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 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 for me 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 rockstar it’s a very fun job saving lives beats it 10 millionfold it like puts a huge smile on my face it’s solvable this is a solvable problem welcome to Moonshine shots my
[00:01:00] guest here today is an extraordinary American singer songwriter and actress has sold over 30 million albums for Grammy nominations you know her as juwel 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 inner do world it’s an extraordinary combination of VR and social networks to help anyone struggling with mental health 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 inworld premium service you can check it out and as always if you enjoy the conversations we have here in moonshots the the
[00:02:00] 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 juwel well hi so last time I saw you was on a porch in toride we a dear friend’s home you were teaching us how to yodel yes which was fun um I’m not going to try it right now but uh then we started talking about your moonshot your uh 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 uh which I commend never broken to everyone it’s an amazing book actually I recommend it to in particular women who are searching for their purpose in life or anybody searching with their purpose but it’s the gift you’re giving the world in a addressing
[00:03:00] mental health and I want to get into that um because it’s one of the biggest unknown problems on the planet uh 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 I mean truly from one end to the other uh you I remember my dad grew up in a small village in uh in meini in an island in Greece and he’s tending goats and picking olives and uh barely surviving and to go from there to a successful New York physician was like this Arc of this career and I remember
[00:04:02] 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 uh 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 were born into it I mean the Arc of your career was insane if you were going to paint one extreme and the other could you just take a second and share that like two little Snippets 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 I but it wasn’t always that way
[00:05:00] talk about some of the low points would you a moment yeah I think maybe to take people uh over a little Arc quickly yeah um I’m from Alaska uh my mom left when I was eight my dad and I became a duet 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 sort of where my dad took us because it was kind of the only place you know we could all figure out to go so I was raised with an ouse no running water um and singing in pretty rough places and I realized because my mom left and I was in a lot of pain my dad started drinking he started becoming physically abusive and as I I sang In These Bars and
[00:06:00] 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 the coping mechanisms but back then I just could see where ways people were trying to bury pain yeah and I remember writing down on my journal nobody outruns pain um I saw people doing PCP or heroine 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 fles forward a couple years I moved out at 15 and I knew that that’s a very risky thing like you don’t go from being an abusive of household to moving
[00:07:00] out in that movie ending well and I knew that statistically I should end up repeating the cycle 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 yeah but a win for what if I couldn’t do better and so I just really started thinking about uh nature versus nurture you know was the type of abuse that I suffered going to obscure me from knowing my nature um what 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 with have a predisposition for heart disease or diabetes
[00:08:00] 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 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 sure 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
[00:09:01] can I learn a new emotional language is happiness a learnable skill is it a teachable skill 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 and this is when you’re 15 leaving home what’s driving you at that point is it a search for safety it wasn’t a search for significance yet was it was a search for happiness what was what was driving you before you intercepted your career I think the thing driving me was I was in a lot of pain and and I didn’t want to kill myself and so if you’re not going to kill yourself you have to do something different today than you did yesterday if you want a different outcome and so I felt like by the way that’s a pretty Advanced simplistic but very Advanced thought
[00:10:00] right I mean people tend to not appreciate the fact that 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’ I’ve listened to many hours I was amazed at um sort of the the philosophical psychological introspection you went through in this process 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 and um by the way we have we have children boys the same age and I wish they were taking the
[00:11:01] philosophy yeah yeah I was raised moving schools once or twice a year I was dyslexic I had a very hard time reading 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 raising 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 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 ask myself a question and I would hear
[00:12:00] 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 through the spaces yeah 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 without wow 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
[00:13:01] words in a separate notebook basically so I would take whatever the Symposium and then rewrite it in the way I thought and this is as a young teenager yeah I’d say 13 and 14 um there inher and Brilliance there for sure 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 15 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 and that seemed better as long as I felt like I don’t know I
[00:14:01] had some kind of groundwork that would keep me nailed down to doing better so you do move and at 16 you’re just now starting your singing career but you’re homeless you’re what’s going on then I mean I just I just find the ark 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 yeah so I moved out I started paying rent uh I want to say it was $400 a month so getting jobs obviously was really Paramount uh I was cleaning buildings in Alaska I’m living in Homer Alaska this time in a little one room cabin um I would hit Chik 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 Workshop I was a terrible dancer but he was a te teacher at A Fine Arts High
[00:15:00] 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 um I still have to earn $10,000 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 $10,000 seemed hard but these uh six women took me under their wing and they were like you can earn this 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 businessto 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 nice 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
[00:16:01] 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 didn’t have 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 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
[00:17:00] 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 at 15 was writing so it didn’t suppress the pain it actually diminished it yeah yeah it just was like a pressure valve and it felt like okay that took some pressure off it didn’t fix everything but it took pressure off and so it became a positive coping mechanism I mean it’s interesting right uh what we do to minim I pain in our life yeah um and all this come will come back again to the to the work that you’re doing today in in mental health um you’re at this point how old 16 17 16 16 five years later you have you’re selling a million albums a month I right yeah at 21 something like thereabouts MH and uh in between then
[00:18:02] 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 you’re turned around and paying it forward you know multiple fold and living in the back of a car uh 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 I do good because I very much think you are your your your singing career was maybe your your first entrepreneurial venture and their multitude since um just the drive to keep going after adverse and adversity what was that besides pain was
[00:19:02] there a point at which you had a vision of what you could achieve and and and set out a desire to achieve that or do you was it just luck did you just happened to luck into all of this and just it’s a little bit of both uh I don’t I wasn’t a kid that thought I’m going to be famous one day even though people I sang for people as a kid it you get any kids singing it’s going to 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 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
[00:20:01] life since I was very young you know in bars I remember 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 going to be great to [ ] when you’re older wow I remember a guy when I was 12 I was kind of going to a bathroom in a bar and he was coming out and he kind of 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 that means but I think it’s a [ ] reference 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 I nothing clocked me that I set the bomb off as it were uh but the next day my my paycheck
[00:21:00] 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 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 going to pay off so it isn’t that I thought this would be a great payoff I knew it’ 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 that I should take very seriously but it also really scared me because again somebody
[00:22:00] with my emotional background God forbid I get famous that’s every biopic you’ve ever seen on every musician as well drugs and everything misery misery yeah I just greater need for fame greater need for power greater insecurity everybody Peter Dand is here uh 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 uh it’s very readable in just an hour in the book I cover longevity diet EX 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 technolog is coming our way if you want this it’s free just check out the link below and download it right now you know I think about some of the most extraordinary people on the planet and reading about their childhood it was tough it was harsh uh so much character formed during those difficult
[00:23:02] years and then I think about our kids and you know 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 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 children appropriate amounts of stress to build their system it’s like an immune system you know remember I remember uh I have to I’m going to be at neker in a couple weeks and I remember Richard Branson and one no no no this is we’re doing an ex prise uh fundraiser and he’s hosting us um uh but uh 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 uh it’s you know sort of creating uh
[00:24:01] that kind of uh 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 um maybe in Alaska there’s more maybe we’ll put them in in sort of bare Len Woods next year but I think about 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 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 FOC focused where I could get a real return on that investment which is
[00:25:00] how am I going to 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 going to happen what am I going to do about it has to perpetually be the question the self-reflection you were going through uh in those years um understanding the meaning you were giving to things 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 because I mean you have them on your website and you you speak about them and they’re they’re extraordinary one of the things that really helped me was being faithful to growth and not outcome I didn’t have that languaging when I was younger but I called it hardwood grow slowly MH I
[00:26:01] think nature is 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 um 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 pair is a side effect it’s a phenomenon of being loyal to growth a pair happens as a side effect of good growth you don’t have to make a pair happen you have to grow well and a pair happens with zero effort okay and so if you look at the outcomes of my life like you know the record sales and the music career you can’t make that happen you can only be incredibly loyal
[00:27:00] 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 uh 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 yeah yeah uh 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 don’t most people not you but most people don’t stop to think about what mind mind ET do I have and um they just go with it and
[00:28:02] that mindset makes the things they encounter in life mean different things opportunities and hardships um did when did you start realizing that you can choose the mindsets that you want how how young were you there because it seemed like it hit you early much earlier than me I think philosophy really helped me feel that way everything was a question and questions are lenses and so what questions am I asking so if I don’t 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 um I call it filter updates you know once I started to realize that I had been born into a system an 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 15 that needs a
[00:29:00] 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 you know could you couldn’t walk down the street and and have your privacy because yeah yeah the level of Fame that I had achieved was on the cover of time I was one of the most famous people in the world it was that type of Fame where you can’t walk across the street without people following you I was having I was having a a conversation with Elon I don’t know this is years ago and he goes you know only place I can go and relax is a biker bar when no one knows me yeah but they they would probably know you at a biker bar though yeah he’s a level of Fame that I don’t don’t wish on anybody I don’t yeah it’s a poison and again I don’t know what part of me knew that but when I was discovered at 18 I knew I was being offered at poison and it could help me and it could also kill me and I
[00:30:01] had to engage it like a poison and have a very deliberate plan about it wow that’s so far beyond the years I ever was when I was 18 can you talk about what mindsets you chose I mean I I I I talk about you know a gratitude mindset a curiosity mindset an abundance mindset longitude a moonshot mindset and so forth and I Define these and they’re meaningful for me and I I very carefully 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 I think for me I thought in terms of postures I called it a posture and emotional posture like a stance that I would take in life and more than mindset
[00:31:01] 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 shoplift was a big problem in my life I was homeless how old are you now 18 homeless shoplifting was in a store one day I was trying to shove these this dress down my pants because I wanted 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 worst statistic I was so disappointed I didn’t didn’t hit me till that moment that image of myself in that Mir and I remembered like maybe it was a stoic had said uh happiness isn’t what
[00:32:03] 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 that I could not witness my thoughts in real time and so now I had a problem how was I going to change my life 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 like I’m washing my hands I’m opening the door shaking so dumb exactly like I’m opening a door I’m Clos I had no idea what I was looking for I was like maybe I’ll see it B 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 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
[00:33:02] myself it suddenly dawn on me I hadn’t had a panic attack in two weeks wow that was like a radical side effect of a weird little scientific study I did you know of like was it because you were paying attention what I stumbled on to was being wildly present ah I stumbl what you might call mindfulness presence right yeah yeah and just for you know this word mind that’s 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 dayart 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
[00:34:00] Not My Thoughts I’m the Observer of my thoughts that was a very radical and empowering thought because if I could observe I was sad I was something other than sad I was The Observer of sad and that distance between associating myself with my negative attributes which is a shelf 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 like it’s you think that’s nature natur 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 overidentifying with my thoughts I have to go down and in to 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
[00:35:01] different directions because your body is a tremendous amount of knowledge and when did you start meditating I had an aunt that was a transcendental meditation teacher and she taught me when I was 13 or 14 and then writing I didn’t know it at the time but my writing was a mindfulness exercise it caused me to go down and in and it caused me to have that little bit of a distance that curious Observer the quiet Observer it’s my favorite time in the day uh are you a morning writer uh it depends 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 5 or 5:30 and I’ll just get you know a good 90 minutes of writing in yeah and it really is it’s my happy time it’s reflective time yeah so what I discovered and I’ll trangle through this quickly 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
[00:36:01] was doing this writing I 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 right 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 going to be the perfect replacement didn’t work hated it huh 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
[00:37:01] 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 Dr an addiction it was an addiction yeah and it had a posture it had this posture of like excitatory super in my head okay that was very interesting that was neat experience so now let me see what does it feel like by way your ability to sit and observe this in yourself is the extraordinary gift because most people are unable they need a third person observing them or asking them but your ability and maybe it goes back to your early philosophical um you know uh approach that’s beautiful it saved my life for sure and so what happened then your your posture yeah I thought about writing what is my posture when I write I leaned back my voice right now talking about it just
[00:38:00] dropped octave sure my eyes are dilating my blood pressure is dropping I’m much more relaxed that was so interesting to me so then I wrote down dilated and contracted in my notebook and I was like what if I only I started to follow myself around 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 sure it can be you know lots of good things require it can be determination to you know survive exactly and it can also be a compensating method I I’ll explain it a little bit so what I did for a month was write down anytime I was dilated and anytime I was contracted I used my body as my barometer yeah sure every time I felt relaxed I would write down I had three categories so under dilated I had thinking feeling doing same thing under
[00:39:00] 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 I learned my idiosyncratic triggers if you will that could force my body in and out of these two states which have huge physiological and neurochemical reproductions yeah Tony Robbins teaches this uh a yeah absolutely it’s amazing wow yeah so then I realized you can’t be in two states at once and so could I don’t believe in hacks because I don’t think nature has a lot of shortcuts but could I force my way out
[00:40:01] of a contracted state by participating something on my dilated list and that was the first time I ever was able to ward off a panic attack so what would you do was it was it a was it a physiologic was it a physical move was it a imagining something what would take you from contracted to dilated in that moment most effectively on my dilated list was uh thoughts like I’ll figure it out I’ll keep going I’m not going to quit I never quit I will keep going those thoughts always relax positive affirmations of control yeah I wouldn’t actually I find that to be an interesting topic I don’t like affirmations well although we might be defining it differently um to me it’s truth it’s a it’s a innate truth that you that you believe in heart that 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 but the
[00:41:01] opposite I’ll figure it out yeah was your experience was you ultimately did figure these things out well for me like the opposite of that thought which might have been an affirmation would have been 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 antidote thought is making sure you find a sentence that’s so trly about you 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 I will keep going and that is so true about me this day it works like it’s just I know to trust that about myself and so then you can swap the thoughts and then it’s a willful act the first
[00:42:00] time I got my panic attack to go away was a building months of awareness to notice early enough that I was starting to have these little trimmers the 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 see if I can get this to work can I avoid this panic attack by being grateful I couldn’t think of a thing to be grateful 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 gra 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 sorry so I start going like okay okay it seems like the dumbest thing I’ve ever done but I see the Sun going through
[00:43:00] 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 gratitude with gratitude that’s beautiful and it still makes me cry yeah it is and it wasn’t like I think gratitude has been such a misused word because it’s been like # great Paul 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 of myself I wasn’t the person who went around thinking like go you this
[00:44:01] 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 biof feedback basically I gave myself biof feedback again you are at this time 16 18 18 yeah but anyway I knew it was powerful W I knew that if I paid very close attention to those two states those two postures which posture am I owner manual yeah it is yeah and I have a Youth Foundation and I teach this to lots of teenagers and for a month everybody journals I teach this to a lot of adults I teach a lot of CEOs this yeah 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 cuz drugs do one or two things things they dilate you or contract you and they help you so the
[00:45:00] 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 going to happen when and so that always keeps you on your toes that takes being in a hyper Vigilant very Focus or a contracted state so I was able to basically think of that as a bicep curl I was able to hold emotional posture of contraction 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 yeah I could study harder than other classmates that made me good at studying I got a reward for those things well that feels really good and so I want to hold contracted States longer and longer another nice thing about a contracted State and focusing is it keeps you distracted from having a feeling you stay focused on a goal on a prize on being perfect on on being performative you don’t have to feel a lot of feelings you just keep your eye
[00:46:00] 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 innocuous sleeping pill that quits working and you need bigger and bigger dilators a lot of these people become CEOs they become highly performing highly functional people that are so rewarded highly intense and they just need bigger and bigger things and so that’s where like when I work with people I’m just like just tell me which drugs you like 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 going to have a harder and harder time getting themselves to organize getting
[00:47:00] themselves to have a self uh schedule that they can keep themselves in um they’re going to be less able to focus and these people are going to want uppers they’re going to want things that help them focus and help them contract so a lot of my work and what I do is just helping people internally get their systems in and out of healthy dilated and healthy contracted States everybody 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 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 when you have a pain in your side you go to the physician or the emergency room and they say listen I’m sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three three or four going on and you know it didn’t start that morning it
[00:48:00] probably was a problem that’s been going on for some time but because we never look we don’t find out so what we built at Fountain life was the world’s most advanced diagnostic Centers we have four across the us today and we’re building 20 around the world these centers give you a full body m a brain a brain vasculature an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque Dex scan a Grail blood cancer test a full executive blood workup it’s the most advanced workup you’ll ever receive 150 gigabyt of data that then go to our AIS and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it’s solvable you’re going to find out eventually might as well find out when you can take action Fountain life also has an entire side of the Therapeutics we look around the world for the most Advanced Therapeutics that can add 10 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers so if this is of interest to you
[00:49:02] please go and check it out go to Fountain life.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 Fountain life.com Peter will put you to the top of the list really it’s something that is um for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family the CEOs of my companies my friends it’s a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans go to fountainlife decomp 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 uh I I’m so impressed and I we’re going to talk about this because you’ve taken your your teachings your learnings and you moved them into different parts of our ecosystem from schools and such
[00:50:02] 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 thanks um 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 but if you’re going to learn a new way of being that’s education and education costs money for us in our country I haven’t heard you say the word happiness yet in this conversation and I’m I’m super curious about because 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 all ultimately everything comes down to minimizing pain and maximizing you know
[00:51:02] 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 is it play into into this happiness does play in you know my original goal was to learn if happiness was a learnable skill you can’t get happy it’s a byproduct it’s a byproduct of behaviors and choices and so it’s the fruit on the tree you can’t make the pair you have to create an environment that 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 so is that what you’re teaching in these programs now yeah yeah I wanted to see if basically you know if I could use an agricultural metaphor I had to
[00:52:01] recultivated the soil of my being the soil of my psyche so that something better could grow at a very toxic soil at a toxic internal environment at a toxic mindset and learning how to recultivated 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 A SL not everybody has access expensive process and we have a huge crisis like right now we’re currently 500,000 therapists short in America we think if everybody sought care that wanted it we’d be 5 million therapist 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
[00:53:00] results so that’s a problem why is that why does 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 I want to worked with kids that were trying to in their lives that were really really happy and didn’t was there a particular geography you went to First yeah my partner and I started in Las Vegas is where our foundation started um mental health wasn’t a word in the 90s so we were a tennis academy and an entrepreneurship school okay 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 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
[00:54:00] street hustle kids have especially kids from Revere 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 360 approach to human development I wanted to see if I could create high developed high- performing humans that came from adverse backgrounds what was that program called it’s called inspiring children we have one of the highest success rates of helping kids with suicidal ideation and I mean suicide um I will we’ll talk about that um uh you had some suicidal ideations early on your life and the numbers here you know I mean are pretty staggering 800,000 people dying from suicide every year one person every 40 seconds um and the number today in with children with
[00:55:00] social media is just it’s you look at the graph and it’s skyrocketing um so you went from Las Vegas where 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 cuz 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 so boiling these things down into things for me I realize the way I actually want to scale is through curriculum it’s through training I don’t necessarily want to grow my footprint bigger I want to be more like a virus I want to use other people’s bodies to do good and so everybody needs a mental health curriculum whether you’re working with at risk youth or people of color or transgendered kids or people that are homeless everybody has to address mental
[00:56:00] health and so I don’t need to scale my footprint I need to scale my curriculum 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 50 years ago yeah 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 and 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 50 state capitals I’m like why it’s infuriating it is it Tru is 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 and and using the tools that are are when people say well making chat GPT you
[00:57:00] know illegal in school I’m like huh interesting and you’re the teacher that said we should handw write books and not use a printing press probably 500 years ago um so the curriculum is in school is one of your programs yeah so we have the foundation I have a program called Cella we baked these schools into an English language arts class it’s a Core Curriculum so 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 so it’s basically uh embedding it in something that doesn’t feel threatening just and it’s something I’m already doing and then it is time like that’s really one of the biggest problems with why I think there’s a huge barrier to entry with a lot of mindfulness especially in schools 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
[00:58:00] because writing works so good for mindfulness reading assignments work really good it’s just a natural fit for learning how to cultivate some autonomy how to think how to question what you’re thinking how to observe what you’re thinking so I’m curious as an entrepreneur when you’re starting these programs um 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 the sell programs for profit I partnered with a Montgomery Scout in uh 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 Co slow us down on our testing and so I’ll be at a big educational Summit but it’s through partnering it’s through partnering with people that do say I don’t do sales so it’s just making sure I do the part I’m good at uh let’s jump into inner World
[00:59:01] um this is what started this conversation this podcast we’re sitting on a bench we’re tell you I you’re telling me what you built and I’m like oh my God that’s amazing uh would you paint the picture of of when did enough become enough when did you become uh frustrated as most entrepreneurs are to give birth to this in our foundation a lot of people didn’t want to invest in us because they wanted scale which can be incredibly frustrating because we have to think of the right thing at the right time right you can’t apply the same thing to All Things um 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
[01:00:01] in a meaningful way or at least scale these tools um inner world is a for-profit venture it’s a mental health intervention that happens in virtual reality um 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 um 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 I don’t what the number we’re short again 500,000 currently 5 million if everybody seeks help so I just don’t see a lot of these platforms that are building themselves to scale through online therapy working 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 lay people to teach scientifically proven tools so
[01:01:02] you can take our course we can train you in CBT and DBT skills and we have a technology called cognitive behavioral immersion that basically leverages 50 years of proven behavioral scientifically proven tools and we can teach that to lay people with the oversight of AI to lead groups so the way it works is you come in you say by way CBT stands for cognitive behavioral therapy and DBT is dialectical behavioral therapy super soft spot for it because 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 1:00 you want to learn about grief and you want to have a practice a skill or social anxiety you’ll go to a class with 30 other people it’s Anonymous and virtual which is why we have 60 over 60% men which is very unusual for male adoption
[01:02:01] into these types of modalities 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 uh and it’s your you’re using your phone typically and so you’re communicating voice um and there’s a proctor in this group of 30 there’s a coordinator there’s a guide there’s a guide yeah there’s a trained guide who is trained in these tools and in leading these classes and so let’s say you come in for social anxiety and one of the things we’ll teach you is a behavioral tool called Sol 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 want to go to the grocery store I’m afraid I’ll have a panic attack in public and that has kept me from leaving my helmet years so we say all right if your worst case scenario happens what would you do like
[01:03:00] what’s your plan who would you call what would you do we get very very nailed down into like a really specific plan now we put that to the side all right what do you think the best case scenario is if you went grocery shopping what do you think the best thing that could happen is so you write that down 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 get really clear about it uh St back in that favor 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 oh my God and in four months she went to a concert with 5,000 people oh my God that’s amazing yeah and so we’re getting incredible results we’re a clinical research platform so we take this very seriously we did beta testing for four
[01:04:00] years prior to launching this launched I think it was November 22 Yeah so I mean on the sort of the downward slope of covid where a lot of people needed a lot of support 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 uh and you’re listening to videos and you’re doing some exercises yeah everything’s live so there’s not there’s nothing you’re doing on your own it’s all in this group of 30 there’s a social component where you can socialize and hang out with people that’s unstructured there’s always a guide present though and then there’s structured classes where you go for grief or for or 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
[01:05:01] because we need all of them wow and how often does someone uh who’s joining first of all how much does this cost you this costs it’s premium so it’s free or $8 a month wow so it’s super affordable it’s very affordable and and if you can’t afford it it’s there for you anyway yeah which is amazing I love that um and it’s unlimited usage for eight bucks a month MH yeah wow and does everybody in my cohort with my guide typically have the same situation or they sort of grouped together people typically are they’re working on the same thing they came there because they wanted to learn a tool around brief or a tool around social anxiety 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 oh my gosh I have to ask our C CEO I should have the number and so if someone is listening and they have have uh a friend a family member maybe it’s themselves uh where do they go to find out more go to Inner dotor
[01:06:01] inner do World um or just go on the App Store inner world and you like I said you can go in with VR or without it just use your phone your laptop your iPad I mean you know one of the things 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 and it is an extraordinary need what’s the what’s the age demographic here you’re seeing we have two uh two platforms one is 18 and up and the other is 13 to 17 because the growing need I think one in four kids are having suicidal ideation right now and so we’re really proud just we’re about to launch that product um yeah covers the gamut and at the end of the day um are is there anything that you’re seeing that you wish you had that you
[01:07:01] don’t have that someone wants to step in here is it is it funding for inot world is it promotion for it what would move the needle further we want people yeah I really more people in the platform I want to get the word out um right now we just got a $2 million Grant from the National Institute of Health which I’m really proud of because that takes good science they don’t just d out and the 2 million is to actually have a randomized control test so that we can really track what we’re doing um and so that boss 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 I’m definitely starting to set that up now so I’d say those are the two main priorities everybody I want to take a quick break from our episode tell you about a health product that I love and that I use every day in fact I use it twice a day it’s called C Health now your microbiome and gut health are one of the most important and modifiable parts of your health plan your gut
[01:08:01] 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 seeds 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 20 4 clinically studied and scientifically backed probiotic strains are delivered in a patented capsule that actually protects it from the stomach acid and ensures that all of it reaches your colon alive with 100% survivability now if you want to try seeds daily symbiotic for yourself you can get a 25% off your first month supply by using the code moonshots at checkout just go to c.com back/ moonshots and enter the code moonshots at check out that’s seeds.com moonshots and use the code moonshots to get 25% off your first month of seeds
[01:09:02] daily symbiotic trust me your gut will thank you all right let’s get back to our episode can we talk about the other side of it homelessness yeah I’m you know I I live in Santa Monica and some of my company offices are in Venice and wow yeah um it’s it’s like I so want to do something and I feel so styed by it I feel it’s such a difficult complex issue from so many different approaches you know I I had a moment the other day I was walking along the boardwalk here and um there was a I don’t know she probably was late 20s and and clearly was uh she was having having mental health issues and she was homeless and I was with my friend
[01:10:00] 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 our whole demeanor just relax um you know I am curious as an entrepreneur I’ve thought about X prises for homelessness um but it’s so many different things it’s financial hardship it’s drugs it’s family it’s a whole slew have you seen anything that works I haven’t seen anything with a robust enough approach it really has to be a 360 whole human approach you know for me it took mental health it took safety um you know something that I
[01:11:00] didn’t think I’d become homeless I 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 7-Eleven and ask for a drab application and they just wouldn’t give it to me you know or they would but then I didn’t have a 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 you’re reduced to what we were as cavemen but there’s nothing to hunt it’s an awful situation in an urban environment I think especially so I was so exhausted by the end of the day that like the luxury of doing job hunting 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
[01:12:02] 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 yeah hi and just that was like holy recognition I’m a human I 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 uh I am you know uh I do so we do something called this moonshot workshops at X prise 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
[01:13:01] 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 and it is such a real fundamental issue and I really truly would love a great X prise yeah um on this just to get more entrepreneurs working on it and thinking about it it’s an ecosystem you know for me it’s thinking in terms of a forest like homelessness was the last thing that happened to me right 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
[01:14:00] 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 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 7-Eleven or dominoes 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 which is good too like which is which is good the other you know leg of the stool here is addictions uh what do you have going on there 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 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
[01:15:00] 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 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 a coping mechanism without replacing it so 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 through uh through all these exponential Technologies and when I talk about where we’re going to be on the
[01:16:00] 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 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 I’ve already seen what it can do in medicine just in helping diagnose people um 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 this 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
[01:17:02] 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 hippoc 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 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 paliative care it’s called non-specific effects so a big part of what we do is again the safe social environment where there’s no trolling there’s no bullying it’s safe and we use a lot of AI to make sure that we stay safe so it’s very quick within 20 seconds we can identify a bully thanks to AI but we still really think that human connection is incredibly important and so that non-specific effective even if you don’t get into one of our groups to learn a therapeutic tool you’re going to have a benefit from meaningful connection I’m going to read
[01:18:02] 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 I have yeah so it’s um uh this is a study that was recently done let’s see okay so uh jamama which is the journal American Medical Association said chat GPT outperforms doctors in giving empathetic advice so here’s the data panel of licensed healthc Care Professionals preferred the chat spot chatbots response to nearly 200 inquiries 79% of the time over a physician um 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
[01:19:01] to be empathetic and we’re going to be able to connect with people and here we have these chat Bots being uh seen as more empathetic yeah I I also found in uh in therapy sessions uh 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 but end of the today that’s going to be the cost of electricity and a $40 feature phone yeah does that give you hope 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 um 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 uh this is his own he tells the story so this isn’t me speaking out of turn but he came out as
[01:20:01] 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 how do I create something that’s virtual safe Anonymous but doesn’t causes people’s real world life to 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 because that’s how you make money sure kids gaming um mental health as the mom of a 12-year-old and how do you think about that my son has had to read a lot of published papers on the effect of gaming on your brain and on your neuro and biochemical response it’s very very add did he did he reach a conclusion yeah it’s it’s been shown to
[01:21:01] be it very it is very addictive period 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 uh other treatment centers are popping up um for me I think the 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 yeah that’s a distraction addiction it’s an excitement addiction and so it feels like unhappiness to be calm because they want to feel excited and so kids are confusing a excitatory
[01:22:02] 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 remember that toy versus a toy that you know looks like an ambulance and is an ambulance what they realized and actually it’s a really cool study so they took b a theory that open into toys creative play and boredom was good for brain development and so which is a pretty safe Theory 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 over schedule 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
[01:23:00] 16-year-old in America they gave both control groups computer programming and the indigenous kids won they outperformed the kids who had been highly educated and highly Tech educated what they learned basically is that open-ended play forces you to create numeral Pathways if I’ve turn to stick into a plane into a boat into a bridge my brain is doing that sure and if you have the toy do it for you it won’t so I think it’s just going what kind of human do I need to build 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 yeah I I’m there are two systems I want to destroy and Crush my listeners know it it’s the healthc care system and education system yeah they need so so much Reinventing it needs disrupting yeah and you know the music business deserved it disrupt ion it these these things don’t fail because they’re efficient yeah right this is entropy this is nature doing what it’s built to do which is break things down
[01:24:01] and build a more efficient model so where is juwel going next um you know you’ve lived out maybe a third of your life you have uh a good amount left if I follow all your advice yeah well hey uh uh you’re young enough to intercept all these Technologies um 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 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 Nirvana saying I’m in
[01:25:00] pain and I feel awful W 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 will save your soul and that’s why I wrote hands so I knew I had a shot because of that where I saw that graph and then when I was 40 divorced didn’t want to be just a touring musician as a mom as a single mom I went again like where am I where is the side 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 that’s a beautiful place to to close this out um 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 yeah it’s like the most important thing for all of us uh juel uh enjy to spend time
[01:26:00] with you thank you thanks for having me 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 uh 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 just want to say spoiler alert happiness is a learnable skill yeah being dysfunctional is very hard work learning how to be happy is very hard work but being being dysfunctional is exhausting yeah so it’s worth it it it isn’t quick but it’s really worthwhile and inworld 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
[01:27:01] need the tech is here uh it’s working when do you expect to have the science uh the study completed we just published two papers um the results are yeah that we’re showing as effective as traditional therapy um now we just got funding to do and uh let’s let’s do a quick calculation here uh you know a thousand times cheaper than traditional therapy it is yeah 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 but you know the beautiful thing of course is it’s it’s h cohorts it’s people helping people yeah 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 and it lets us Flex up in a natural system you know if we have a a national emergency and we suddenly
[01:28:01] need to scale up we can send a text out to more guides and we can instantly do more classes in a day it’s a really fluid thing because of technology and I bet you that the people who benefit and come out the other end from in. world are likely to be uh the strongest teachers in that Community yeah guides are of and the most willing to give back 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 70 year- olds that are alone and all their family and friends have died which just kills me we’re helping housewives that have very young children and don’t have time to go out to a therapist we 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 10 millionfold it like puts a huge smile on my face ohes it’s solvable this is a
[01:29:00] problem Joel thank you thank [Music] you