanted to learn a tool around grief or a tool around social anxiety.
1:06:36 Peter Diamandis? And I saw some of the, I saw some of the results. I mean, it's awesome. I mean, you moved the needle for an amazing, how many folks have gone through this so far?
1:06:44 Speaker 04 Oh my gosh, I have to ask our C- CEO. I should have the number.
1:06:47 Peter Diamandis? And so if someone is listening and they have a friend, a family member, maybe it's themselves, uh, where do they go to find out more?
1:06:55 Speaker 04 You go to inner.world.
1:06:57 Peter Diamandis? Inner.world.
1:06:58 Speaker 04 Or just go on the App Store, InnerWorld. And you could, like I said, you can go in with VR or without it. Just use your phone, your laptop, your iPad.
1:07:06 Peter Diamandis? I mean, you know, one of the things, 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, what's the age demographic here you're seeing?
1:07:30 Speaker 04 We have two, uh, two platforms. One is eighteen and up and the other is thirteen to seventeen. 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. And yeah, covers the gamut.
1:07:47 Peter Diamandis? And at the end of the day,
1:07:52 Peter Diamandis? are, is 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, is it funding for InnerDotWorld? Is it promotion for it? What would move the needle further?
1:08:06 Speaker 04 We want people. Yeah, I really want, I want more people in the platform. I want to get the word out. Right now, we just got a two million dollar grant from the National Institute of Health, which I'm really proud of because that takes good science. They don't just dole that out. And the two million is to actually have a randomized control test so that we can really. Track what we're doing. And so that bought us a little bit of runway. We'll 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.
1:08:41 Peter Diamandis? 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. So the question is, what are you doing to optimize your gut? Let me take a second to tell you what I'm doing. Every day, I take two capsules of Seed's Daily Synbiotic. It's a two-in-one probiotic and prebiotic formulation that supports digestive health, gut health, skin health, heart health, and more. It contains 24 clinically studied and scientifically backed probiotic strains that are delivered
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1:10:08 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:10:09 Peter Diamandis? I'm, you know, I live in Santa Monica and some of my company offices are in Venice. And wow.
1:10:22 Peter Diamandis? It's it'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 the other day, I was walking along the boardwalk here and there was a, I don't know, she probably was late twenties and clearly it was,
1:10:49 Peter Diamandis? 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 of 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, my friend said, hi, how are you? You could see her whole demeanor, just relax.
1:11:23 Peter Diamandis? You know, I I am curious, as an entrepreneur, I've thought about X prizes 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?
1:11:42 Speaker 04 I haven't seen anything with a robust enough approach. It really has to be a three sixty whole human approach, you know. For me, it took mental health, it took
1:11:53 Speaker 04 safety, you know, something that I didn't think I'd become homeless. I always worked hard, it was it was a kind of shocking thing. And it's like quicksand, you know, pretty soon you start looking homeless. And pretty soon you start going into like, I would go to seven eleven and ask for job application and they just wouldn't give it to me, you know, or they would. But then I didn't have a physical address to put on the job application. And I also was sick a lot. And so you start missing work because you're sick and so that doesn't fly. You know, the the exposure, being homeless causes a whole host of problems. It 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.
1:12:35 Speaker 04 You're reduced to what we were as cavemen, but there's nothing done. 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. I don't think people realize how tiring being homeless is. It's really tiring. It's it's on 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. Um, it was hard and that that bit of human kindness. You know, I remember when people would look me full in the eye and they'd say, hi. And they wouldn't give me money, but they would be like, how are you?
1:13:15 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
1:13:16 Speaker 04 Hi. And just that was like, holy.
1:13:18 Peter Diamandis? A gift, recognition.
1:13:20 Speaker 04 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. And I was like, that's currency. People don't appreciate that currency.
1:13:33 Peter Diamandis? Uh, I am, you know, uh, I do. So we do something called this moonshot 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? What would we want teams to compete to do to solve it? And inherently, right? So we've been, we've conquered like, uh, 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.
1:14:13 Peter Diamandis? And it is such a real fundamental issue. And I really truly would love a great X Prize.
1:14:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:14:23 Peter Diamandis? Um, on this, just to get more entrepreneurs working on it and thinking about it.
1:14:28 Speaker 04 It's an ecosystem. You know, for me, it's thinking in terms of a forest, like homelessness was the last thing that happened to me.
1:14:35 Peter Diamandis? Right.
1:14:36 Speaker 04 But a lot of things went wrong in my ecosystem 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 a, 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. And so you have to treat, you have to create an ecosystem. You have to create mental health healing. You have to create physical safety. Do you have to create an opportunity? And a lot of healing. It's hard work.
1:15:09 Peter Diamandis? It is. It it it is. And I I know we used to go around with the kids and and give people, you know, gift cards to seven eleven or Domino's or whatever the case might be. Just so they'd have food over the holidays. Um, but you know that it was just a moment momentary patch.
1:15:29 Speaker 04 Which is good, too.
1:15:30 Peter Diamandis? Which is good, which is which is good. The other, you know, leg of the stool here is addictions.
1:15:36 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:15:38 Peter Diamandis? Uh, what do you have going on there?
1:15:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, we treat addiction in our uh in inner world. Um, 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. Um, 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 it's mindfulness fitness. What do I do? When I want to reach for a negative coping mechanism, what 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,
1:16:23 Speaker 04 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. You can't take away a behavior or coping mechanism without replacing it.
1:16:34 Peter Diamandis? So, uh, listen, I am a techno optimist. I I I truly am. But I've seen how technology helps. And I've seen how we have uh transformed the world uh through uh through all these exponential technologies. And when I talk about where we're going to be on the other side of AGI, uh, I do believe that we can create a world of abundance. Uh, how much have 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,
1:17:17 Peter Diamandis? AI physician, AI teacher, AI coach, that is there for them always, understanding and being able to be a safety net. Um, do you buy that?
1:17:31 Speaker 04 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. Um, but it's, it's nice to have a section, 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. Uh, we make sure we're flagging words. Like if somebody's talking about suicide or self harm, we get alerted instantly. Um, so that we can make sure that we intervene. If somebody's off in a, a place by themselves in our virtual world, we're able to have oversight. But being HIPAA compliant. Um, 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.
1:18:14 Speaker 04 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 effect. 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. So it's very quick. Within 20 seconds, we can identify a bully thanks to AI.
1:18:43 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
1:18:43 Speaker 04 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.
1:18:57 Peter Diamandis? I'm gonna read you this. Um, I'm in the middle of writing one of my books. I was working on this this morning. Um, and just, uh, fascinated by, by the power of AI for providing empathy. Have you tracked any of this, what's going on?
1:19:15 Speaker 04 I have, yeah.
1:19:16 Peter Diamandis? So it's, um, uh, this is a study that was recently done. Uh, let's see. Okay. So, uh, JAMA, which is the Journal of American Medical Association, said ChatGPT outperforms doctors in giving empathetic advice. So here's the data. Panel of licensed healthcare professionals preferred the chat spot, chatbots respond to nearly 200 inquiries 79% of the time over a physician.
1:19:46 Peter Diamandis? I find that amazing because we think about humans being empathic as sort of the last, you know, 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 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.
1:20:18 Peter Diamandis? But at the end of the day, that's going to be the cost of electricity and a $40 feature phone.
1:20:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:20:25 Peter Diamandis? Does that give you hope?
1:20:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think that it's helping. I think that technology is 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 worlds, I can't remember. I think World of Warcraft and he was highly depressed. He was, this is his own, he tells the story. So this isn't me 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. He 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.
1:21:11 Speaker 04 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.
1:21:31 Peter Diamandis? Sure.
1:21:32 Speaker 04 That's how you make money.
1:21:33 Peter Diamandis? Sure. Kids, gaming.
1:21:36 Peter Diamandis? Um, mental health as the mom of a twelve year old. How do you think about that?
1:21:43 Speaker 04 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.
1:21:52 Peter Diamandis? Did he reach a conclusion?
1:21:55 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's it's been shown to be very addictive.
1:21:57 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, it is. It is very addictive, period.
1:22:00 Speaker 04 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 and and other treatment centers are popping up. Um, for 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. Being the observer of your thought, getting uh 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.
1:22:45 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
1:22:46 Speaker 04 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 an excitatory contracted state with happiness. Excitement is not happiness. It's a different physiological state. And 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, it was a great study done actually, uh, about open ended toys, meaning a stick, you know, or a rock. Versus a toy that, you know, looks like an ambulance and is an ambulance.
1:23:27 Peter Diamandis? Sure.
1:23:27 Speaker 04 What they realized, and actually it's a really cool study. So they took, they had a theory that open ended toys, creative play and boredom was good for brain development. And so they.
1:23:36 Peter Diamandis? Which is a pretty safe theory.
1:23:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, but it was radical because, you know, as parents, we feel so much pressure of like, if I don't get my kid up on the latest everything and overschedule him and teach him French and utero, I'm behind as a parent. And 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 sixteen 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 to stick into a plane, into a boat, into a bridge, my brain is doing that.
1:24:20 Peter Diamandis? Sure.
1:24:20 Speaker 04 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? What 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.
1:24:35 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, I'm, there are two systems I want to destroy and crush. My listeners know it. It's the healthcare system, the education system.
1:24:42 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:24:43 Peter Diamandis? They need so, so much reinventing.
1:24:45 Speaker 04 It needs disrupting.
1:24:46 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
1:24:46 Speaker 04 And you know, the music business deserved disruption. It, these, these things don't fail because they're efficient.
1:24:52 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
1:24:52 Speaker 04 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.
1:24:59 Peter Diamandis? So where is Jewel going next? Um, you know, you've lived out maybe a third of your life. You have a good amount left.
1:25:05 Speaker 04 Yes, I follow all your advice.
1:25:06 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, well, hey, uh, uh, you're young enough to intercept all these technologies.
1:25:13 Peter Diamandis? What, what beckons you? Is there something that like, you know, man, oh, man, I can't wait to have the time. You're probably the person who does it right away. If you, if you feel that all of a sudden, but where are you going next?
1:25:26 Speaker 04 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, why would this succeed? And for me, like I saw a little graph in my head of what am I and what is culture and where do I intersect in an authentic way? And where I intersected was I'm in pain now what? Grunge was addressing pain. It was a revolution. It was.
1:25:55 Speaker 04 Nirvana saying, I'm in pain and I feel awful.
1:25:57 Peter Diamandis? Wow.
1:25:58 Speaker 04 Well, you can only feel awful so long till you kill 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 Who'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 forty, divorced, didn't want to be just a touring musician as a mom, as a single mom, I went again, like, where am I? Where is society? I was like, oh, my God, it's the same thing. I'm in pain now, what? But it's not going to be through music. It's going to be through behavioral tools. So I've just had fun. It's invent, 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.
1:26:39 Peter Diamandis? 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 when I drop them off at school, ask great questions today.
1:26:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:26:50 Peter Diamandis? It's like the most important thing for all of us. I, Jewel, uh, joy to spend time with you.
1:26:56 Speaker 04 Thank you. Thanks for having me.
1:26:58 Peter Diamandis? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the work you're doing. Um, so folks, if you haven't read Never Broken, uh, it's a beautiful voice and I particularly commend the audible, which you read and and do some singing in there as well. And it's a, it's a gorgeous story of perseverance. Just absolute, uh, perseverance against all odds.
1:27:23 Speaker 04 I just want to say spoiler alert. Happiness is a learnable skill.
1:27:26 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
1:27:27 Speaker 04 Being dysfunctional is very hard work. Learning how to be happy is very hard work. But being dysfunctional is exhausting.
1:27:34 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
1:27:35 Speaker 04 So it's worth it. It it isn't quick, but it's really worthwhile.
1:27:41 Peter Diamandis? And inner dot world, um, share it. Um, I'll, I'll tweet it out as soon as we're done here, but uh, when you're ready for it to hit prime time. I mean, honestly, there's a massive need.
1:27:58 Peter Diamandis? The tech is here. Uh, it's working. When do you expect to have the science, uh, the study completed?
1:28:05 Speaker 04 We just published two papers.
1:28:06 Peter Diamandis? Okay. The results are?
1:28:08 Speaker 04 That were showing as effective as traditional therapy. Um, now we just got funding to do.
1:28:14 Peter Diamandis? And, uh, let's, let's do a quick calculation here. Uh, you know, a thousand times cheaper than traditional therapy.
1:28:20 Speaker 04 It is.
1:28:21 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
1:28:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's, 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 out how to do this affordably. That's my commitment.
1:28:34 Peter Diamandis? But I, you know, the, the beautiful thing, of course, is it's, it's cohorts. It's people helping people.
1:28:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:28:40 Peter Diamandis? And we all have, uh, those individuals in our lives who were at the right moment in time. That just made that small gift and led us in the right direction.
1:28:52 Speaker 04 And it lets us flex up in a natural system. You know, if we have a, 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.
1:29:06 Peter Diamandis? And I bet you that the people who benefit and come out the other end from Inner Dot World are likely to be, uh, the strongest teachers in that community.
1:29:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, our guides are often are.
1:29:19 Peter Diamandis? And the most willing to give back.
1:29:21 Speaker 04 Yeah. A lot of people have quit their jobs because Inner World saved their life and they quit doing their other job and they made this their full-time job to be a guide. It's really neat. I mean, we're helping veterans. We're helping seventy-year-olds that are alone and all their family and friends have died. It just kills me. We're helping housewives that have very young children and don't have time to go out to a therapist. We're helping young kids that live online. It's, it's the, I love being a rock star. It's a very fun job. Saving lives beats it ten millionfold. It like puts a huge smile on my face.
1:29:54 Peter Diamandis? Oh, that's awesome.
1:29:55 Speaker 04 It's solvable. This is a solvable problem.
1:29:59 Peter Diamandis? Joel, thank you.
1:30:00 Speaker 04 Thank you.
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