Speaker 1: What do you do when your own mind stops feeling safe?
Speaker 1: How does a person sing on stage while panicking inside?
Speaker 1: How do you learn to catch your thoughts before they
Speaker 1: catch you? And can creativity become a survival tool. Today
Speaker 1: we're talking with singer songwriter Jewel about mental health, the
Speaker 1: battles that she has lived, the wisdom she's earned, and
Speaker 1: the lives she's helping to shape. Welcome to Inner Cosmos
Speaker 1: with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at
Speaker 1: Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our
Speaker 1: three pound universe to understand why and how our lives
Speaker 1: look the way they do.
Speaker 2: May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Every year.
Speaker 1: We're reminded this month to look directly at what is
Speaker 1: typically hidden. A broken arm is obvious, a fever is obvious,
Speaker 1: But a troubled mind can stay incognito, often for a
Speaker 1: very long time. As we talk about here every week,
Speaker 1: the brain locked inside the skull builds our reality and
Speaker 1: interprets our social world and generates the private weather that
Speaker 1: we live inside. And when that internal weather turns dark
Speaker 1: and stormy, that struggle can remain invisible even to the
Speaker 1: person sitting one chair away. Mental Health Awareness Month exists
Speaker 1: because that sort of invisibility carries a cost. This month
Speaker 1: asks us to bring these struggles into the light, and
Speaker 1: by doing so, to reduce stigma and to widen the
Speaker 1: pathways to care. This matters to everyone on the planet.
Speaker 1: But today I'm going to zoom in a little to
Speaker 1: talk about mental health health struggles for young people. Adolescence
Speaker 1: and early adulthood are years when the brain is tuning
Speaker 1: itself in public. You have your identity under construction, and
Speaker 1: the notion of belonging matters with an unusual amount of force.
Speaker 1: That wasn't true before, and it's not as potent later.
Speaker 1: So social feedback lands with intensity, and the numbers tell
Speaker 1: us something urgent about the state of that inner landscape.
Speaker 1: The CDC reports that forty percent of US high school
Speaker 1: students have persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and twenty
Speaker 1: percent seriously consider attempting suicide, and almost one in ten
Speaker 1: actually attempt suicide. So what we're looking at is classrooms
Speaker 1: full of young people carrying invisible storms. This issue matters
Speaker 1: to me deeply because, like many people, I have known
Speaker 1: and loved people who have taken their lives, So where
Speaker 1: can young people turn well happily.
Speaker 2: There are many options.
Speaker 1: They can turn to friends and families and teachers and communities,
Speaker 1: and now that we're in the second half of the
Speaker 1: twenty first century, there are also new digital options available.
Speaker 1: In a Stanford study of college students using chat GPT,
Speaker 1: some fraction of the participants reported that the AI companion
Speaker 1: halted their suicidal ideation. So that kind of signal points
Speaker 1: toward a future in which support can be available at
Speaker 1: two in the morning, in moments when a person feels
Speaker 1: stranded inside their own mind and beyond, the digital organizations
Speaker 1: matter enormously here. An organization can create continuity and culture
Speaker 1: and a place where a person can return on the
Speaker 1: hard days. They create rituals and language, and accountability and
Speaker 1: mentorship and the rare feeling that somebody has built a
Speaker 1: structure with you and mind. There are many organizations doing
Speaker 1: extraordinary work in the mental health space, and one that
Speaker 1: I want to highlight today is the Inspiring Children Foundation,
Speaker 1: which is an organization built by my friend Ryan Wolfington
Speaker 1: with the help of singer songwriter Jewel and some others.
Speaker 1: And the goal with this organization is a whole human
Speaker 1: approach to mental health that includes the physical, and the
Speaker 1: social and the emotional, and that brings us to today's
Speaker 1: guest singer songwriter. Jewel has lived several public lives at once.
Speaker 1: Her music became part of the emotional architecture of the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties and beyond. She's a four time Grammy nominated artist,
Speaker 1: and she has sold more than thirty million albums worldwide.
Speaker 1: She's also an author and a visual artist, and she's
Speaker 1: a forceful advocate in the mental health space. A lot
Speaker 1: of people know Jewel's voice and songs and the success
Speaker 1: that she had, but presumably most people don't know about
Speaker 1: her interior origin story. Today's conversation feels so important to
Speaker 1: me because it opens a window onto mental health from
Speaker 1: the inside. It's one thing to speak clinically about anxiety
Speaker 1: or trauma or self regulation, but it's another thing to
Speaker 1: hear someone describe how that all cashes out in real life.
Speaker 1: What does panic feel like when it takes hold? How
Speaker 1: do you begin to build a gap between stimulus and response.
Speaker 1: How do you learn a new emotional language when nobody
Speaker 1: has handed you a textbook? These are questions that matter
Speaker 1: to millions of people, especially young people. So here is
Speaker 1: my conversation with Jewel. Okay, so, Jewel, you've been very
Speaker 1: open about struggles that you had when you were a
Speaker 1: young person, So let's start there, if you don't mind,
Speaker 1: what was life like for you on the inside.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So just a little context in case people don't
Speaker 3: know my story. I was raised in Alaska. My family
Speaker 3: were homesteaders and kind of pioneers in Alaska. My parents
Speaker 3: got divorced when I was eight, and my dad took
Speaker 3: over raising us and we moved to Homer, to the
Speaker 3: homestead where my dad was raised. My dad started drinking
Speaker 3: then after the divorce, my dad, I mean today we'd
Speaker 3: use the word trauma triggering, those words didn't really exist
Speaker 3: back then. You know, my dad's childhood was so traumatic
Speaker 3: that when when he went to Vietnam, it was the
Speaker 3: first time he relaxed, Oh, it'sn't that wild. Like. The
Speaker 3: amount of yeah, just trauma and abuse that he had
Speaker 3: during his childhood was so intense. So after the divorce,
Speaker 3: he began what we would now call trauma triggering, and
Speaker 3: he began to drink to try to manage that, and
Speaker 3: he started to be physically abusive at that age, and
Speaker 3: it went rather predictably. I was also singing in bars
Speaker 3: at the time. He and I became a duet. So
Speaker 3: we were touring, like you know, lumberjack joints and fisherman
Speaker 3: haunts and biker bars. And what I really noticed is
Speaker 3: that everybody was in pain, and everybody was managing it
Speaker 3: in different ways. You know, we were singing for career alcoholics,
Speaker 3: career drug addicts. You'd see people I was in a
Speaker 3: lot of pain, and so I was just very acutely
Speaker 3: aware of it, and I realized nobody outruns it. And
Speaker 3: I would watch people use PCP or anger or sex
Speaker 3: and it never worked. And so because I'm a really
Speaker 3: visual person, to me, I saw like this original wound
Speaker 3: or pain, and then you would try to bury it
Speaker 3: with whatever drugs, alcohol, toxic relationships, and it you still
Speaker 3: would have to, like if you wanted to heal, you
Speaker 3: still have to get rid of all these layers and
Speaker 3: then still deal with this.
Speaker 2: And how old were you at this time that you
Speaker 2: were starting.
Speaker 4: Probably nine ten in there?
Speaker 2: Oh were you? And you were starting to realize that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh wow, okay.
Speaker 3: And I had just learned that the buffalo was the
Speaker 3: only animal that went into a storm, and that the
Speaker 3: quickest way was through, and it just changed my life.
Speaker 3: Like learning that, I was like, you have to be
Speaker 3: the buffalo. Like the quickest way is through, and you
Speaker 3: move toward it, you don't move away from it.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And so I made myself a promise that when I
Speaker 3: was in pain, I would go closer to it, I
Speaker 3: would look at it. And I was already journaling a
Speaker 3: lot at this point, and I realized that when I wrote,
Speaker 3: that was taking me toward it. My curiosity was taking
Speaker 3: me toward it. And it did relieve the pain a
Speaker 3: little bit and didn't cure everything, but it took enough
Speaker 3: of pressure off, like a pressure valve, that it became manageable.
Speaker 3: And I learned things, and that was fascinating to me.
Speaker 1: So I once sartainly say something that you made a
Speaker 1: shift from you realized that you could either be bitter
Speaker 1: about something or curious about it.
Speaker 2: Is this the same sort of thing about moving into
Speaker 2: the storm.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't think bitterness had kind of like entered
Speaker 3: my consciousness quite yet.
Speaker 4: For whatever reason. It was just when something.
Speaker 3: Hurts, look at it, get toward it, don't move away
Speaker 3: from it. Okay, the quickest way is through.
Speaker 1: And so what does that mean in terms of the
Speaker 1: tools that you took on the earliest tools that you
Speaker 1: took on to manage with your mental health.
Speaker 3: That was definitely writing. So like journaling was the way
Speaker 3: that I went towards something. So when something hurt, instead
Speaker 3: of doing an I mean, I didn't have these word
Speaker 3: avoidant behavior, So I'm using words now that obviously I
Speaker 3: didn't have them. But when I was in pain, instead
Speaker 3: of avoiding it, I would sit down, get quiet, and
Speaker 3: journal and that would let me move toward it. And
Speaker 3: then I realized when I journaled, I saw patterns. I
Speaker 3: saw things in the day I didn't realize. I saw
Speaker 3: there was a wise part of me that showed up
Speaker 3: that I could access and I found that, Yeah, very interesting.
Speaker 1: Can you give an example of the type of pattern
Speaker 1: you might see at the end of the day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would notice, like if it was, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe a conflict with my dad, I noticed what was
Speaker 3: going on for him that day that I didn't notice.
Speaker 3: I just noticed he got mad, you know, or yelled
Speaker 3: at me. But I I would sort of see the
Speaker 3: things that led up to it. Not that that makes
Speaker 3: abusive behavior okay, but it brought understanding, which in itself
Speaker 3: can be very helpful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so you started realizing that you could do
Speaker 1: things actively in terms of dealing with mental health in
Speaker 1: an active way.
Speaker 2: Is that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it really turned a corner when I moved out.
Speaker 3: I wanted to move out at fifteen, but I knew
Speaker 3: that statistically that wasn't a great idea. Typically abused kids
Speaker 3: don't move out at fifteen and have the movie and better.
Speaker 3: And so I would only let myself move out if
Speaker 3: I had, you know, a hope, a real reason to
Speaker 3: think I might do better. And I had been studying
Speaker 3: philosophy for quite a while at that point and.
Speaker 2: Just so familiar just reading things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and in school I had a philosophy I was
Speaker 3: deeply dyslexic, and I had a teacher take an interest
Speaker 3: and just sort of learn. I was so in in
Speaker 3: philosophy that I was very dedicated to like figure out
Speaker 3: like why can't I read well? Like what's going on?
Speaker 3: Because in those days I just wasn't a lot known
Speaker 3: about dyslexia. And so I experimented. And what I did
Speaker 3: is I took a blank piece of paper and I
Speaker 3: used an exactoblade to cut a sentence window out and
Speaker 3: then I would limit my visual field, so all I
Speaker 3: saw was one sentence at a time that I was reading,
Speaker 3: and then I would paraphrase whatever I was reading. And
Speaker 3: so I had a whole separate book of the book
Speaker 3: of the book in my words. And that caused me
Speaker 3: to have a really deep understanding and retention of the text.
Speaker 3: And so this teacher just taking an interest in me
Speaker 3: and my own kind of fascination with the concepts or ideas,
Speaker 3: he let me teach my own class. I got to
Speaker 3: teach like high school teachers about philosophy.
Speaker 4: And run seminars and it was really empowering.
Speaker 2: It was when you were fourteen years Wow. Amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was just one of those great teachers that
Speaker 3: change your life and you know, just empowering. And so
Speaker 3: when I did decide will I move out, I sat
Speaker 3: down with it and just looked at it sort of
Speaker 3: like a problem, and how do you solve this problem?
Speaker 3: And I we was just just learning about like genetic inheritances,
Speaker 3: how you know I might have a predisposition to diabetes
Speaker 3: or heart disease. And when I thought about my emotional life,
Speaker 3: I was like, I have an emotional inheritance. I saw
Speaker 3: it like a Milky Way, like you're in this huge
Speaker 3: system that has a that goes way far back and
Speaker 3: it gets projected into the future and it's like a
Speaker 3: family system. It's an emotional language. And I realized I
Speaker 3: had already been taught this language. I was already done.
Speaker 3: It was done, like I learned this emotional way of
Speaker 3: relating to the world. And so I realized my job
Speaker 3: was could I learn a new emotional language like learning Spanish?
Speaker 3: But there was no school to go learn emotional Spanish,
Speaker 3: you know, And so if if I wanted to learn
Speaker 3: a different emotional way of relating to the world, how
Speaker 3: would I do that? And that was so interesting to
Speaker 3: me that I felt like at a really clear goal,
Speaker 3: a really clear objective. And that's why I let myself
Speaker 3: move out, which is very stressful taking on that responsibility
Speaker 3: and then making it trackable, like how was I doing?
Speaker 3: What were the metrics around it? And it was exciting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh that's great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting because we think about ourselves as being
Speaker 1: free agents in the world, but in fact we're made
Speaker 1: up of our genetic inheritance and all of our childhood
Speaker 1: experiences which shape our brain. This is brain plasticity, and
Speaker 1: we don't have choice about either of those things, and
Speaker 1: so at some point we come to realize that we
Speaker 1: have to be the sculptors of our own brains. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think you've used the term rewiring. You're thinking
Speaker 1: you figured out along.
Speaker 2: The way how to do this.
Speaker 1: Do you feel like you were already figuring that out
Speaker 1: of fifteen when he left home, or you figured it
Speaker 1: out subsequently, or are still.
Speaker 2: Figuring it out?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it was something I started at fifteen.
Speaker 3: I'd say the next huge phase of development was for
Speaker 3: me when I was eighteen. I ended up homeless. I
Speaker 3: wouldn't have sex with a boss. I was in San Diego.
Speaker 3: He wouldn't give me my paycheck. I couldn't pay my rent.
Speaker 3: I started living in my car, and then my car
Speaker 3: got stolen and I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks.
Speaker 3: I was agoraphobic. If I left my little street corner,
Speaker 3: this little tree I liked to sleep under, I thought
Speaker 3: that I would, you know, get terribly ill. I was
Speaker 3: sick a lot. I had bad kidneys. I was having
Speaker 3: constant like almost died of sepsis. An emergency room wouldn't
Speaker 3: see me because I didn't insurance. Like it was definitely
Speaker 3: very rough, and I realized, especially with the shoplifting, that
Speaker 3: I would end up in jail or dead if I
Speaker 3: didn't do something. And it was really an eye opening
Speaker 3: experience because three short years later I had this lofty
Speaker 3: goal of like, I'm not going to be a statistic,
Speaker 3: I'm going to learn a new emotional language. And here
Speaker 3: I was three years later, and I was a statistic.
Speaker 3: I was homeless and stealing, and so I remembered, I
Speaker 3: want to say, it was a stoic quote, happiness doesn't
Speaker 3: depend on who you are or or what you have.
Speaker 3: It depends on what you think. And I was like,
Speaker 3: I don't have anything left but my thoughts, and so
Speaker 3: can I really change my life one thought at a time?
Speaker 3: And I took it sincerely and like earnestly, like I'm
Speaker 3: going to try, and I.
Speaker 4: Think I can change my life one thought at a time.
Speaker 4: And so I left.
Speaker 3: I had been stealing something and I was in a
Speaker 3: dressing room where I had this like epiphany. So I
Speaker 3: leave and I'm like, all right, I realized I don't
Speaker 3: know what I'm thinking in real time. If you're going
Speaker 3: to change your life one thought at a time, you
Speaker 3: better be aware of what you're thinking. And now I
Speaker 3: know the word disassociative, but I was so disassociative. I
Speaker 3: had no ability to track my thoughts in real time.
Speaker 3: I called it waking up after I would kind of
Speaker 3: wake up after I stole. I would wake up after
Speaker 3: these big events, you know, I would wake up in
Speaker 3: the middle of a panic attack. I don't know what
Speaker 3: led to the panic attack. And so what I I
Speaker 3: was like, if you can't witness your thought in real time,
Speaker 3: your actions, our thoughts slowed down into things you do.
Speaker 3: So maybe I could reverse engineer into what I was
Speaker 3: thinking by watching what I was doing. So my huge
Speaker 3: life plan was I'm going to watch my hands for
Speaker 3: two weeks.
Speaker 4: I gave myself two weeks.
Speaker 3: I'm going to watch everything I do, and that's going
Speaker 3: to tell me something about my thoughts. So I had
Speaker 3: a journal and I was like, I opened a door
Speaker 3: at eight fifty seven am, I washed my hands at
Speaker 3: whatever time.
Speaker 4: I didn't know what I was looking for.
Speaker 3: I literally just wrote down everything my hands did for
Speaker 3: two weeks, and at the end of it, I sit
Speaker 3: down and I'm like.
Speaker 4: Okay, what does this tell me about myself?
Speaker 3: Like what am I thinking? And it dawned on me.
Speaker 3: I hadn't had a panic attack that whole two weeks.
Speaker 3: I'd never gone two weeks without a panic attack in years.
Speaker 3: It was like stumbling on the most random side effect,
Speaker 3: and I was like, what has caused me not to
Speaker 3: have panic attacks? What I stumbled on was being radically present? Ah,
Speaker 3: forcing myself to watch my hands. I was so presently
Speaker 3: engaged I was. I was feeling my hand on the door,
Speaker 3: I was feeling my hand shake somebody's hand. I was
Speaker 3: so radically present that I didn't have time to worry
Speaker 3: about a future that didn't happen. And that's when I realized, like,
Speaker 3: fear is a thief. It robs you of the present
Speaker 3: moment to try and solve for a future that hasn't
Speaker 3: even happened.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 1: So you know, so brains are prediction machines. We're constantly
Speaker 1: simulating possible futures, and when people have had trauma, they
Speaker 1: tend to simulate dangerous futures. It sounds like you were
Speaker 1: able to get yourself off of that path with some
Speaker 1: intentionality there, or it sounds like it happened accidentally first, yes,
Speaker 1: but then what did you learn from that about how
Speaker 1: you could keep yourself from constantly simulating fear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for me, it was you know, Descartes said, I think,
Speaker 3: therefore I am. I realized in that period of time
Speaker 3: it's not what I think. Therefore I am. I perceive
Speaker 3: what I think. Therefore I am, and that I'm the
Speaker 3: observer of my thoughts. I'm actually not my thoughts. And
Speaker 3: that was very powerful because there's something in me that
Speaker 3: can observe my thoughts. There's something in me that can
Speaker 3: observe my actions. So if I was a car, you know,
Speaker 3: my brain isn't the driver. My brain is a steering
Speaker 3: wheel the observer. I call it capital o, like the
Speaker 3: observer is the driver. And I realized I needed to
Speaker 3: cultivate a relationship with my observer, so I didn't over
Speaker 3: identify with my thoughts because and so I called it
Speaker 3: my gap method. But like you perceive something, you have
Speaker 3: a stimulus, a really intense emotional or intellectual reaction, and
Speaker 3: then you act and so power like to get off
Speaker 3: of autopilot. If I was a car, I'd already been trained,
Speaker 3: right I was. I had maps downloaded neurologically genetically, and
Speaker 3: so I had predictable ways.
Speaker 4: Of responding to stimulus.
Speaker 3: And I realized that if I put a gap in it,
Speaker 3: then I could change the course of my life. Then
Speaker 3: I could go somewhere different. So if somebody you know,
Speaker 3: did X, I stopped. I created a gap, and then
Speaker 3: that got me off autopilot, so I could have my
Speaker 3: own thoughtful response instead of just a knee jerk reaction.
Speaker 3: And once I realized that I knew I was on,
Speaker 3: that was powerful. I know, I just became very powerful.
Speaker 2: So this is cool.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I mean, the thing that
Speaker 1: distinguishes humans from our nearest neighbors in the animal kingdom
Speaker 1: is that we have a lot more cortex that wrinkly
Speaker 1: outer three millimeters. And it turns out that because of
Speaker 1: the massive expansion of the cortex, one of the things
Speaker 1: we got was a lot more real estate in between
Speaker 1: the input and the output. So if you throw some
Speaker 1: food in front of a cat, it's going to eat
Speaker 1: the food. Me you throw food in front of human
Speaker 1: to human says I'm on a diet, I won't eat it.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: Whatever, We've got.
Speaker 1: All these pathways that we can take through the system,
Speaker 1: but we typically don't. We take the path of least
Speaker 1: resistance most of the time, so it sounds like, wait, what.
Speaker 2: You got there was?
Speaker 1: Hey, there are different paths I can take here, given
Speaker 1: the stimulus, given somebody being mean to me or doing something,
Speaker 1: whatever the thing is, I don't have to react right
Speaker 1: away in the way that is the path at least resistance.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or just the most familiar. I mean when cook
Speaker 3: comes to shove, we do the familiar thing, and it
Speaker 3: is hard to do the unfamiliar thing because it's invention.
Speaker 3: I've never done it before. I've never related to the
Speaker 3: world that way, you know.
Speaker 1: So it sounds to me like you figured out a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff the hard way on your own. If
Speaker 1: you were advising somebody now with depression or anxiety, what
Speaker 1: is the first lever that they can pull on?
Speaker 3: People do need to learn to be present because until
Speaker 3: your present, you can't make different choices, and so that
Speaker 3: has to be the number one requisite thing. And to
Speaker 3: be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to
Speaker 3: be present. You learn to do it for longer and
Speaker 3: longer periods of time. And so what meditation is is
Speaker 3: teaching people to be present. I think what people don't
Speaker 3: realize about meditation and why a lot of people quit,
Speaker 3: is because there's.
Speaker 4: A withdrawal symptom.
Speaker 3: You know, when you start being present, your mind is
Speaker 3: prompting you to be distracted. You think about all these
Speaker 3: other things, and now you feel like a failure, that
Speaker 3: you're failing at meditation. And so I think the first
Speaker 3: thing I tell people is that every time you're meditating
Speaker 3: and you get distracted, that's a bicep curl for your brain.
Speaker 3: That's the moment where you go, oh, awesome, and so
Speaker 3: to feel.
Speaker 4: Excited that you were distracted.
Speaker 3: Instead of feeling defeated. And I think that perspective shift
Speaker 3: really changes so that you're like, oh my god, I'm
Speaker 3: so excited. I just noticed I was thinking about my
Speaker 3: grocery list. I'm going to come back to my breathing
Speaker 3: or my accounting. That perspective shift really helps people stick
Speaker 3: with meditation and realizing that is the success, getting distracted,
Speaker 3: coming back, getting distracted coming back. If that's a hundred
Speaker 3: reps and a one minute meditation, that's great, you just
Speaker 3: did one hundred reps. Once people build the ability to
Speaker 3: be present, I think one of the most foundational things
Speaker 3: that helped me. I call it making an ally out
Speaker 3: of anxiety. When I was having all those panic attacks,
Speaker 3: I was like, there has to be a biological reason
Speaker 3: I have anxiety. It can't just be God made a mistake, Sorry,
Speaker 3: humanity about that anxiety. And I realized I was like,
Speaker 3: what else is like this overwhelming physiological response like anxiety?
Speaker 3: And I came up with food poisoning. You eat something bad,
Speaker 3: you get sick, you throw up. You shouldn't get mad
Speaker 3: at throwing up. You should get curious about what you ate.
Speaker 3: Like a car alarm, You shouldn't be mad at the
Speaker 3: car alarm. You should wonder who tried to break in?
Speaker 3: What if my anxiety was actually something going right with me?
Speaker 4: What if it didn't mean I was broken? What if
Speaker 4: it meant my body.
Speaker 3: Was reacting correctly to me consuming something that didn't agree
Speaker 3: with me. And so I stopped being so avoidant about
Speaker 3: my anxiety, and I started getting curious, like, Okay, my
Speaker 3: body's giving me a correct signal. What was I just thinking, feeling,
Speaker 3: or doing? And so what I encourage people to do
Speaker 3: is to have like notes in their phone or on
Speaker 3: their journal that says thinking, feeling, doing, And every time
Speaker 3: you're anxious, try to fill one of those categories. And
Speaker 3: after a month, you're gonna see a pattern. To your
Speaker 3: nervous system. You're just going to write down what were
Speaker 3: you just thinking? What were you just feeling? Or what
Speaker 3: were you just doing? So I might You know, you
Speaker 3: don't honestly get aware until you feel anxious. You just
Speaker 3: now I'm cripplingly anxious. So then you get curious about
Speaker 3: what was I just doing?
Speaker 2: Got it?
Speaker 4: Like what would I just eat? Who did I just
Speaker 4: talk to?
Speaker 3: What did I just think? And you don't try and
Speaker 3: change any of it. You just start to keep a law,
Speaker 3: you know, like talk to Gary, didn't sleep whatever is,
Speaker 3: You don't try to change it.
Speaker 4: You just observe it.
Speaker 1: And you in your own life started seeing patterns emerging
Speaker 1: that you can recognize.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what I realized is we only have two states
Speaker 3: of being. Were either dilated or contracted.
Speaker 2: That's all we have.
Speaker 3: Means you're either you could probably put in like sympathetic
Speaker 3: compair sympathetic nervous system state, like your system is either
Speaker 3: dilated literally where your blood pressure drops, your voice drops,
Speaker 3: your relaxed, your calm, your posture changes, or you're contracted
Speaker 3: and that can be whatever you know, your sympathetic nervous
Speaker 3: system your fight or flight taking over your voice raises,
Speaker 3: your blood pressure raises, your pulse raises, your anxiety raises.
Speaker 3: And so what I realized is you can't be in
Speaker 3: both states at one time. And I don't believe in
Speaker 3: many hacks, but you really can get yourself out of
Speaker 3: a contracted state by participating in something that gets you
Speaker 3: into a dilated state. So to do this, I just
Speaker 3: started having these lists of dilated, contracted, and every time
Speaker 3: I was dilated relaxed, I would write down what I
Speaker 3: was thinking, feeling, or doing. Every time I was contracted,
Speaker 3: I would write down what was I thinking, feeling, or doing.
Speaker 3: And it was a very clear set path. You know,
Speaker 3: every time I had this certain thought that would always
Speaker 3: undo me. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't
Speaker 3: know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing.
Speaker 3: I would get myself worked up and that would send
Speaker 3: me into a panic attack. And so can you abstain?
Speaker 3: And that's really where the rubber meets the road for
Speaker 3: people is once you make these lists, can you stop
Speaker 3: consuming the things that make you anxious? Will you give
Speaker 3: up that relationship, will you stop skipping sleep? Whatever it
Speaker 3: is that you know? But this list is so helpful
Speaker 3: because it's your personal map to your nervous system, and
Speaker 3: nobody else knows that better than you.
Speaker 1: That's amazing that you did this work on your own,
Speaker 1: and now you're so good at explaining this to other
Speaker 1: people to take care on. So let's get to that.
Speaker 1: So you've dealt with so many young people right now,
Speaker 1: and the first question I have for you is we
Speaker 1: see the way that trauma can end up shaping identity.
Speaker 1: What patterns do you see in that when you look
Speaker 1: across all the young people you've spent time with now.
Speaker 3: I like to think of trauma as an overwhelming experience
Speaker 3: that you don't know how to process, and we often
Speaker 3: want to shut down, we contract, and then we start
Speaker 3: to avoid. And I think that stays trapped in your
Speaker 3: body until you deal with it, and that takes dilating
Speaker 3: moving towards getting curious and understanding. And we don't have
Speaker 3: great systems in our society to help give people a
Speaker 3: safe enough environment and enough context that they can expand
Speaker 3: let those intense feelings come, because it's so intense. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's amazing how trauma stays in your body and when
Speaker 3: you are ready to deal with it, you will experience it.
Speaker 3: Just distensely is the first time. And so creating safer
Speaker 3: spaces for people's nervous systems.
Speaker 4: Where they know they can do it, where you know
Speaker 4: it's going to pass.
Speaker 2: Those things are important space of a safe space.
Speaker 3: Like in our foundation it's called Inspiring Children. Everybody knows
Speaker 3: that we show up in a certain way, like in
Speaker 3: a therapeutic saying. A nice way of giving it context
Speaker 3: might be to say, you know, if you were to
Speaker 3: tell me something like think of something really traumatic in
Speaker 3: your childhood, something you don't want to tell anybody, what
Speaker 3: would it take.
Speaker 4: For you to tell me?
Speaker 3: Like what agreement would it take between us for you
Speaker 3: to tell me? And it would probably be confidentiality, not
Speaker 3: being rushed. You know, there's certain things that are a
Speaker 3: recipe to creating an environment that, with time, would give
Speaker 3: you the confidence to say, I'm going to take a
Speaker 3: huge risk. I'm going to tell you the secret I've
Speaker 3: never wanted to share.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so let's move to Inspiring Children foundations. So
Speaker 1: you're a co founder of that, and it combines the
Speaker 1: tools of athletics and mentorship and emotional tools.
Speaker 2: So why that combination, because that starts.
Speaker 3: To create an environment for you to change you know
Speaker 3: my goal. When I got discovered from my record deal,
Speaker 3: I almost didn't sign it because I knew I had
Speaker 3: a lot of trauma and if you add fame to
Speaker 3: my background, it's what every movie is about, of every musician.
Speaker 4: It leads to drug abuse.
Speaker 3: The movie doesn't end well, and I wanted, you know,
Speaker 3: during that year, I learned how to stop shoplifting. I
Speaker 3: learned how to stop having panic attacks. I learned to
Speaker 3: heal my agoraphobia. I didn't want to give that up
Speaker 3: just because I was being offered a record deal. Being
Speaker 3: offered a record deal was like being offered a very
Speaker 3: dangerous drug to me. How would I interact with that
Speaker 3: so that I could have a different outcome where I
Speaker 3: wouldn't become a drug addict. And made myself a promise
Speaker 3: that my number one job was to learn to be
Speaker 3: a happy, whole human, not a human full of holes.
Speaker 3: My number two job was to be a musician, and
Speaker 3: so I stayed really loyal to that. And what I
Speaker 3: realized about happiness is you can't just get happy. It's
Speaker 3: just impossible, you know. You don't get to just flip
Speaker 3: a switch and like I'm happy now. Happiness is a
Speaker 3: side effect of choices. It's creating a different environment where
Speaker 3: happiness is a side effect, because happiness is a side
Speaker 3: effect of choices. And so it's like building a different house.
Speaker 3: You know, the house I was raised in doesn't lead
Speaker 3: to a happiness as a side effect.
Speaker 4: I had to build a.
Speaker 3: Different internal structure or internal architecture. And so with the kids,
Speaker 3: it's creating an environment that starts to help them make
Speaker 3: different choices where happiness can be a side effect. So athleticism, exercise,
Speaker 3: moving your body.
Speaker 4: I also, you.
Speaker 3: Know, I wanted to learn to be happy, but I
Speaker 3: a also I'm very competitive, I'm ambitious. I didn't want
Speaker 3: to like disappear from the world and just disappear from
Speaker 3: the things that stressed me out. So I wanted to
Speaker 3: be high achieving. And so what we did with the
Speaker 3: Foundation was create a high achieving environment where people push themselves.
Speaker 3: And it's life that triggers us. It's life that brings
Speaker 3: up our issues. It's striving that brings up our issues.
Speaker 3: And so then when those issues come up in real time,
Speaker 3: we address them for the kids in real time. So
Speaker 3: we kind of turn the model inside out. Instead of
Speaker 3: bringing kids to a therapeutic environment where it's you know,
Speaker 3: therapy every day at two we do no therapy in
Speaker 3: a one on one setting. We create a high achieving
Speaker 3: environment that's healthy, that helps people make healthy choices, that
Speaker 3: has healthy mentorship, healthy relationships, and then when life triggers them,
Speaker 3: we give them tools that help them in that moment.
Speaker 2: Now, this is a very special foundation.
Speaker 1: One of the things that's quite cool is you get
Speaker 1: to track people longitudinally for a long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what patterns have you seen there?
Speaker 4: These kids are just heroic.
Speaker 3: You know, anytime anybody chooses to take responsibility for their
Speaker 3: own happiness, that's gritty work. It's not for the faint
Speaker 3: of heart. You know, you will never change if you
Speaker 3: blame other people for why you're not happy. And we
Speaker 3: all have a lot of reasons why we're not happy,
Speaker 3: and they're valid, they're real, valid reasons, but if you
Speaker 3: let them be an excuse, you're just never going to change.
Speaker 3: And so seeing every kid take on this mantle of
Speaker 3: like no one's coming for me, I'm coming for me,
Speaker 3: like nobody owes me, what do I owe myself? When
Speaker 3: they start to make that switch, you just know they're
Speaker 3: going to be unstoppable.
Speaker 2: What's the longest young person that you've worked with in
Speaker 2: the show.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, I mean our second graduate, Trent is
Speaker 3: now our CEO. Right.
Speaker 4: Our kids stay.
Speaker 3: Around a long, long, long, long time. They stay around
Speaker 3: and become mentors Max. Yeah, it's incredible.
Speaker 1: I've met many of them, and they're so special. They
Speaker 1: seem like the most well adjusted kids that I've met anywhere.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they are. But it's so it's so wild
Speaker 1: to think where they came from. They came from really
Speaker 1: tough spots in their life. Yeah, with suicide attempts and
Speaker 1: other you know, deep depressions, deep anxiety, and now they're
Speaker 1: just they're just.
Speaker 2: On top of the world. Yeah.
Speaker 3: We don't often get to see the other side of
Speaker 3: suicidal ideation, you know. We just hear about the losses
Speaker 3: we have in the world. Yeah, but you don't often
Speaker 3: see what the other side looks like, you know, and
Speaker 3: that these are deeply engaged, deeply happy, deeply passionate. And
Speaker 3: it doesn't mean that your life like. Mental health doesn't
Speaker 3: mean you're happy all the time. Mental health just means
Speaker 3: you're going to have the appropriate response, which sometimes is anger,
Speaker 3: which sometimes is sadness, which sometimes is grief.
Speaker 4: That's all healthy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, having seen a bunch of these young people go
Speaker 1: through inspiring children foundations. Are there any interventions that seem
Speaker 1: to change the trajectory for people?
Speaker 3: One is what I just mentioned of, like when you
Speaker 3: stop making an excuse for why you're not happy and
Speaker 3: you start saying I'm going to be responsible for it,
Speaker 3: your life will change. Another one is when you start
Speaker 3: learning to apply these tools. It takes discipline, you know,
Speaker 3: so you have to build awareness and then you have
Speaker 3: to apply discipline, and really it's learning. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of tricks that work. You know, cold water on your
Speaker 3: face when you're ruminating. Oh, when you get ruminating thoughts
Speaker 3: and you just have these circular thoughts. Like if you
Speaker 3: put cold water on your face or you get in
Speaker 3: an ice bath, like it really breaks those ruminating thoughts.
Speaker 3: And it's because you're having a neurological chemical reaction to
Speaker 3: that and it just.
Speaker 4: Helps reset you.
Speaker 3: What are some other tricks for panic attacks? I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm telling you this. You'll explain this better than me,
Speaker 3: But it's fascinating to watch an MRI. I have a
Speaker 3: brain that's having a panic attack. The blood drains out
Speaker 3: of the frontal lobes, your migdala lights up and it
Speaker 3: goes offline. And that's why when you're having a panic attack,
Speaker 3: it's you're so unreasonable. And so what I realized was
Speaker 3: if I force my brain to deal with information like taste, color, touch,
Speaker 3: it forces my brain to process the information, and so
Speaker 3: it forces that part of my brain to start engaging again,
Speaker 3: and it helps me get out of a panic attack.
Speaker 3: So things like peppermint oil, for some reason, works really
Speaker 3: really well smell Basically, you.
Speaker 2: Just grab a little violin, you take it with Yeah, I.
Speaker 4: Find like peppermint oil.
Speaker 3: If you feel a panic attack coming on, sometimes peppermint
Speaker 3: oil will intervene enough to get your brain to come
Speaker 3: back online and start processing ice cubes on the back
Speaker 3: of the neck.
Speaker 4: It's different for everybody.
Speaker 3: I have a friend who gets obsessed about reading when
Speaker 3: they're heading into a panic attack, because it forces your
Speaker 3: brain to deal with the information, you know, like you
Speaker 3: start spelling words. He'll look at signs on the street
Speaker 3: if he's on the street and be like that, says
Speaker 3: Simon Simo in and he just forces his brain tough
Speaker 3: function and work, and that'll really help people.
Speaker 1: Oh that's great, Okay. So then in the pandemic. You
Speaker 1: started the Not Alone Challenge. First of all, what did
Speaker 1: that moment in time teach you about what was going
Speaker 1: on with our collective mental health?
Speaker 3: We knew, like I see, we started the foundation maybe twenty
Speaker 3: five years ago, and we really thought mental health was
Speaker 3: going to be the next frontier, like the big epidemic
Speaker 3: when COVID hit. I remember just thinking people are locked
Speaker 3: in their house houses with their televisions, and remember just
Speaker 3: the absolute terror and.
Speaker 4: The news and what was on the news.
Speaker 3: I mean, it was really scary, and you had people
Speaker 3: constantly twenty four hours a day, terrified for their lives.
Speaker 3: And so we knew we would see a huge spike
Speaker 3: and mental health issues. We knew we'd see a huge
Speaker 3: spike in domestic abuse because you have people locked up
Speaker 3: with their abusers and they can't get to work or
Speaker 3: do the other things during the day that might help
Speaker 3: them avoid that domestic partner. And so we really dug
Speaker 3: in then to see if we could like develop resources
Speaker 3: that people could use.
Speaker 2: And so what kind of things did you introduce?
Speaker 3: We started the social media challenge hashtag not Alone Challenge.
Speaker 3: And I've always been really like, I love one on
Speaker 3: one therapy is great, it's not very accessible. Like the
Speaker 3: very best patient to therapist ratio is one hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty six to one. That's the state with the best
Speaker 3: and the most therapists. It goes sharply downhill from there,
Speaker 3: and so there's just not enough therapists. We really have
Speaker 3: a bottleneck in the industry. And there's different types of therapy.
Speaker 3: Not every therapeutic model works for everybody. You have somebody
Speaker 3: finally willing to go to therapy, they may not be
Speaker 3: matched to the right therapeutic model, so they think they're
Speaker 3: broken instead of saying it might not.
Speaker 4: Just be the right type of therapy.
Speaker 3: And so for me, it was about democratizing access and
Speaker 3: realizing these skills I taught myself, like anxiety as an ally,
Speaker 3: they're tools you can practice for free, with no guidance.
Speaker 3: And it really bothered me that, you know, misery is
Speaker 3: an equal opportunist. It doesn't care like if you're rich, poor, black, white, homeless,
Speaker 3: a celebrity, but if you want to learn to be different,
Speaker 3: that's an education. An education costs money. You know, therapy
Speaker 3: should be a re education, and that's expensive. And so
Speaker 3: how could we help create scalable tools that would help
Speaker 3: people without that.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm very optimistic about AI therapists because they
Speaker 1: are twenty four to seven, they remember everything you said,
Speaker 1: they've got good guardrails on them. I think it's going
Speaker 1: to change the world quite a bit in terms of
Speaker 1: people in the middle of the night, when they're at
Speaker 1: their lowest moment, having somebody right there.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I helped found a small tech company. It was a
Speaker 3: mental health that we did in virtual reality, and it's
Speaker 3: amazing because that's like a thousand percent scalable. You have
Speaker 3: a live guide twenty four hours a day, day, seven
Speaker 3: days a week, so at two am, if your cat dies,
Speaker 3: you can get on there when you need help. And
Speaker 3: it was all around therapeutic tools helping solve for depression
Speaker 3: or anxiety or addiction or whatever.
Speaker 2: It is great. Great. Are you just out of curiosity?
Speaker 1: Are you still interested in VR as the road for
Speaker 1: that or do you feel like having an AI therapist
Speaker 1: on the phone?
Speaker 2: Is it better? We are you right now?
Speaker 4: And then I think all those tools are really helpful. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean with Inner World there's an overlay of AI
Speaker 3: and it'll become more and more outprevalent. But just because
Speaker 3: the way VR works, especially you have a human intervention
Speaker 3: is coupled with AI, you have a single guide that
Speaker 3: could run several groups simultaneously, you know, but it's an
Speaker 3: amazing thing.
Speaker 4: What can be done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right as I understand it, Females are much
Speaker 1: less likely to use VR than males.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, we're surprised.
Speaker 3: You know, therapy is usually female driven, Like men are
Speaker 3: slow adopters. So we thought we get like young gamers,
Speaker 3: maybe young female gamers when we started it, but we
Speaker 3: realized it was we were getting mostly men, which was
Speaker 3: incredible because men felt safe to show up. It was virtual,
Speaker 3: you had an avatar, and so we had a lot
Speaker 3: of male engagement.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It turns out the reason females don't like VR as
Speaker 1: a general thing is that they don't like to be
Speaker 1: to not be able to see what's going on around them.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oras men don't care.
Speaker 4: As Yeah, we have the responsibilities.
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: And so one of the things, you know, I went
Speaker 1: to this wonderful conference that you put on recently. It
Speaker 1: was so it was so lovely, and one of the
Speaker 1: things that struck me about it was that you have
Speaker 1: really somehow allowed people to be vulnerable in mass and
Speaker 1: one of the things that was so amazing about this
Speaker 1: conference to me is that after person was getting up.
Speaker 1: These people are all people with big lives, celebrities of
Speaker 1: various sorts, and people were so vulnerable and open about
Speaker 1: where they were and what kind of hard stuff they
Speaker 1: went through. I found that absolutely amazing. Tell me about
Speaker 1: how you spread the word of vulnerability.
Speaker 3: I think it really is about creating that environment where
Speaker 3: people know intuitively and instinctively it's safe to share. Nothing
Speaker 3: feels better than connection, human connection. I mean, what, we're
Speaker 3: a carbon based you know, being what doesn't carbon have
Speaker 3: like eight balances? Like it's built to connect for more
Speaker 3: before I thought.
Speaker 4: It was eight.
Speaker 2: Really, yeah, it's like a period.
Speaker 3: Anyway, we're built to connect, like we're built to bond,
Speaker 3: and connection feels really really good to us. And when
Speaker 3: we're vulnerable, we're actually able to connect. When we're armored,
Speaker 3: we don't actually connect. And for me, I really learned that,
Speaker 3: Like when I started singing in coffee shops, I was
Speaker 3: homeless and I was so lonely, and I realized it
Speaker 3: was because nobody knew me. I didn't ever tell the truth.
Speaker 3: I always was like I'm good, great, how are you?
Speaker 3: I never told anybody what I was really doing. Nobody
Speaker 3: knew I was stealing. It was like I had the
Speaker 3: secret life and secret sadness. And so when I started
Speaker 3: writing songs, it was the truth. It was honest, it
Speaker 3: was vulnerable. And when I made the decision to go
Speaker 3: on stage and tell the truth, I remember being this
Speaker 3: huge risk and when I did it, the people in
Speaker 3: my audience cried and they were like, I didn't even
Speaker 3: be able to felt that way, and I was like,
Speaker 3: I didn't know anybody else felt that way, and it
Speaker 3: felt so good to be seen for who I actually was,
Speaker 3: flaws and all. So I decided to make that my
Speaker 3: way as I developed my career was I would be honest,
Speaker 3: I would be vulnerable.
Speaker 4: I would tell people the truth.
Speaker 3: That has a lot of good benefits because then you
Speaker 3: never have imposter syndrome. You're never pretending to be something
Speaker 3: you're not. You talk about all of it. And I
Speaker 3: was able to talk about all of it my fan
Speaker 3: base because you know, the Internet was just coming online
Speaker 3: and it gave me an avenue to have very real
Speaker 3: discussions with people. And so at the Summit, I think
Speaker 3: it's a lot just how we lead and how our
Speaker 3: organizers lead, and when you know great suffering, you want
Speaker 3: to help suffering, and you're driven to help suffering. It
Speaker 3: causes you to care in a way it breaks you
Speaker 3: open and that's beautiful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I'm really interested in the fact that
Speaker 1: you took creativity and artistry as the road out because
Speaker 1: one concern that a lot of people are talking about
Speaker 1: is with AI, are kids going to stop doing creative
Speaker 1: things because you can have it write a song for
Speaker 1: you or have it make a painting for you or something.
Speaker 2: But I actually am not worried about that.
Speaker 1: Because creativity is such a great outlet for people to
Speaker 1: do exactly this kind of thing, to explore their feelings,
Speaker 1: to generate something on their own that communicates honestly with
Speaker 1: other people, to see where there's resonance going on. What's
Speaker 1: your take on creativity as a tool for fighting anxiety
Speaker 1: or depression?
Speaker 3: You know, creativity again helps us move towards something instead
Speaker 3: of moving away from something.
Speaker 4: It brings curiosity.
Speaker 3: And again because every thought, feeling, emotion leads our nervous
Speaker 3: system into one of these two states, you realize like
Speaker 3: engaging in curiosity gets you into rest and digest. You
Speaker 3: can't be curious unless you're relaxed, you know, and so
Speaker 3: you can have the tail wag the dog in a
Speaker 3: good way. You can when you're anxious, get curious and
Speaker 3: it causes you to relax. And creativity is investigation. It's
Speaker 3: exploring its curiosity, and that has a really positive effect
Speaker 3: on our nervous system.
Speaker 4: I am really curious as we use.
Speaker 3: AI just neurologically, if that'll it causes us. I think
Speaker 3: it can cause us to get neurologically lazy. I'm curious.
Speaker 3: You know, writing a short story is hard work. And
Speaker 3: if you get an idea for a short story, but
Speaker 3: you don't do the hard work of like h doing
Speaker 3: all the problem solving, and you give it to AI
Speaker 3: and it does it so great, I'm curious if it'll
Speaker 3: people will have the muscle to push through, you know,
Speaker 3: those uncomfortable problem solving spaces.
Speaker 4: I'm very curious about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nobody knows the answer yet.
Speaker 1: I happen to be sort of techno optimistic about this
Speaker 1: for a couple of reasons. We've all seen these eras
Speaker 1: even during our lifetime, like when calculators were introduced in
Speaker 1: school and people had a lot of concerns about what
Speaker 1: that would mean. But you know, we learn how to
Speaker 1: do long division, but we don't spend a year on
Speaker 1: long division because we can use the machine to speed
Speaker 1: things up. People had these same concerns in fourteen forty
Speaker 1: when the printing press was invented. They thought that children
Speaker 1: were going to be much dumber in the next generation
Speaker 1: because if they wanted the answer, they could just pull
Speaker 1: the book right there there was the answer written down.
Speaker 2: So historically you've seen this over and over.
Speaker 1: My hope is that ai I will enhance creativity, that
Speaker 1: we can all surf the wave of it and do
Speaker 1: bigger and better things rather than have it do stuff
Speaker 1: for us and I The reason I'm optimistic about it
Speaker 1: is because, just as a dumb example, I happen to
Speaker 1: love fixing things in my house, and AI has three
Speaker 1: x to me on my abilities to do things. I
Speaker 1: take a picture or something, and I figure stuff out
Speaker 1: with the AI. Everybody I'm talking to seems to be
Speaker 1: having this sort of experience where whatever they love doing,
Speaker 1: they're able to do it better and faster, but there's
Speaker 1: still I'm still learning stuff, just at a better pace
Speaker 1: than I would have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's your experience with it? So far?
Speaker 4: I've found this to be incredible tool.
Speaker 3: I'm not like building my own agents yet, you know,
Speaker 3: I have a long way to go. I'm using it
Speaker 3: pretty passively, you know, I'll put pictures in like you,
Speaker 3: tell me how to do things, tell me how to
Speaker 3: you know, tell me more about this or things like that.
Speaker 3: So I find the learning aspect really fun.
Speaker 4: But yeah, we're up for a huge change.
Speaker 1: Rough for a huge change. But do you think creatively?
Speaker 1: I mean, what does it mean for you as an artist?
Speaker 1: But I mean you're well known as a musician, but
Speaker 1: also you're a visual artist and you're doing all kinds
Speaker 1: of other cool products which we'll come to. But yeah,
Speaker 1: what do you think this means for you? Do you
Speaker 1: feel like you're able to move faster as a results?
Speaker 3: It's interesting, you know, I'm fifty one, I have a
Speaker 3: life experience, and I'm able to engage with AI in
Speaker 3: a specific way. I'm so curious what it's like when
Speaker 3: you're young and you don't already have that foundation. That'll
Speaker 3: be interesting, Yeah, you know, be very different for a
Speaker 3: twelve year old coming up with AI versus US that
Speaker 3: already kind of has a different type of foundation.
Speaker 1: It's right, I mean, just as an example, with my son.
Speaker 1: We have a fireplace and there's a blank sort of
Speaker 1: shield right in the middle of it, and so we're.
Speaker 2: Looking at it.
Speaker 1: I took a picture and ask chat gip to generate
Speaker 1: a picture of an eagle that would fit right in
Speaker 1: that funny shape space.
Speaker 2: And then my son found.
Speaker 1: A program that allowed us to take that picture and
Speaker 1: turn into a three D structure, and then we three
Speaker 1: D printed it and put it on and it's the
Speaker 1: coolest sculpture of an eagle that we generated in sort
Speaker 1: of ninety seconds of work in total.
Speaker 2: But what I love about that my sense about the
Speaker 2: same age as your.
Speaker 1: Son, and what I love about that is just the seeing, oh,
Speaker 1: I can really create something in the world and do
Speaker 1: it fast. And that means that when he wants to
Speaker 1: dig in and do longer term projects, he's already thinking
Speaker 1: at a higher level than we ever did.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What do you think about social media? One of the
Speaker 1: concerns has been that it's caused a lot more depression
Speaker 1: anxiety in the younger generation. As a side note, I
Speaker 1: find it a little hard to know with certainty if
Speaker 1: that's the issue, because we all, I mean, we had
Speaker 1: magazines and there were movie stars with perfect bodies and
Speaker 1: beauty and whatever. So we all grew up with that stuff.
Speaker 1: The question is, you know, whether it's more intensively spend
Speaker 1: more hours on it now, But the question is what
Speaker 1: can we do to protect young brains.
Speaker 3: I think it always comes down to skill bases, you know,
Speaker 3: gripping a lot with a lot of you know, guns
Speaker 3: are a very big thing up there, I were hunting.
Speaker 3: Guns are very very dangerous, and so you have to
Speaker 3: learn a lot of skills to be able to handle
Speaker 3: a gun well. And I think social media the thing
Speaker 3: I find fascinating about it is, you know, when I
Speaker 3: was nineteen or twenty, I got famous, and fame is
Speaker 3: a huge lesson, Like it's a huge thing to contend with.
Speaker 3: Your people are aware of you on a mass scale,
Speaker 3: and you get feedback on a mass scale, and you
Speaker 3: have people writing articles about like, oh she's fat, or
Speaker 3: oh she's this, or oh she's washed up, and so
Speaker 3: you're getting feedback that isn't normal. You know, it's not
Speaker 3: a normal thing psychologically to weed through the type of
Speaker 3: feedback you get when you're famous, even positive, like I
Speaker 3: thought the positive stuff made me feel just as lonely
Speaker 3: because they don't know me, They don't know if I'm
Speaker 3: a good person, they don't know if it's warrented. So
Speaker 3: it all was a very isolating thing. And you have
Speaker 3: to make a choice as a famous person of will
Speaker 3: this make me more authentic? Will I choose to be
Speaker 3: more authentic or will I start changing who I am
Speaker 3: to be liked? Now, you could argue we go through
Speaker 3: that in high school too. You start to deal with
Speaker 3: like clicks, you know, will I be my authentic self
Speaker 3: or will I start trying to change who I am
Speaker 3: to fit in. I think social media has caused every
Speaker 3: person to deal with what it's like to be famous
Speaker 3: a little bit, and that's interesting, you know, and not,
Speaker 3: by the way, not a lot of famous people handle
Speaker 3: it great either, like a lot of famous people are
Speaker 3: drug addicts, or you know, everybody's coping with something that's
Speaker 3: deeply traumatizing. In all honesty, it's very stressful. So I
Speaker 3: think it's about giving our kids a lot of tools,
Speaker 3: But most of us aren't equipped to help our kids
Speaker 3: intellectually really understand what those tools are. We don't have
Speaker 3: frameworks to talk to our kids about what is our
Speaker 3: authentic self? Who are you if you're not Jonathan Myers.
Speaker 3: You know, if you're not this person, what makes you you?
Speaker 4: You do?
Speaker 3: You make time to be with yourself and understand who
Speaker 3: you are? That isn't your identity, That isn't I mean,
Speaker 3: those are serious skills to learn, and those are our
Speaker 3: skills we need to be teaching our kids, but we
Speaker 3: weren't taught them as parents, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: And so I think that's kind of where the rub
Speaker 3: coms is. Social media and technology came up quicker than
Speaker 3: our ability to give real psychological skill sets around them.
Speaker 1: How would you advise a young person to go about
Speaker 1: that task of figuring out who they are?
Speaker 4: I call it dating yourself?
Speaker 3: You know, like we're so interested in dating other people,
Speaker 3: and what do you do when you date somebody? You
Speaker 3: spend time, you are curious about them, you know, you
Speaker 3: dedicate resources and create frameworks, And so I think you
Speaker 3: have to date yourself. You have to ask yourself questions
Speaker 3: like really, who am I? If I'm not Jewel the singer?
Speaker 4: Who am I?
Speaker 3: Who am I? When I shut my eyes? And I'm
Speaker 3: not anybody's daughter or anybody's sister? Like what makes me me?
Speaker 3: What is essentially me? Yeah? What's just my personality that's
Speaker 3: reacted to trauma? Am I just my trauma? Am I
Speaker 3: a bunch of decisions I made about myself based on
Speaker 3: my value or my worth. They're interesting things to think about,
Speaker 3: and they're not things we're typically encouraged to think about.
Speaker 1: How do you get people to ask the right questions
Speaker 1: on that? I mean, do you have a guide of
Speaker 1: some sort, maybe on the website that tells people like, look,
Speaker 1: why don't you ask you shelf this question?
Speaker 2: That ask yourself that question?
Speaker 4: I should?
Speaker 3: I started writing a second book and I haven't. I
Speaker 3: need to get back to it, but it had a
Speaker 3: list of questions that I find very provocative to to
Speaker 3: sort of get you on that journey.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: As a side note, I ran a company for the
Speaker 1: last ten years and one of the questions that I
Speaker 1: would ask people when they were interviewing was if.
Speaker 2: You had to date yourself, what would drive you crazy?
Speaker 1: Which is a really interesting question because it really caused
Speaker 1: people to think about what, you know. It's easy for
Speaker 1: people in a job interview to talk about what they
Speaker 1: are great at, but the things that would drive them
Speaker 1: crazy something they hadn't examined necessarily. Yeah, what would you
Speaker 1: say is the biggest myth about mental health, maybe a
Speaker 1: dangerous myth about mental health that young people don't know.
Speaker 3: I'd say it's kind of a prevailing feeling that somebody's broken,
Speaker 3: that something's wrong with them, that if they're anxious or
Speaker 3: they've anxiety disorders, that they're broken or something's wrong. I
Speaker 3: went through a really terrible experience where I don't know
Speaker 3: how to describe it. I have an autobiography where I
Speaker 3: talk about my relationship with my mom, but I was
Speaker 3: when I was thirty two. I realized everything I had
Speaker 3: thought I had known wasn't true. All my money was gone.
Speaker 3: I was three million in debt. It was a really
Speaker 3: really rough awakening and I felt devastated. I've been through
Speaker 3: a really hard life and then this thing happens and
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh my gosh. I turned down the tour
Speaker 3: I was on. I really needed the money, but I
Speaker 3: was like, I can't. I'm going to have a mental
Speaker 3: health breakdown if I go on the road. Like I'm
Speaker 3: not okay, and I don't know why. These moments always
Speaker 3: happened the mirror.
Speaker 4: I lood in the mirror.
Speaker 3: I was washing my hands, and I remember this parable
Speaker 3: of the golden statue. It's just a little terrible of
Speaker 3: a village heard that a warring tribe was coming, and
Speaker 3: so they had this golden statue. They covered it in
Speaker 3: mud to hide the value. The war came, there was
Speaker 3: a lot of trauma, and aftermath, villagers were rebuilding. For years,
Speaker 3: they forgot about the golden statue. They even forgot it
Speaker 3: was valuable until one day, after a rainstorm, a child
Speaker 3: was sitting at the feet of the statue and saw
Speaker 3: a little bit of gold and picked it off, and
Speaker 3: they realized, Wow, this thing has value. It's been golden
Speaker 3: all along. And I suddenly realized, what if I'm what
Speaker 3: I mean. A soul isn't a teacup. It isn't a
Speaker 3: chair that can just be broken or shattered like. It
Speaker 3: has to be a sustaining energy that exists, And so
Speaker 3: what if my job was just to do an archaeological
Speaker 3: dig back to my whole self. It's there intact all
Speaker 3: the time. And I think that reframing is really important,
Speaker 3: because fixing something that's broken is really daunting, but uncovering
Speaker 3: something that's whole intuitively makes a.
Speaker 4: Lot more sense.
Speaker 3: And so that for me was a huge change and
Speaker 3: something I has helped other people when they adopt it.
Speaker 2: Oh that's so lovely.
Speaker 1: And so you have taken on all kinds of creative projects,
Speaker 1: So tell us what you're doing right now with both
Speaker 1: oceanographic data and space data.
Speaker 3: I grew up in big nature. It had such a
Speaker 3: positive impact on me and my being. I believe nature
Speaker 3: is always there reaching for us, and I think we
Speaker 3: only value what we're in a relationship with. So whatever
Speaker 3: we're in the biggest relationship with is what we value
Speaker 3: the most. And as we've become industrialized, we've really moved
Speaker 3: away from having a relationship to nature, so we don't
Speaker 3: often know where a food comes from or how heavy
Speaker 3: water is to haul it. I was raised on a homestead, though,
Speaker 3: so I was raised so close with such a big relationship,
Speaker 3: and it's been a mentor. Like a lot of the
Speaker 3: skills I learned was by watching nature, by watching natural systems.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to see if I could build an
Speaker 3: instrument that would give nature a voice and would give
Speaker 3: nature the ability to affect you and your nervous system
Speaker 3: and your brain wave states. And then I wanted to
Speaker 3: see if it worked. So what I did is I
Speaker 3: created for heart of the ocean. I created an eight
Speaker 3: foot tall sculpture and inside are these organelles that are
Speaker 3: wrapped in LED lighting and it's sixty thousand points of
Speaker 3: programmable light. And then I created a sound vocabulary, and
Speaker 3: then I worked with NASA, a woman named Shelgentiman and
Speaker 3: a guy named Gregni and Marr where we went out
Speaker 3: and I created data sculpture, so that data is surfaced
Speaker 3: like surface data, so like wave height, precipitation, things like that.
Speaker 3: Then there's the wind mixed layer in the ocean, which
Speaker 3: is critters like dolphins, salinity currents, things like that. Then
Speaker 3: you go into the midnight zone where there's seismic data
Speaker 3: and deeper sea creatures like anglerfish, and then you cycle
Speaker 3: back up. So it's this twelve minute loop of data.
Speaker 3: Every time we come back up to the surface, our
Speaker 3: satellites grab new fresh data, so it's live every twelve minutes,
Speaker 3: it's changing. And so this data there's a computer in
Speaker 3: the base and the data is live streaming, and that
Speaker 3: data then chooses a color and chooses a sound, and
Speaker 3: it was really fun. It was fun to work with
Speaker 3: the data. Sonifying data is like its own thing. I
Speaker 3: could nerd out on, but we did end up studying
Speaker 3: it in the University of Mexico City, So it's been
Speaker 3: really fun to do that. And it's like a wave
Speaker 3: combining music and my visual art practice and my mental
Speaker 3: health practice all into one thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So when you look at this, I've seen the sculpture,
Speaker 1: it's extraordinary. You're hearing the data from the ocean turned
Speaker 1: into sound and lights.
Speaker 2: Yeah. What do you think the effect is on mental health?
Speaker 2: What's your experience? Is a new sit in front of
Speaker 2: it for a while.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's altering, like you get altered, like you really
Speaker 3: relax and you really get altered.
Speaker 1: So you are a visual artist as well, you paint.
Speaker 1: And am I right that You've got an exhibit coming up?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, opened my seventh the Venice Bianale Crystal Bridges Museum
Speaker 3: of American Art and it'll be up for the next
Speaker 3: eight months.
Speaker 2: Wonderful. And I've seen some of your work. It's very beautiful.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 1: And what I found out I hadn't realized was before,
Speaker 1: but you have synesthesia, as my listeners probably know, I've
Speaker 1: studied synesthesia for a long time and so your form
Speaker 1: of synesthesia is where you where musical notes will trigger
Speaker 1: colors and shapes. Tell us about that for your experience.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I see colors sometimes when people talk, most
Speaker 3: often with music, when people talk, I see like clouds
Speaker 3: of color that have movement to them, kind of like
Speaker 3: the Aurora borealis maybe is a good example. But when
Speaker 3: i'm I see much more structured shapes with color and
Speaker 3: the tone when I sing or the vibrato affects the
Speaker 3: shape and how those shapes move and collapse and expand.
Speaker 4: And the way I hear pitch I realized is doing this.
Speaker 3: I hear pitch as a shape like I see a
Speaker 3: little like a if you've ever seen like the signatures
Speaker 3: of like you pluck a guitar string and it makes
Speaker 3: that sound wave.
Speaker 4: That's what I see.
Speaker 3: And so when I get pitched by hearing slash seeing
Speaker 3: this shape, and I match the shape with my voice,
Speaker 3: and then that's how I tune my guitar or things
Speaker 3: like that. So for me switching to in your monitors
Speaker 3: where I'm not hearing the sound push the air, I'm
Speaker 3: not as good at my pitch. It's very interesting. It's
Speaker 3: like it happens in space. It's I don't fully understand it.
Speaker 2: Do you have perfect pitch.
Speaker 1: No, are you able to tell when your guitar is
Speaker 1: flat or sharp based on the shapes and colors?
Speaker 4: Yeah, because I hear I hear the pitch, but I
Speaker 4: hear one.
Speaker 3: I see a sound wave of signature and how high
Speaker 3: and low the valley peaks are. And so when I'm singing,
Speaker 3: I have to get it's a pitch. But you're all,
Speaker 3: it's how it's pushing the air. It's the one wo yeah,
Speaker 3: creates the pitch.
Speaker 2: I guess. Nice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you had previously told me the the way
Speaker 1: you discovered you had synesthesia. Of course you didn't know
Speaker 1: the words for it the time when you were a
Speaker 1: little girl.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: My earliest memory is somehow I got in the basement
Speaker 3: of our house and my mom was looking for me,
Speaker 3: and she called down the stairs and she was like true,
Speaker 3: and I just saw this explosion of color and it
Speaker 3: was like a dark room, and so this color was
Speaker 3: just so bright in my head and I was like,
Speaker 3: that's me, Like, I'm those colors.
Speaker 4: That name means those colors.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's wonderful.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay, So, in wrapping up, what do you think is
Speaker 1: the most important lesson about mental health that all of
Speaker 1: us listening should be keeping in mind.
Speaker 3: Gosh, I would just say, if you want to work
Speaker 3: on your mental health, if you make that your number
Speaker 3: one job, Like, what is it like to really take
Speaker 3: that on and really say I'm going to care more
Speaker 3: about my mental health than any other thing that really
Speaker 3: starts to change your life?
Speaker 2: And what tools should people use for this?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there's a lot of types of therapy. There's
Speaker 3: talk therapy, there's cognitive behavioral, there's DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy.
Speaker 3: They're all different, they all have different tools available For me. Personally,
Speaker 3: talk therapy doesn't really work. It doesn't It helps me
Speaker 3: feel connected, which is therapeutic, but it doesn't help me
Speaker 3: make changes. I'm personally interested in making changes. That's when
Speaker 3: I notice I get the best results. And so I
Speaker 3: think it's just being a really good advocate for yourself.
Speaker 3: You know, now that we have AI, you can just
Speaker 3: say what types of therapies are out there, what types
Speaker 3: of modalities are out there, and then also just knowing
Speaker 3: like you can do a lot on your own. You know,
Speaker 3: if you just like the types of exercises I mentioned,
Speaker 3: those are free and if you want to apply them,
Speaker 3: they will really change your life.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, thank you for inspiring so many people, and
Speaker 1: for being vulnerable and for finding your own golden statue
Speaker 1: under the mud ah.
Speaker 4: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: That was my conversation with Jewel. One of the ideas
Speaker 1: that stayed with me most after this conversation is the
Speaker 1: role of vulnerability. Vulnerability is easy to praise from a distance,
Speaker 1: and it becomes even more interesting when you look at
Speaker 1: what it really asks of the brain. To be vulnerable
Speaker 1: is to let another person see something frightened or uncertain
Speaker 1: or ashamed inside of you. It requires relaxing the impulse
Speaker 1: to conceal and pretend. Vulnerability is about letting go of
Speaker 1: performance for a moment, and that is nothing small for
Speaker 1: a nervous system. Because the brain is always managing risk,
Speaker 1: it's always estimating consequences. It's asking what happens if I
Speaker 1: reveal this? What if I say this out loud? What
Speaker 1: if everyone turns away? So from a neural point of view,
Speaker 1: this is a real risk. But vulnerability is one of
Speaker 1: the most important.
Speaker 2: Doors that we have.
Speaker 1: In our conversation today, Jewel reminded us that when we
Speaker 1: are armored, we don't actually connect. We can only meaningfully
Speaker 1: do that when we're vulnerable, and this is why loneliness
Speaker 1: can persist even in very crowded lives. A person can
Speaker 1: be surrounded by attention and starved for something deeper. They
Speaker 1: can be praised and remain unknown. In Jewel's case, a
Speaker 1: person can become highly legible in a role and remain
Speaker 1: nearly invisible as a self. The neuroscience story underneath all
Speaker 1: this is that brains are extremely social. They are relational,
Speaker 1: by which I mean we regulate each other constantly. We
Speaker 1: calm one another, we alarm one another, we reshape one another,
Speaker 1: and so just the presence of another human who says,
Speaker 1: in effect, I know something about pain too, this can
Speaker 1: change the chemistry of a room. When one person tells
Speaker 1: the truth, permission spreads and people feel like their private
Speaker 1: interior becomes shareable.
Speaker 2: And that really matters.
Speaker 1: In the domain of mental health, because shame thrives in
Speaker 1: silence and secrecy. Openness creates oxygen. Every time one person
Speaker 1: speaks honestly about what's happening in their inner cosmos, the
Speaker 1: universe becomes just a little bit easier to inhabit for
Speaker 1: the next person. And I just want to return to
Speaker 1: the quite striking metaphor that jewels shared near the end,
Speaker 1: this golden statue covered in mud. I love that story
Speaker 1: because it offers a different way to think about suffering.
Speaker 1: For a lot of people, mental health struggles come with
Speaker 1: the conclusion that there is something wrong with me at
Speaker 1: the core. But her story offers another lens on it,
Speaker 1: which is that the gold is still there. Life lays
Speaker 1: down mud, and so the work is archaeological. You uncover,
Speaker 1: you remember, you return, and that gives a frame shift.
Speaker 1: And I hope that many people hearing this conversation were
Speaker 1: able to feel something loosen when they encounter that image.
Speaker 1: So let's wrap up. I think of hope as an architecture.
Speaker 1: Hope is what happens when a person has somewhere to turn.
Speaker 1: Hope is what happens when there are tools to practice,
Speaker 1: or when a person is given a language for their experience.
Speaker 2: It's what happens when there is.
Speaker 1: A mentor or a teacher, or a therapist or a friend,
Speaker 1: or an organization or just a song or a hotline
Speaker 1: or an AI therapist, or sometimes it's a family member
Speaker 1: or a stranger or some structure that's says you do
Speaker 1: not have to carry all this bad weather by yourself
Speaker 1: and this landscape of help is a lot broader than
Speaker 1: it used to be, and I think with growing societal
Speaker 1: attention and new tools like AI, the help.
Speaker 2: Is going to keep on growing.
Speaker 1: So my hope for today is that you or someone
Speaker 1: that you know asks for help a little sooner. Go
Speaker 1: to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and
Speaker 1: to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my substack,
Speaker 1: and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube
Speaker 1: for videos of each episode and to leave comments until
Speaker 1: next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos