Ep152 "How do you survive your own thoughts?" with Jewel

What do you do when your own mind stops feeling safe? How does a person sing on stage while panicking inside? How do you catch your thoughts before they catch you? Join Eagleman with singer/songwriter Jewel to talk about mental health: the battles she’s lived, the wisdom she’s earned, and the lives she’s helping shape. This episode kicks off Mental Health Awareness month, when we’re reminded to look directly at what is typically hidden. A troubled mind with stormy weather can often remain dark; join us this month to bring some light.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What do you do when your own mind stops feeling safe?
How does a person sing on stage while panicking inside?
How do you learn to catch your thoughts before they
catch you? And can creativity become a survival tool. Today
we're talking with singer songwriter Jewel about mental health, the

(00:22):
battles that she has lived, the wisdom she's earned, and
the lives she's helping to shape. Welcome to Inner Cosmos
with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at
Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our
three pound universe to understand why and how our lives

(00:43):
look the way they do.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Every year.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
We're reminded this month to look directly at what is
typically hidden. A broken arm is obvious, a fever is obvious,
But a troubled mind can stay incognito, often for a
very long time. As we talk about here every week,
the brain locked inside the skull builds our reality and

(01:20):
interprets our social world and generates the private weather that
we live inside. And when that internal weather turns dark
and stormy, that struggle can remain invisible even to the
person sitting one chair away. Mental Health Awareness Month exists

(01:41):
because that sort of invisibility carries a cost. This month
asks us to bring these struggles into the light, and
by doing so, to reduce stigma and to widen the
pathways to care. This matters to everyone on the planet.
But today I'm going to zoom in a little to
talk about mental health health struggles for young people. Adolescence

(02:03):
and early adulthood are years when the brain is tuning
itself in public. You have your identity under construction, and
the notion of belonging matters with an unusual amount of force.
That wasn't true before, and it's not as potent later.
So social feedback lands with intensity, and the numbers tell

(02:26):
us something urgent about the state of that inner landscape.
The CDC reports that forty percent of US high school
students have persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and twenty
percent seriously consider attempting suicide, and almost one in ten
actually attempt suicide. So what we're looking at is classrooms

(02:51):
full of young people carrying invisible storms. This issue matters
to me deeply because, like many people, I have known
and loved people who have taken their lives, So where
can young people turn well happily.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
There are many options.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
They can turn to friends and families and teachers and communities,
and now that we're in the second half of the
twenty first century, there are also new digital options available.
In a Stanford study of college students using chat GPT,
some fraction of the participants reported that the AI companion
halted their suicidal ideation. So that kind of signal points

(03:29):
toward a future in which support can be available at
two in the morning, in moments when a person feels
stranded inside their own mind and beyond, the digital organizations
matter enormously here. An organization can create continuity and culture
and a place where a person can return on the

(03:51):
hard days. They create rituals and language, and accountability and
mentorship and the rare feeling that somebody has built a
structure with you and mind. There are many organizations doing
extraordinary work in the mental health space, and one that
I want to highlight today is the Inspiring Children Foundation,
which is an organization built by my friend Ryan Wolfington

(04:14):
with the help of singer songwriter Jewel and some others.
And the goal with this organization is a whole human
approach to mental health that includes the physical, and the
social and the emotional, and that brings us to today's
guest singer songwriter. Jewel has lived several public lives at once.

(04:34):
Her music became part of the emotional architecture of the
nineteen nineties and beyond. She's a four time Grammy nominated artist,
and she has sold more than thirty million albums worldwide.
She's also an author and a visual artist, and she's
a forceful advocate in the mental health space. A lot

(04:55):
of people know Jewel's voice and songs and the success
that she had, but presumably most people don't know about
her interior origin story. Today's conversation feels so important to
me because it opens a window onto mental health from
the inside. It's one thing to speak clinically about anxiety
or trauma or self regulation, but it's another thing to

(05:18):
hear someone describe how that all cashes out in real life.
What does panic feel like when it takes hold? How
do you begin to build a gap between stimulus and response.
How do you learn a new emotional language when nobody
has handed you a textbook? These are questions that matter
to millions of people, especially young people. So here is

(05:42):
my conversation with Jewel. Okay, so, Jewel, you've been very
open about struggles that you had when you were a
young person, So let's start there, if you don't mind,
what was life like for you on the inside.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
Yeah, So just a little context in case people don't
know my story. I was raised in Alaska. My family
were homesteaders and kind of pioneers in Alaska. My parents
got divorced when I was eight, and my dad took
over raising us and we moved to Homer, to the
homestead where my dad was raised. My dad started drinking
then after the divorce, my dad, I mean today we'd

(06:22):
use the word trauma triggering, those words didn't really exist
back then. You know, my dad's childhood was so traumatic
that when when he went to Vietnam, it was the
first time he relaxed, Oh, it'sn't that wild. Like. The
amount of yeah, just trauma and abuse that he had
during his childhood was so intense. So after the divorce,

(06:46):
he began what we would now call trauma triggering, and
he began to drink to try to manage that, and
he started to be physically abusive at that age, and
it went rather predictably. I was also singing in bars
at the time. He and I became a duet. So
we were touring, like you know, lumberjack joints and fisherman
haunts and biker bars. And what I really noticed is

(07:06):
that everybody was in pain, and everybody was managing it
in different ways. You know, we were singing for career alcoholics,
career drug addicts. You'd see people I was in a
lot of pain, and so I was just very acutely
aware of it, and I realized nobody outruns it. And
I would watch people use PCP or anger or sex

(07:28):
and it never worked. And so because I'm a really
visual person, to me, I saw like this original wound
or pain, and then you would try to bury it
with whatever drugs, alcohol, toxic relationships, and it you still
would have to, like if you wanted to heal, you
still have to get rid of all these layers and
then still deal with this.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
And how old were you at this time that you
were starting.

Speaker 4 (07:49):
Probably nine ten in there?

Speaker 2 (07:51):
Oh were you? And you were starting to realize that.

Speaker 4 (07:53):
Yeah, oh wow, okay.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
And I had just learned that the buffalo was the
only animal that went into a storm, and that the
quickest way was through, and it just changed my life.
Like learning that, I was like, you have to be
the buffalo. Like the quickest way is through, and you
move toward it, you don't move away from it.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
And so I made myself a promise that when I
was in pain, I would go closer to it, I
would look at it. And I was already journaling a
lot at this point, and I realized that when I wrote,
that was taking me toward it. My curiosity was taking
me toward it. And it did relieve the pain a
little bit and didn't cure everything, but it took enough
of pressure off, like a pressure valve, that it became manageable.

(08:37):
And I learned things, and that was fascinating to me.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
So I once sartainly say something that you made a
shift from you realized that you could either be bitter
about something or curious about it.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Is this the same sort of thing about moving into
the storm.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
Yeah, I don't think bitterness had kind of like entered
my consciousness quite yet.

Speaker 4 (08:53):
For whatever reason. It was just when something.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Hurts, look at it, get toward it, don't move away
from it. Okay, the quickest way is through.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
And so what does that mean in terms of the
tools that you took on the earliest tools that you
took on to manage with your mental health.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
That was definitely writing. So like journaling was the way
that I went towards something. So when something hurt, instead
of doing an I mean, I didn't have these word
avoidant behavior, So I'm using words now that obviously I
didn't have them. But when I was in pain, instead
of avoiding it, I would sit down, get quiet, and
journal and that would let me move toward it. And

(09:31):
then I realized when I journaled, I saw patterns. I
saw things in the day I didn't realize. I saw
there was a wise part of me that showed up
that I could access and I found that, Yeah, very interesting.

Speaker 1 (09:43):
Can you give an example of the type of pattern
you might see at the end of the day.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yeah, I would notice, like if it was, you know,
maybe a conflict with my dad, I noticed what was
going on for him that day that I didn't notice.
I just noticed he got mad, you know, or yelled
at me. But I I would sort of see the
things that led up to it. Not that that makes
abusive behavior okay, but it brought understanding, which in itself

(10:08):
can be very helpful.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Yeah, and so you started realizing that you could do
things actively in terms of dealing with mental health in
an active way.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
Is that right?

Speaker 3 (10:21):
Yeah, it really turned a corner when I moved out.
I wanted to move out at fifteen, but I knew
that statistically that wasn't a great idea. Typically abused kids
don't move out at fifteen and have the movie and better.
And so I would only let myself move out if
I had, you know, a hope, a real reason to

(10:42):
think I might do better. And I had been studying
philosophy for quite a while at that point and.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
Just so familiar just reading things.

Speaker 3 (10:51):
Yeah, and in school I had a philosophy I was
deeply dyslexic, and I had a teacher take an interest
and just sort of learn. I was so in in
philosophy that I was very dedicated to like figure out
like why can't I read well? Like what's going on?
Because in those days I just wasn't a lot known
about dyslexia. And so I experimented. And what I did

(11:13):
is I took a blank piece of paper and I
used an exactoblade to cut a sentence window out and
then I would limit my visual field, so all I
saw was one sentence at a time that I was reading,
and then I would paraphrase whatever I was reading. And
so I had a whole separate book of the book
of the book in my words. And that caused me
to have a really deep understanding and retention of the text.

(11:36):
And so this teacher just taking an interest in me
and my own kind of fascination with the concepts or ideas,
he let me teach my own class. I got to
teach like high school teachers about philosophy.

Speaker 4 (11:48):
And run seminars and it was really empowering.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
It was when you were fourteen years Wow. Amazing.

Speaker 3 (11:53):
Yeah, it was just one of those great teachers that
change your life and you know, just empowering. And so
when I did decide will I move out, I sat
down with it and just looked at it sort of
like a problem, and how do you solve this problem?
And I we was just just learning about like genetic inheritances,
how you know I might have a predisposition to diabetes

(12:13):
or heart disease. And when I thought about my emotional life,
I was like, I have an emotional inheritance. I saw
it like a Milky Way, like you're in this huge
system that has a that goes way far back and
it gets projected into the future and it's like a
family system. It's an emotional language. And I realized I

(12:34):
had already been taught this language. I was already done.
It was done, like I learned this emotional way of
relating to the world. And so I realized my job
was could I learn a new emotional language like learning Spanish?
But there was no school to go learn emotional Spanish,
you know, And so if if I wanted to learn
a different emotional way of relating to the world, how

(12:56):
would I do that? And that was so interesting to
me that I felt like at a really clear goal,
a really clear objective. And that's why I let myself
move out, which is very stressful taking on that responsibility
and then making it trackable, like how was I doing?
What were the metrics around it? And it was exciting.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
Yeah, oh that's great.

Speaker 1 (13:19):
Yeah, it's interesting because we think about ourselves as being
free agents in the world, but in fact we're made
up of our genetic inheritance and all of our childhood
experiences which shape our brain. This is brain plasticity, and
we don't have choice about either of those things, and
so at some point we come to realize that we
have to be the sculptors of our own brains. Yeah,

(13:41):
and I think you've used the term rewiring. You're thinking
you figured out along.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
The way how to do this.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
Do you feel like you were already figuring that out
of fifteen when he left home, or you figured it
out subsequently, or are still.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
Figuring it out?

Speaker 3 (13:54):
Yeah, I mean it was something I started at fifteen.
I'd say the next huge phase of development was for
me when I was eighteen. I ended up homeless. I
wouldn't have sex with a boss. I was in San Diego.
He wouldn't give me my paycheck. I couldn't pay my rent.
I started living in my car, and then my car
got stolen and I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks.

(14:15):
I was agoraphobic. If I left my little street corner,
this little tree I liked to sleep under, I thought
that I would, you know, get terribly ill. I was
sick a lot. I had bad kidneys. I was having
constant like almost died of sepsis. An emergency room wouldn't
see me because I didn't insurance. Like it was definitely
very rough, and I realized, especially with the shoplifting, that

(14:37):
I would end up in jail or dead if I
didn't do something. And it was really an eye opening
experience because three short years later I had this lofty
goal of like, I'm not going to be a statistic,
I'm going to learn a new emotional language. And here
I was three years later, and I was a statistic.
I was homeless and stealing, and so I remembered, I
want to say, it was a stoic quote, happiness doesn't

(14:58):
depend on who you are or or what you have.
It depends on what you think. And I was like,
I don't have anything left but my thoughts, and so
can I really change my life one thought at a time?
And I took it sincerely and like earnestly, like I'm
going to try, and I.

Speaker 4 (15:14):
Think I can change my life one thought at a time.
And so I left.

Speaker 3 (15:18):
I had been stealing something and I was in a
dressing room where I had this like epiphany. So I
leave and I'm like, all right, I realized I don't
know what I'm thinking in real time. If you're going
to change your life one thought at a time, you
better be aware of what you're thinking. And now I
know the word disassociative, but I was so disassociative. I
had no ability to track my thoughts in real time.

(15:39):
I called it waking up after I would kind of
wake up after I stole. I would wake up after
these big events, you know, I would wake up in
the middle of a panic attack. I don't know what
led to the panic attack. And so what I I
was like, if you can't witness your thought in real time,
your actions, our thoughts slowed down into things you do.

(16:05):
So maybe I could reverse engineer into what I was
thinking by watching what I was doing. So my huge
life plan was I'm going to watch my hands for
two weeks.

Speaker 4 (16:13):
I gave myself two weeks.

Speaker 3 (16:15):
I'm going to watch everything I do, and that's going
to tell me something about my thoughts. So I had
a journal and I was like, I opened a door
at eight fifty seven am, I washed my hands at
whatever time.

Speaker 4 (16:28):
I didn't know what I was looking for.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
I literally just wrote down everything my hands did for
two weeks, and at the end of it, I sit
down and I'm like.

Speaker 4 (16:35):
Okay, what does this tell me about myself?

Speaker 3 (16:37):
Like what am I thinking? And it dawned on me.
I hadn't had a panic attack that whole two weeks.
I'd never gone two weeks without a panic attack in years.
It was like stumbling on the most random side effect,
and I was like, what has caused me not to
have panic attacks? What I stumbled on was being radically present? Ah,

(16:58):
forcing myself to watch my hands. I was so presently
engaged I was. I was feeling my hand on the door,
I was feeling my hand shake somebody's hand. I was
so radically present that I didn't have time to worry
about a future that didn't happen. And that's when I realized, like,
fear is a thief. It robs you of the present

(17:19):
moment to try and solve for a future that hasn't
even happened.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
Ah.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
So you know, so brains are prediction machines. We're constantly
simulating possible futures, and when people have had trauma, they
tend to simulate dangerous futures. It sounds like you were
able to get yourself off of that path with some
intentionality there, or it sounds like it happened accidentally first, yes,
but then what did you learn from that about how
you could keep yourself from constantly simulating fear.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
Yeah, for me, it was you know, Descartes said, I think,
therefore I am. I realized in that period of time
it's not what I think. Therefore I am. I perceive
what I think. Therefore I am, and that I'm the
observer of my thoughts. I'm actually not my thoughts. And

(18:06):
that was very powerful because there's something in me that
can observe my thoughts. There's something in me that can
observe my actions. So if I was a car, you know,
my brain isn't the driver. My brain is a steering
wheel the observer. I call it capital o, like the
observer is the driver. And I realized I needed to

(18:27):
cultivate a relationship with my observer, so I didn't over
identify with my thoughts because and so I called it
my gap method. But like you perceive something, you have
a stimulus, a really intense emotional or intellectual reaction, and
then you act and so power like to get off

(18:48):
of autopilot. If I was a car, I'd already been trained,
right I was. I had maps downloaded neurologically genetically, and
so I had predictable ways.

Speaker 4 (18:58):
Of responding to stimulus.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
And I realized that if I put a gap in it,
then I could change the course of my life. Then
I could go somewhere different. So if somebody you know,
did X, I stopped. I created a gap, and then
that got me off autopilot, so I could have my
own thoughtful response instead of just a knee jerk reaction.
And once I realized that I knew I was on,

(19:22):
that was powerful. I know, I just became very powerful.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
So this is cool.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
One of the things that I mean, the thing that
distinguishes humans from our nearest neighbors in the animal kingdom
is that we have a lot more cortex that wrinkly
outer three millimeters. And it turns out that because of
the massive expansion of the cortex, one of the things
we got was a lot more real estate in between
the input and the output. So if you throw some
food in front of a cat, it's going to eat

(19:48):
the food. Me you throw food in front of human
to human says I'm on a diet, I won't eat it.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
Now.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
Whatever, We've got.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
All these pathways that we can take through the system,
but we typically don't. We take the path of least
resistance most of the time, so it sounds like, wait, what.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
You got there was?

Speaker 1 (20:02):
Hey, there are different paths I can take here, given
the stimulus, given somebody being mean to me or doing something,
whatever the thing is, I don't have to react right
away in the way that is the path at least resistance.

Speaker 3 (20:14):
Yeah, or just the most familiar. I mean when cook
comes to shove, we do the familiar thing, and it
is hard to do the unfamiliar thing because it's invention.
I've never done it before. I've never related to the
world that way, you know.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
So it sounds to me like you figured out a
lot of stuff the hard way on your own. If
you were advising somebody now with depression or anxiety, what
is the first lever that they can pull on?

Speaker 3 (20:50):
People do need to learn to be present because until
your present, you can't make different choices, and so that
has to be the number one requisite thing. And to
be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to
be present. You learn to do it for longer and
longer periods of time. And so what meditation is is

(21:11):
teaching people to be present. I think what people don't
realize about meditation and why a lot of people quit,
is because there's.

Speaker 4 (21:19):
A withdrawal symptom.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
You know, when you start being present, your mind is
prompting you to be distracted. You think about all these
other things, and now you feel like a failure, that
you're failing at meditation. And so I think the first
thing I tell people is that every time you're meditating
and you get distracted, that's a bicep curl for your brain.
That's the moment where you go, oh, awesome, and so

(21:41):
to feel.

Speaker 4 (21:42):
Excited that you were distracted.

Speaker 3 (21:44):
Instead of feeling defeated. And I think that perspective shift
really changes so that you're like, oh my god, I'm
so excited. I just noticed I was thinking about my
grocery list. I'm going to come back to my breathing
or my accounting. That perspective shift really helps people stick
with meditation and realizing that is the success, getting distracted,
coming back, getting distracted coming back. If that's a hundred

(22:06):
reps and a one minute meditation, that's great, you just
did one hundred reps. Once people build the ability to
be present, I think one of the most foundational things
that helped me. I call it making an ally out
of anxiety. When I was having all those panic attacks,
I was like, there has to be a biological reason
I have anxiety. It can't just be God made a mistake, Sorry,

(22:29):
humanity about that anxiety. And I realized I was like,
what else is like this overwhelming physiological response like anxiety?
And I came up with food poisoning. You eat something bad,
you get sick, you throw up. You shouldn't get mad
at throwing up. You should get curious about what you ate.

(22:51):
Like a car alarm, You shouldn't be mad at the
car alarm. You should wonder who tried to break in?
What if my anxiety was actually something going right with me?

Speaker 4 (23:00):
What if it didn't mean I was broken? What if
it meant my body.

Speaker 3 (23:03):
Was reacting correctly to me consuming something that didn't agree
with me. And so I stopped being so avoidant about
my anxiety, and I started getting curious, like, Okay, my
body's giving me a correct signal. What was I just thinking, feeling,
or doing? And so what I encourage people to do
is to have like notes in their phone or on
their journal that says thinking, feeling, doing, And every time

(23:27):
you're anxious, try to fill one of those categories. And
after a month, you're gonna see a pattern. To your
nervous system. You're just going to write down what were
you just thinking? What were you just feeling? Or what
were you just doing? So I might You know, you
don't honestly get aware until you feel anxious. You just

(23:47):
now I'm cripplingly anxious. So then you get curious about
what was I just doing?

Speaker 2 (23:51):
Got it?

Speaker 4 (23:52):
Like what would I just eat? Who did I just
talk to?

Speaker 3 (23:55):
What did I just think? And you don't try and
change any of it. You just start to keep a law,
you know, like talk to Gary, didn't sleep whatever is,
You don't try to change it.

Speaker 4 (24:06):
You just observe it.

Speaker 1 (24:08):
And you in your own life started seeing patterns emerging
that you can recognize.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
Yeah, what I realized is we only have two states
of being. Were either dilated or contracted.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
That's all we have.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
Means you're either you could probably put in like sympathetic
compair sympathetic nervous system state, like your system is either
dilated literally where your blood pressure drops, your voice drops,
your relaxed, your calm, your posture changes, or you're contracted
and that can be whatever you know, your sympathetic nervous
system your fight or flight taking over your voice raises,

(24:40):
your blood pressure raises, your pulse raises, your anxiety raises.
And so what I realized is you can't be in
both states at one time. And I don't believe in
many hacks, but you really can get yourself out of
a contracted state by participating in something that gets you
into a dilated state. So to do this, I just
started having these lists of dilated, contracted, and every time

(25:03):
I was dilated relaxed, I would write down what I
was thinking, feeling, or doing. Every time I was contracted,
I would write down what was I thinking, feeling, or doing.
And it was a very clear set path. You know,
every time I had this certain thought that would always
undo me. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't
know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing.
I would get myself worked up and that would send

(25:23):
me into a panic attack. And so can you abstain?
And that's really where the rubber meets the road for
people is once you make these lists, can you stop
consuming the things that make you anxious? Will you give
up that relationship, will you stop skipping sleep? Whatever it
is that you know? But this list is so helpful

(25:46):
because it's your personal map to your nervous system, and
nobody else knows that better than you.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
That's amazing that you did this work on your own,
and now you're so good at explaining this to other
people to take care on. So let's get to that.
So you've dealt with so many young people right now,
and the first question I have for you is we
see the way that trauma can end up shaping identity.
What patterns do you see in that when you look

(26:12):
across all the young people you've spent time with now.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
I like to think of trauma as an overwhelming experience
that you don't know how to process, and we often
want to shut down, we contract, and then we start
to avoid. And I think that stays trapped in your
body until you deal with it, and that takes dilating

(26:37):
moving towards getting curious and understanding. And we don't have
great systems in our society to help give people a
safe enough environment and enough context that they can expand
let those intense feelings come, because it's so intense. I mean,
it's amazing how trauma stays in your body and when

(26:57):
you are ready to deal with it, you will experience it.
Just distensely is the first time. And so creating safer
spaces for people's nervous systems.

Speaker 4 (27:06):
Where they know they can do it, where you know
it's going to pass.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Those things are important space of a safe space.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
Like in our foundation it's called Inspiring Children. Everybody knows
that we show up in a certain way, like in
a therapeutic saying. A nice way of giving it context
might be to say, you know, if you were to
tell me something like think of something really traumatic in
your childhood, something you don't want to tell anybody, what
would it take.

Speaker 4 (27:34):
For you to tell me?

Speaker 3 (27:36):
Like what agreement would it take between us for you
to tell me? And it would probably be confidentiality, not
being rushed. You know, there's certain things that are a
recipe to creating an environment that, with time, would give
you the confidence to say, I'm going to take a
huge risk. I'm going to tell you the secret I've

(27:57):
never wanted to share.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
Yeah, and so let's move to Inspiring Children foundations. So
you're a co founder of that, and it combines the
tools of athletics and mentorship and emotional tools.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
So why that combination, because that starts.

Speaker 3 (28:15):
To create an environment for you to change you know
my goal. When I got discovered from my record deal,
I almost didn't sign it because I knew I had
a lot of trauma and if you add fame to
my background, it's what every movie is about, of every musician.

Speaker 4 (28:33):
It leads to drug abuse.

Speaker 3 (28:35):
The movie doesn't end well, and I wanted, you know,
during that year, I learned how to stop shoplifting. I
learned how to stop having panic attacks. I learned to
heal my agoraphobia. I didn't want to give that up
just because I was being offered a record deal. Being
offered a record deal was like being offered a very
dangerous drug to me. How would I interact with that
so that I could have a different outcome where I

(28:57):
wouldn't become a drug addict. And made myself a promise
that my number one job was to learn to be
a happy, whole human, not a human full of holes.
My number two job was to be a musician, and
so I stayed really loyal to that. And what I
realized about happiness is you can't just get happy. It's
just impossible, you know. You don't get to just flip

(29:17):
a switch and like I'm happy now. Happiness is a
side effect of choices. It's creating a different environment where
happiness is a side effect, because happiness is a side
effect of choices. And so it's like building a different house.
You know, the house I was raised in doesn't lead
to a happiness as a side effect.

Speaker 4 (29:37):
I had to build a.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
Different internal structure or internal architecture. And so with the kids,
it's creating an environment that starts to help them make
different choices where happiness can be a side effect. So athleticism, exercise,
moving your body.

Speaker 4 (29:54):
I also, you.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
Know, I wanted to learn to be happy, but I
a also I'm very competitive, I'm ambitious. I didn't want
to like disappear from the world and just disappear from
the things that stressed me out. So I wanted to
be high achieving. And so what we did with the
Foundation was create a high achieving environment where people push themselves.

(30:17):
And it's life that triggers us. It's life that brings
up our issues. It's striving that brings up our issues.
And so then when those issues come up in real time,
we address them for the kids in real time. So
we kind of turn the model inside out. Instead of
bringing kids to a therapeutic environment where it's you know,
therapy every day at two we do no therapy in
a one on one setting. We create a high achieving

(30:37):
environment that's healthy, that helps people make healthy choices, that
has healthy mentorship, healthy relationships, and then when life triggers them,
we give them tools that help them in that moment.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
Now, this is a very special foundation.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
One of the things that's quite cool is you get
to track people longitudinally for a long time.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
Yeah, what patterns have you seen there?

Speaker 4 (30:56):
These kids are just heroic.

Speaker 3 (30:57):
You know, anytime anybody chooses to take responsibility for their
own happiness, that's gritty work. It's not for the faint
of heart. You know, you will never change if you
blame other people for why you're not happy. And we
all have a lot of reasons why we're not happy,
and they're valid, they're real, valid reasons, but if you

(31:18):
let them be an excuse, you're just never going to change.
And so seeing every kid take on this mantle of
like no one's coming for me, I'm coming for me,
like nobody owes me, what do I owe myself? When
they start to make that switch, you just know they're
going to be unstoppable.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
What's the longest young person that you've worked with in
the show.

Speaker 3 (31:40):
Oh my gosh, I mean our second graduate, Trent is
now our CEO. Right.

Speaker 4 (31:47):
Our kids stay.

Speaker 3 (31:48):
Around a long, long, long, long time. They stay around
and become mentors Max. Yeah, it's incredible.

Speaker 1 (31:56):
I've met many of them, and they're so special. They
seem like the most well adjusted kids that I've met anywhere.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, and they are. But it's so it's so wild
to think where they came from. They came from really
tough spots in their life. Yeah, with suicide attempts and
other you know, deep depressions, deep anxiety, and now they're
just they're just.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
On top of the world. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:19):
We don't often get to see the other side of
suicidal ideation, you know. We just hear about the losses
we have in the world. Yeah, but you don't often
see what the other side looks like, you know, and
that these are deeply engaged, deeply happy, deeply passionate. And
it doesn't mean that your life like. Mental health doesn't
mean you're happy all the time. Mental health just means
you're going to have the appropriate response, which sometimes is anger,

(32:42):
which sometimes is sadness, which sometimes is grief.

Speaker 4 (32:44):
That's all healthy.

Speaker 1 (32:45):
Yeah, having seen a bunch of these young people go
through inspiring children foundations. Are there any interventions that seem
to change the trajectory for people?

Speaker 3 (32:54):
One is what I just mentioned of, like when you
stop making an excuse for why you're not happy and
you start saying I'm going to be responsible for it,
your life will change. Another one is when you start
learning to apply these tools. It takes discipline, you know,
so you have to build awareness and then you have
to apply discipline, and really it's learning. There's a lot

(33:15):
of tricks that work. You know, cold water on your
face when you're ruminating. Oh, when you get ruminating thoughts
and you just have these circular thoughts. Like if you
put cold water on your face or you get in
an ice bath, like it really breaks those ruminating thoughts.
And it's because you're having a neurological chemical reaction to
that and it just.

Speaker 4 (33:35):
Helps reset you.

Speaker 3 (33:37):
What are some other tricks for panic attacks? I mean,
I'm telling you this. You'll explain this better than me,
But it's fascinating to watch an MRI. I have a
brain that's having a panic attack. The blood drains out
of the frontal lobes, your migdala lights up and it
goes offline. And that's why when you're having a panic attack,

(33:58):
it's you're so unreasonable. And so what I realized was
if I force my brain to deal with information like taste, color, touch,
it forces my brain to process the information, and so
it forces that part of my brain to start engaging again,
and it helps me get out of a panic attack.

(34:19):
So things like peppermint oil, for some reason, works really
really well smell Basically, you.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
Just grab a little violin, you take it with Yeah, I.

Speaker 4 (34:27):
Find like peppermint oil.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
If you feel a panic attack coming on, sometimes peppermint
oil will intervene enough to get your brain to come
back online and start processing ice cubes on the back
of the neck.

Speaker 4 (34:40):
It's different for everybody.

Speaker 3 (34:41):
I have a friend who gets obsessed about reading when
they're heading into a panic attack, because it forces your
brain to deal with the information, you know, like you
start spelling words. He'll look at signs on the street
if he's on the street and be like that, says
Simon Simo in and he just forces his brain tough
function and work, and that'll really help people.

Speaker 1 (35:03):
Oh that's great, Okay. So then in the pandemic. You
started the Not Alone Challenge. First of all, what did
that moment in time teach you about what was going
on with our collective mental health?

Speaker 3 (35:17):
We knew, like I see, we started the foundation maybe twenty
five years ago, and we really thought mental health was
going to be the next frontier, like the big epidemic
when COVID hit. I remember just thinking people are locked
in their house houses with their televisions, and remember just
the absolute terror and.

Speaker 4 (35:40):
The news and what was on the news.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
I mean, it was really scary, and you had people
constantly twenty four hours a day, terrified for their lives.
And so we knew we would see a huge spike
and mental health issues. We knew we'd see a huge
spike in domestic abuse because you have people locked up
with their abusers and they can't get to work or
do the other things during the day that might help
them avoid that domestic partner. And so we really dug

(36:05):
in then to see if we could like develop resources
that people could use.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
And so what kind of things did you introduce?

Speaker 3 (36:13):
We started the social media challenge hashtag not Alone Challenge.
And I've always been really like, I love one on
one therapy is great, it's not very accessible. Like the
very best patient to therapist ratio is one hundred and
fifty six to one. That's the state with the best
and the most therapists. It goes sharply downhill from there,

(36:34):
and so there's just not enough therapists. We really have
a bottleneck in the industry. And there's different types of therapy.
Not every therapeutic model works for everybody. You have somebody
finally willing to go to therapy, they may not be
matched to the right therapeutic model, so they think they're
broken instead of saying it might not.

Speaker 4 (36:52):
Just be the right type of therapy.

Speaker 3 (36:54):
And so for me, it was about democratizing access and
realizing these skills I taught myself, like anxiety as an ally,
they're tools you can practice for free, with no guidance.
And it really bothered me that, you know, misery is
an equal opportunist. It doesn't care like if you're rich, poor, black, white, homeless,

(37:14):
a celebrity, but if you want to learn to be different,
that's an education. An education costs money. You know, therapy
should be a re education, and that's expensive. And so
how could we help create scalable tools that would help
people without that.

Speaker 1 (37:30):
You know, I'm very optimistic about AI therapists because they
are twenty four to seven, they remember everything you said,
they've got good guardrails on them. I think it's going
to change the world quite a bit in terms of
people in the middle of the night, when they're at
their lowest moment, having somebody right there.

Speaker 4 (37:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
I helped found a small tech company. It was a
mental health that we did in virtual reality, and it's
amazing because that's like a thousand percent scalable. You have
a live guide twenty four hours a day, day, seven
days a week, so at two am, if your cat dies,
you can get on there when you need help. And
it was all around therapeutic tools helping solve for depression

(38:10):
or anxiety or addiction or whatever.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
It is great. Great. Are you just out of curiosity?

Speaker 1 (38:16):
Are you still interested in VR as the road for
that or do you feel like having an AI therapist
on the phone?

Speaker 2 (38:23):
Is it better? We are you right now?

Speaker 4 (38:24):
And then I think all those tools are really helpful. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:27):
I mean with Inner World there's an overlay of AI
and it'll become more and more outprevalent. But just because
the way VR works, especially you have a human intervention
is coupled with AI, you have a single guide that
could run several groups simultaneously, you know, but it's an
amazing thing.

Speaker 4 (38:44):
What can be done.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
Yeah, that's right as I understand it, Females are much
less likely to use VR than males.

Speaker 4 (38:51):
Yeah, yeah, we're surprised.

Speaker 3 (38:53):
You know, therapy is usually female driven, Like men are
slow adopters. So we thought we get like young gamers,
maybe young female gamers when we started it, but we
realized it was we were getting mostly men, which was
incredible because men felt safe to show up. It was virtual,
you had an avatar, and so we had a lot
of male engagement.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
It turns out the reason females don't like VR as
a general thing is that they don't like to be
to not be able to see what's going on around them.

Speaker 4 (39:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:23):
Yeah, oras men don't care.

Speaker 4 (39:25):
As Yeah, we have the responsibilities.

Speaker 5 (39:29):
Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 (39:40):
And so one of the things, you know, I went
to this wonderful conference that you put on recently. It
was so it was so lovely, and one of the
things that struck me about it was that you have
really somehow allowed people to be vulnerable in mass and
one of the things that was so amazing about this

(40:00):
conference to me is that after person was getting up.
These people are all people with big lives, celebrities of
various sorts, and people were so vulnerable and open about
where they were and what kind of hard stuff they
went through. I found that absolutely amazing. Tell me about
how you spread the word of vulnerability.

Speaker 3 (40:19):
I think it really is about creating that environment where
people know intuitively and instinctively it's safe to share. Nothing
feels better than connection, human connection. I mean, what, we're
a carbon based you know, being what doesn't carbon have
like eight balances? Like it's built to connect for more

(40:40):
before I thought.

Speaker 4 (40:41):
It was eight.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
Really, yeah, it's like a period.

Speaker 3 (40:44):
Anyway, we're built to connect, like we're built to bond,
and connection feels really really good to us. And when
we're vulnerable, we're actually able to connect. When we're armored,
we don't actually connect. And for me, I really learned that,
Like when I started singing in coffee shops, I was
homeless and I was so lonely, and I realized it
was because nobody knew me. I didn't ever tell the truth.

(41:07):
I always was like I'm good, great, how are you?
I never told anybody what I was really doing. Nobody
knew I was stealing. It was like I had the
secret life and secret sadness. And so when I started
writing songs, it was the truth. It was honest, it
was vulnerable. And when I made the decision to go
on stage and tell the truth, I remember being this

(41:27):
huge risk and when I did it, the people in
my audience cried and they were like, I didn't even
be able to felt that way, and I was like,
I didn't know anybody else felt that way, and it
felt so good to be seen for who I actually was,
flaws and all. So I decided to make that my
way as I developed my career was I would be honest,
I would be vulnerable.

Speaker 4 (41:48):
I would tell people the truth.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
That has a lot of good benefits because then you
never have imposter syndrome. You're never pretending to be something
you're not. You talk about all of it. And I
was able to talk about all of it my fan
base because you know, the Internet was just coming online
and it gave me an avenue to have very real
discussions with people. And so at the Summit, I think
it's a lot just how we lead and how our

(42:11):
organizers lead, and when you know great suffering, you want
to help suffering, and you're driven to help suffering. It
causes you to care in a way it breaks you
open and that's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
Yeah, you know, I'm really interested in the fact that
you took creativity and artistry as the road out because
one concern that a lot of people are talking about
is with AI, are kids going to stop doing creative
things because you can have it write a song for
you or have it make a painting for you or something.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
But I actually am not worried about that.

Speaker 1 (42:46):
Because creativity is such a great outlet for people to
do exactly this kind of thing, to explore their feelings,
to generate something on their own that communicates honestly with
other people, to see where there's resonance going on. What's
your take on creativity as a tool for fighting anxiety

(43:08):
or depression?

Speaker 3 (43:11):
You know, creativity again helps us move towards something instead
of moving away from something.

Speaker 4 (43:17):
It brings curiosity.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
And again because every thought, feeling, emotion leads our nervous
system into one of these two states, you realize like
engaging in curiosity gets you into rest and digest. You
can't be curious unless you're relaxed, you know, and so
you can have the tail wag the dog in a
good way. You can when you're anxious, get curious and

(43:40):
it causes you to relax. And creativity is investigation. It's
exploring its curiosity, and that has a really positive effect
on our nervous system.

Speaker 4 (43:50):
I am really curious as we use.

Speaker 3 (43:52):
AI just neurologically, if that'll it causes us. I think
it can cause us to get neurologically lazy. I'm curious.
You know, writing a short story is hard work. And
if you get an idea for a short story, but
you don't do the hard work of like h doing
all the problem solving, and you give it to AI
and it does it so great, I'm curious if it'll

(44:13):
people will have the muscle to push through, you know,
those uncomfortable problem solving spaces.

Speaker 4 (44:19):
I'm very curious about that.

Speaker 2 (44:20):
Yeah, nobody knows the answer yet.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
I happen to be sort of techno optimistic about this
for a couple of reasons. We've all seen these eras
even during our lifetime, like when calculators were introduced in
school and people had a lot of concerns about what
that would mean. But you know, we learn how to
do long division, but we don't spend a year on
long division because we can use the machine to speed
things up. People had these same concerns in fourteen forty

(44:44):
when the printing press was invented. They thought that children
were going to be much dumber in the next generation
because if they wanted the answer, they could just pull
the book right there there was the answer written down.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
So historically you've seen this over and over.

Speaker 1 (44:57):
My hope is that ai I will enhance creativity, that
we can all surf the wave of it and do
bigger and better things rather than have it do stuff
for us and I The reason I'm optimistic about it
is because, just as a dumb example, I happen to
love fixing things in my house, and AI has three

(45:18):
x to me on my abilities to do things. I
take a picture or something, and I figure stuff out
with the AI. Everybody I'm talking to seems to be
having this sort of experience where whatever they love doing,
they're able to do it better and faster, but there's
still I'm still learning stuff, just at a better pace
than I would have.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
Yeah, what's your experience with it? So far?

Speaker 4 (45:38):
I've found this to be incredible tool.

Speaker 3 (45:39):
I'm not like building my own agents yet, you know,
I have a long way to go. I'm using it
pretty passively, you know, I'll put pictures in like you,
tell me how to do things, tell me how to
you know, tell me more about this or things like that.
So I find the learning aspect really fun.

Speaker 4 (45:55):
But yeah, we're up for a huge change.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
Rough for a huge change. But do you think creatively?
I mean, what does it mean for you as an artist?
But I mean you're well known as a musician, but
also you're a visual artist and you're doing all kinds
of other cool products which we'll come to. But yeah,
what do you think this means for you? Do you
feel like you're able to move faster as a results?

Speaker 3 (46:16):
It's interesting, you know, I'm fifty one, I have a
life experience, and I'm able to engage with AI in
a specific way. I'm so curious what it's like when
you're young and you don't already have that foundation. That'll
be interesting, Yeah, you know, be very different for a
twelve year old coming up with AI versus US that
already kind of has a different type of foundation.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
It's right, I mean, just as an example, with my son.
We have a fireplace and there's a blank sort of
shield right in the middle of it, and so we're.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
Looking at it.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
I took a picture and ask chat gip to generate
a picture of an eagle that would fit right in
that funny shape space.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
And then my son found.

Speaker 1 (46:54):
A program that allowed us to take that picture and
turn into a three D structure, and then we three
D printed it and put it on and it's the
coolest sculpture of an eagle that we generated in sort
of ninety seconds of work in total.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
But what I love about that my sense about the
same age as your.

Speaker 1 (47:09):
Son, and what I love about that is just the seeing, oh,
I can really create something in the world and do
it fast. And that means that when he wants to
dig in and do longer term projects, he's already thinking
at a higher level than we ever did.

Speaker 4 (47:23):
Yeah, yeah, it's true.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
What do you think about social media? One of the
concerns has been that it's caused a lot more depression
anxiety in the younger generation. As a side note, I
find it a little hard to know with certainty if
that's the issue, because we all, I mean, we had
magazines and there were movie stars with perfect bodies and
beauty and whatever. So we all grew up with that stuff.

(47:46):
The question is, you know, whether it's more intensively spend
more hours on it now, But the question is what
can we do to protect young brains.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
I think it always comes down to skill bases, you know,
gripping a lot with a lot of you know, guns
are a very big thing up there, I were hunting.
Guns are very very dangerous, and so you have to
learn a lot of skills to be able to handle
a gun well. And I think social media the thing
I find fascinating about it is, you know, when I

(48:17):
was nineteen or twenty, I got famous, and fame is
a huge lesson, Like it's a huge thing to contend with.
Your people are aware of you on a mass scale,
and you get feedback on a mass scale, and you
have people writing articles about like, oh she's fat, or

(48:37):
oh she's this, or oh she's washed up, and so
you're getting feedback that isn't normal. You know, it's not
a normal thing psychologically to weed through the type of
feedback you get when you're famous, even positive, like I
thought the positive stuff made me feel just as lonely
because they don't know me, They don't know if I'm

(48:58):
a good person, they don't know if it's warrented. So
it all was a very isolating thing. And you have
to make a choice as a famous person of will
this make me more authentic? Will I choose to be
more authentic or will I start changing who I am
to be liked? Now, you could argue we go through
that in high school too. You start to deal with
like clicks, you know, will I be my authentic self

(49:18):
or will I start trying to change who I am
to fit in. I think social media has caused every
person to deal with what it's like to be famous
a little bit, and that's interesting, you know, and not,
by the way, not a lot of famous people handle
it great either, like a lot of famous people are
drug addicts, or you know, everybody's coping with something that's
deeply traumatizing. In all honesty, it's very stressful. So I

(49:41):
think it's about giving our kids a lot of tools,
But most of us aren't equipped to help our kids
intellectually really understand what those tools are. We don't have
frameworks to talk to our kids about what is our
authentic self? Who are you if you're not Jonathan Myers.
You know, if you're not this person, what makes you you?

Speaker 4 (50:00):
You do?

Speaker 3 (50:00):
You make time to be with yourself and understand who
you are? That isn't your identity, That isn't I mean,
those are serious skills to learn, and those are our
skills we need to be teaching our kids, but we
weren't taught them as parents, you know what I mean?
And so I think that's kind of where the rub
coms is. Social media and technology came up quicker than
our ability to give real psychological skill sets around them.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
How would you advise a young person to go about
that task of figuring out who they are?

Speaker 4 (50:28):
I call it dating yourself?

Speaker 3 (50:30):
You know, like we're so interested in dating other people,
and what do you do when you date somebody? You
spend time, you are curious about them, you know, you
dedicate resources and create frameworks, And so I think you
have to date yourself. You have to ask yourself questions
like really, who am I? If I'm not Jewel the singer?

Speaker 4 (50:49):
Who am I?

Speaker 3 (50:50):
Who am I? When I shut my eyes? And I'm
not anybody's daughter or anybody's sister? Like what makes me me?
What is essentially me? Yeah? What's just my personality that's
reacted to trauma? Am I just my trauma? Am I
a bunch of decisions I made about myself based on
my value or my worth. They're interesting things to think about,
and they're not things we're typically encouraged to think about.

Speaker 1 (51:10):
How do you get people to ask the right questions
on that? I mean, do you have a guide of
some sort, maybe on the website that tells people like, look,
why don't you ask you shelf this question?

Speaker 2 (51:20):
That ask yourself that question?

Speaker 4 (51:21):
I should?

Speaker 3 (51:21):
I started writing a second book and I haven't. I
need to get back to it, but it had a
list of questions that I find very provocative to to
sort of get you on that journey.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 1 (51:33):
As a side note, I ran a company for the
last ten years and one of the questions that I
would ask people when they were interviewing was if.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
You had to date yourself, what would drive you crazy?

Speaker 1 (51:43):
Which is a really interesting question because it really caused
people to think about what, you know. It's easy for
people in a job interview to talk about what they
are great at, but the things that would drive them
crazy something they hadn't examined necessarily. Yeah, what would you
say is the biggest myth about mental health, maybe a
dangerous myth about mental health that young people don't know.

Speaker 3 (52:04):
I'd say it's kind of a prevailing feeling that somebody's broken,
that something's wrong with them, that if they're anxious or
they've anxiety disorders, that they're broken or something's wrong. I
went through a really terrible experience where I don't know
how to describe it. I have an autobiography where I
talk about my relationship with my mom, but I was

(52:25):
when I was thirty two. I realized everything I had
thought I had known wasn't true. All my money was gone.
I was three million in debt. It was a really
really rough awakening and I felt devastated. I've been through
a really hard life and then this thing happens and
I'm like, oh my gosh. I turned down the tour
I was on. I really needed the money, but I

(52:45):
was like, I can't. I'm going to have a mental
health breakdown if I go on the road. Like I'm
not okay, and I don't know why. These moments always
happened the mirror.

Speaker 4 (52:53):
I lood in the mirror.

Speaker 3 (52:54):
I was washing my hands, and I remember this parable
of the golden statue. It's just a little terrible of
a village heard that a warring tribe was coming, and
so they had this golden statue. They covered it in
mud to hide the value. The war came, there was
a lot of trauma, and aftermath, villagers were rebuilding. For years,

(53:15):
they forgot about the golden statue. They even forgot it
was valuable until one day, after a rainstorm, a child
was sitting at the feet of the statue and saw
a little bit of gold and picked it off, and
they realized, Wow, this thing has value. It's been golden
all along. And I suddenly realized, what if I'm what
I mean. A soul isn't a teacup. It isn't a
chair that can just be broken or shattered like. It

(53:37):
has to be a sustaining energy that exists, And so
what if my job was just to do an archaeological
dig back to my whole self. It's there intact all
the time. And I think that reframing is really important,
because fixing something that's broken is really daunting, but uncovering

(53:59):
something that's whole intuitively makes a.

Speaker 4 (54:02):
Lot more sense.

Speaker 3 (54:03):
And so that for me was a huge change and
something I has helped other people when they adopt it.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
Oh that's so lovely.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
And so you have taken on all kinds of creative projects,
So tell us what you're doing right now with both
oceanographic data and space data.

Speaker 3 (54:23):
I grew up in big nature. It had such a
positive impact on me and my being. I believe nature
is always there reaching for us, and I think we
only value what we're in a relationship with. So whatever
we're in the biggest relationship with is what we value
the most. And as we've become industrialized, we've really moved

(54:44):
away from having a relationship to nature, so we don't
often know where a food comes from or how heavy
water is to haul it. I was raised on a homestead, though,
so I was raised so close with such a big relationship,
and it's been a mentor. Like a lot of the
skills I learned was by watching nature, by watching natural systems.
So I wanted to see if I could build an

(55:06):
instrument that would give nature a voice and would give
nature the ability to affect you and your nervous system
and your brain wave states. And then I wanted to
see if it worked. So what I did is I
created for heart of the ocean. I created an eight
foot tall sculpture and inside are these organelles that are
wrapped in LED lighting and it's sixty thousand points of

(55:29):
programmable light. And then I created a sound vocabulary, and
then I worked with NASA, a woman named Shelgentiman and
a guy named Gregni and Marr where we went out
and I created data sculpture, so that data is surfaced
like surface data, so like wave height, precipitation, things like that.

(55:50):
Then there's the wind mixed layer in the ocean, which
is critters like dolphins, salinity currents, things like that. Then
you go into the midnight zone where there's seismic data
and deeper sea creatures like anglerfish, and then you cycle
back up. So it's this twelve minute loop of data.
Every time we come back up to the surface, our
satellites grab new fresh data, so it's live every twelve minutes,

(56:14):
it's changing. And so this data there's a computer in
the base and the data is live streaming, and that
data then chooses a color and chooses a sound, and
it was really fun. It was fun to work with
the data. Sonifying data is like its own thing. I
could nerd out on, but we did end up studying
it in the University of Mexico City, So it's been

(56:36):
really fun to do that. And it's like a wave
combining music and my visual art practice and my mental
health practice all into one thing.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
So when you look at this, I've seen the sculpture,
it's extraordinary. You're hearing the data from the ocean turned
into sound and lights.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
Yeah. What do you think the effect is on mental health?
What's your experience? Is a new sit in front of
it for a while.

Speaker 3 (57:00):
Yeah, it's altering, like you get altered, like you really
relax and you really get altered.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
So you are a visual artist as well, you paint.
And am I right that You've got an exhibit coming up?

Speaker 4 (57:13):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (57:13):
Yeah, opened my seventh the Venice Bianale Crystal Bridges Museum
of American Art and it'll be up for the next
eight months.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
Wonderful. And I've seen some of your work. It's very beautiful.

Speaker 4 (57:23):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (57:24):
And what I found out I hadn't realized was before,
but you have synesthesia, as my listeners probably know, I've
studied synesthesia for a long time and so your form
of synesthesia is where you where musical notes will trigger
colors and shapes. Tell us about that for your experience.

Speaker 3 (57:42):
Yeah, so I see colors sometimes when people talk, most
often with music, when people talk, I see like clouds
of color that have movement to them, kind of like
the Aurora borealis maybe is a good example. But when
i'm I see much more structured shapes with color and

(58:03):
the tone when I sing or the vibrato affects the
shape and how those shapes move and collapse and expand.

Speaker 4 (58:11):
And the way I hear pitch I realized is doing this.

Speaker 3 (58:14):
I hear pitch as a shape like I see a
little like a if you've ever seen like the signatures
of like you pluck a guitar string and it makes
that sound wave.

Speaker 4 (58:23):
That's what I see.

Speaker 3 (58:24):
And so when I get pitched by hearing slash seeing
this shape, and I match the shape with my voice,
and then that's how I tune my guitar or things
like that. So for me switching to in your monitors
where I'm not hearing the sound push the air, I'm
not as good at my pitch. It's very interesting. It's
like it happens in space. It's I don't fully understand it.

Speaker 2 (58:47):
Do you have perfect pitch.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
No, are you able to tell when your guitar is
flat or sharp based on the shapes and colors?

Speaker 4 (58:55):
Yeah, because I hear I hear the pitch, but I
hear one.

Speaker 3 (58:59):
I see a sound wave of signature and how high
and low the valley peaks are. And so when I'm singing,
I have to get it's a pitch. But you're all,
it's how it's pushing the air. It's the one wo yeah,
creates the pitch.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
I guess. Nice.

Speaker 1 (59:14):
Yeah, and you had previously told me the the way
you discovered you had synesthesia. Of course you didn't know
the words for it the time when you were a
little girl.

Speaker 5 (59:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:25):
My earliest memory is somehow I got in the basement
of our house and my mom was looking for me,
and she called down the stairs and she was like true,
and I just saw this explosion of color and it
was like a dark room, and so this color was
just so bright in my head and I was like,
that's me, Like, I'm those colors.

Speaker 4 (59:44):
That name means those colors.

Speaker 2 (59:46):
Oh, it's wonderful.

Speaker 4 (59:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:49):
Okay, So, in wrapping up, what do you think is
the most important lesson about mental health that all of
us listening should be keeping in mind.

Speaker 3 (59:59):
Gosh, I would just say, if you want to work
on your mental health, if you make that your number
one job, Like, what is it like to really take
that on and really say I'm going to care more
about my mental health than any other thing that really
starts to change your life?

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
And what tools should people use for this?

Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
Yeah, so there's a lot of types of therapy. There's
talk therapy, there's cognitive behavioral, there's DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy.
They're all different, they all have different tools available For me. Personally,
talk therapy doesn't really work. It doesn't It helps me
feel connected, which is therapeutic, but it doesn't help me

(01:00:37):
make changes. I'm personally interested in making changes. That's when
I notice I get the best results. And so I
think it's just being a really good advocate for yourself.
You know, now that we have AI, you can just
say what types of therapies are out there, what types
of modalities are out there, and then also just knowing
like you can do a lot on your own. You know,
if you just like the types of exercises I mentioned,

(01:00:59):
those are free and if you want to apply them,
they will really change your life.

Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
Okay, well, thank you for inspiring so many people, and
for being vulnerable and for finding your own golden statue
under the mud ah.

Speaker 4 (01:01:10):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
That was my conversation with Jewel. One of the ideas
that stayed with me most after this conversation is the
role of vulnerability. Vulnerability is easy to praise from a distance,
and it becomes even more interesting when you look at
what it really asks of the brain. To be vulnerable
is to let another person see something frightened or uncertain

(01:01:38):
or ashamed inside of you. It requires relaxing the impulse
to conceal and pretend. Vulnerability is about letting go of
performance for a moment, and that is nothing small for
a nervous system. Because the brain is always managing risk,
it's always estimating consequences. It's asking what happens if I

(01:02:01):
reveal this? What if I say this out loud? What
if everyone turns away? So from a neural point of view,
this is a real risk. But vulnerability is one of
the most important.

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
Doors that we have.

Speaker 1 (01:02:15):
In our conversation today, Jewel reminded us that when we
are armored, we don't actually connect. We can only meaningfully
do that when we're vulnerable, and this is why loneliness
can persist even in very crowded lives. A person can
be surrounded by attention and starved for something deeper. They

(01:02:35):
can be praised and remain unknown. In Jewel's case, a
person can become highly legible in a role and remain
nearly invisible as a self. The neuroscience story underneath all
this is that brains are extremely social. They are relational,
by which I mean we regulate each other constantly. We

(01:02:58):
calm one another, we alarm one another, we reshape one another,
and so just the presence of another human who says,
in effect, I know something about pain too, this can
change the chemistry of a room. When one person tells
the truth, permission spreads and people feel like their private

(01:03:19):
interior becomes shareable.

Speaker 2 (01:03:22):
And that really matters.

Speaker 1 (01:03:23):
In the domain of mental health, because shame thrives in
silence and secrecy. Openness creates oxygen. Every time one person
speaks honestly about what's happening in their inner cosmos, the
universe becomes just a little bit easier to inhabit for
the next person. And I just want to return to

(01:03:44):
the quite striking metaphor that jewels shared near the end,
this golden statue covered in mud. I love that story
because it offers a different way to think about suffering.
For a lot of people, mental health struggles come with
the conclusion that there is something wrong with me at
the core. But her story offers another lens on it,

(01:04:07):
which is that the gold is still there. Life lays
down mud, and so the work is archaeological. You uncover,
you remember, you return, and that gives a frame shift.
And I hope that many people hearing this conversation were
able to feel something loosen when they encounter that image.

(01:04:27):
So let's wrap up. I think of hope as an architecture.
Hope is what happens when a person has somewhere to turn.
Hope is what happens when there are tools to practice,
or when a person is given a language for their experience.

Speaker 2 (01:04:42):
It's what happens when there is.

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
A mentor or a teacher, or a therapist or a friend,
or an organization or just a song or a hotline
or an AI therapist, or sometimes it's a family member
or a stranger or some structure that's says you do
not have to carry all this bad weather by yourself

(01:05:05):
and this landscape of help is a lot broader than
it used to be, and I think with growing societal
attention and new tools like AI, the help.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
Is going to keep on growing.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
So my hope for today is that you or someone
that you know asks for help a little sooner. Go
to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and
to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my substack,
and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube

(01:05:38):
for videos of each episode and to leave comments until
next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos