Jonathan Wilson : The Mental Health Crisis No One Sees Coming

Former Navy SEAL Jonathan Wilson has spent his life operating under extreme pressure. Today, he's on a mission to help people detect declining mental health before it becomes a crisis. This is a powerful conversation on resilience, purpose, and the future of mental well-being. Also, a little note that this episode contains discussion of suicide and mental health. Jonathan, a huge welcome to the Habits of High Performers podcast. How are you?

I'm great. Thank you for having me.

Oh, it's a delight to have you. There's only been a couple of occasions over the last 500 or so episodes where we've had a former Navy SEAL on the show, so it's a pleasure to welcome you onto the show. And I just want to say thank you for what you do, what you have done. It's incredible, putting your life on the line and putting others before yourself always. So I want to go just into something very specific. I've been reading papers on Navy SEAL training, so BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training, and it's arguably one of the toughest selection trainings on the planet. There's a pass rate of somewhere between 15 and 20%. It's very low pass rate. Most people that go to BUD/S are highly skilled and trained and the best in the business, but they fail. You passed. What do you know about the people who pass? What do they do differently? What are some of the simple things they do differently to get through hell?

Yeah, it's a great question, and I, uh, it's one that the Navy has spent probably millions of dollars trying to solve, right? Because there's a cost associated with sending a Navy SEAL to the program or a candidate, uh, and then it's a, it's over a million dollars per candidate to get through the pipeline. So if they can identify who's going to make it, then they're going to save quite a bit of money. And, uh, 30-some-odd Gallup studies later, they still don't know the answer. Here's what I believe to be a big part of this. So when I showed up to BUD/S and I was BUD/S Class 252, there was 216 of us lined up in height order too, because you got to have a swim buddy. You got to have— everywhere you went, you had to have a buddy with you. And at the time, I didn't understand what the heck the point of that was, but the idea was when you go to war, if something were to happen, you'd always have somebody there with you to pull you off the battlefield. So it absolutely made sense later on. Regardless, 216 of us lined up. When it was all said and done, there were 16 of us left. Wild. Yeah, 16. I believe after, you know, it's been a couple decades now and spent a lot of time with these guys and other SEALs that have made it through, the differentiator between those high performers, the individuals that make it and don't, it comes down, in my opinion, to one simple thing. The ones that didn't make it gave themselves an out. They gave themselves another option. The ones that did made it, make, made it through the program, they gave themselves one single option is we are going to make it at all costs, period, end of statement. And I think about human nature and human behavior. If you give yourself another option and oh, by the way, it's easier and the storm sets in and it's raining and you're tired and you haven't slept in 4 or 5 days, well then the, these thoughts start creeping in your head and you start thinking, well, maybe I'm just not ready right now, but I can come back. Or maybe now's not the right time. Or maybe I just go get this coffee, this cup of tea that the instructors dangle in front of us. And I'll take another go at this when I'm a little more mature. It doesn't matter when the second you give yourself another option, human nature, you're going to go down that path, in my opinion. And I think that's the big differentiator, my personal opinion.

Amazing. So having that commitment, it's not necessarily a goal, but a commitment that you're committed to finishing.

Yeah. And, you know, since then I've, we've worked with some of the most amazing business teams. Um, I've worked with some sports teams. I've worked with elite units around the world, Australian SAS. That's a funny story in Afghanistan. Maybe we come back to as a Halloween party. Um, but, um, I digress. Every single one of them was committed to the trade. They were so disciplined in what they were doing that Everything. And there's a high cost to committing to that level. Everything was focused on that. And, you know, you just kind of share in some of the truths about our community. The divorce rate is really high because those men were so darn committed to the craft that they put that above their families. I'm not saying that's right or wrong. I'm just acknowledging the data and the facts, right? So that's the level that these men in the SEAL Teams were committed to.

Mm-hmm. That's huge. And is that level of commitment and fanatical discipline Is that something we're born with or can we learn that?

I believe that it is something that we can be taught. I really do. I'm a father of 5. My oldest is in law school, my youngest is 15, and I talk all the time with— and I tell them all the time that you're the average of the 5 people you surround yourself with, right? Go find some people that are better than you, that are stronger than you, faster than you, think differently than you, and immerse yourself in that community. And it's going to elevate you. And the same is true with, with the commitment level of these men in these high-performing organizations. You, you start witnessing them, seeing them, you might not know what you're doing, but you're going to start mimicking it. You're going to start talking like them. You're going to start creating those same behaviors, waking up at 4:00 AM versus 8:30 because you went out drinking the night before. You're going to stop drinking because that's what these men do, right? And women at this level do. So my personal belief, 100%. This is something that could be trained.

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Caroline@jjlaughlin.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes. Beautiful. And if we talk about a SEAL team for a second, what's the size, number of people in a SEAL team?

So, a SEAL team has troops or squadrons, and there's roughly 30 in each troop. And there's roughly 3 troops per a SEAL team, and then you break them out into platoons. So 15 and 15, and then you break them out into squads. So when it's all said and done, my last deployment was, I guess that was what, 2000, uh, maybe 14, 15 at the time. And I got out of the SEALs in 2017, but I was in charge. I was deployed to Uganda and we were doing, that was the first time I was in Africa and we were doing a mission set there. And I was in charge of, of a troop, but I also had all the support team as well. So when it was, it was roughly, let's say, 50 or so people that we were, that I was, uh, in charge of that time. And, um, yeah, it was an amazing mission set. But, uh, to answer your question, a SEAL team's roughly, you know, 120 plus the support personnel that takes it up to about 150, 160. That's huge.

I never honestly never realized that the sheer scale of it and When Jonathan joined the SEALs versus Jonathan who left the SEALs, what changed in terms of you and your personality and your mindset?

Okay, this is one— I don't know if we have enough time on this call, right? Um, so there's a lot of positive attributes that came from my time in service, from my time in the SEAL teams, like, uh, just an obsession with purpose. Being surrounded by people that would do anything for the mission, for that purpose, right? Would give their lives. And I have teammates that are no longer with us because they gave the ultimate sacrifice to protect their brothers. We call it the brotherhood. Passionate to the level that we described, like the obsession, waking up early, getting your workout in, going to the range, doing skydiving, getting a second workout in. That's an obsession.

That's—

you're passionate about what you do. Or else you wouldn't be as obsessed as you were. When you get out, I went to Goldman Sachs and I traded equity stocks on Wall Street. Now, James, I was born in Texas. Texas and New York are really desperate and very different cultures. And I had never been to New York City at the time. So I pack up and I take my family and I go up to New York City and I start trading and I quickly realize I can't sit still. I'm not a trader. I can't be behind be behind these Bloomberg screens staring at, at these numbers all day. I'm an outgoing person. At best, I'm a sales guy, but I didn't know how to translate my skills. I had no friends outside of the military. So what I quickly fell into, if I'm being really transparent, is I fell into depression because I lost my purpose, I lost my passion, and I lost my teammates. I kind of lost my way. Now, from that experience, we've created a foundation to help other SEALs transition to find purpose. But, you know, again, if I'm just answering your question bluntly, there's a lot of good things, and I'll identify a couple here that I took away from it. And then there's a lot of challenges that have come from serving overseas and being in combat. So the good things are, like, just operationally, we have an operational mindset. Everything's tight, accountable, accountability, attention to detail, because on the battlefield, attention to detail is the difference between life and death. Well, that's how we We operate in the military, so we're going to do that same level of commitment outside of the military. Now that doesn't quite translate to a family, right? So when you're trying to hold people and you're running it like a drill sergeant, there's some challenges that arise from that communication. We're very direct and short in how we communicate because we're on comms, there's bullets flying, you know, you gotta be very clear and concise. We had a saying, it was, um, Keep it simple, stupid. Everybody's heard KISS. Yeah. And the other one that we said in the military when we're using our communication was be brief, be brilliant, and be gone. Now, corporate America, I think we could all use a little bit of that, especially with these 2-page emails. But when you're talking to your family members and you're being brief and brilliant and gone, it just doesn't resonate. They need some emotional connection there. And That's some of the lessons learned on the negative side of coming out of the military. Does that answer the question or kind of start getting— Yeah.

Honestly, that's so helpful. And it's interesting how you can be a high performer in one realm, but how that can actually potentially set you up to be a pretty mediocre performer in other realms because you're so focused and rigid. But ultra high performer, I would even say above that, you go to peak performance. If you're a SEAL or an SAS trooper, you're at peak. Performer, but translating those into everyday civilian life, like those habits, is pretty damn tricky.

So absolutely.

When you think of headaches, you've been in, I think from what I understand, Iraq, Afghanistan, several other areas. Was there any one place in particular that really left a lasting impression on your psyche, your mindset?

There is. Can I maybe just one final thought on the last question?

Of course.

So there's a recent article, and I'll send it to you afterwards, floating around, and it's this idea of 4 burners on a stove. Have you seen this?

No.

Okay. So, there's 4 burners on a stove and one represents health, work, family, and friends. And the author proceeds to just educate the audience on those are the kind of the core areas that majority of us focus on, right? But those high performers, they can't have all 4. At best they can have 3. And that kind of goes into what you were just saying is like these peak performers that are at that level, they may have work, they seldom have work and family and friends, right? They'll have 3 of the 4 at best, but more often than not, and you've seen this and you've talked to quite a few folks, there's going to be 2 burners, maybe 3 burners that are full flame, and there's going to be one that's completely out. So I just wanted to kind of, kind of bring that, that point home. I'll send it to you afterwards.

Please do. And I think that's really helpful because in a moment we'll talk about Invisible Visible and what you're doing now to help people. And I think it's important that we do have self-awareness to go, there are buckets or burners in our lives that we've got to take care of if we want to feel joy, fulfillment, connection, love. And some of the people that I work with, and certainly some of our listeners, are very high performers in their careers. In their sports, politics even, but they're very low performers in other areas of their lives and they don't want to be. They want to have good family life and they want to have more awareness of their financial well-being. So I think what you're doing is going to help them to do that.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk on it.

Yeah, me too. So yeah, let's go back to that. Is there a moment that really stands out that impacted your psyche or your mindset when you were, you know, in Afghanistan, Iraq, or wherever else?

The answer is yes, but there's a big but here. Not until I got out of the military. Hmm. So when you're in— and I imagine a lot of people will relate to this— when you're in the moment or you're doing something that's tasking, or, you know, there's this massive purpose and you buy into that, and you have people relying on you, well, we get so darn good at compartmentalizing and pushing back those traumas and then replacing what we should be doing is analyzing that, talking about it with this machismo or alpha type personality because you're a Navy SEAL. We don't talk about our emotions or our mental health. Instead, we go out and we seek vengeance. We need to go invoke vengeance. And that's how we dealt with it in the time. But I promise you, it all comes out. It all comes out. And there's quite a few times I've lost a lot of friends. There's been helicopter crashes that have taken every single teammate of mine and the crew on board. I've carried, you know, teammates off the battlefield. And the biggest right now for me, to answer your question, is I served just under 16 years total. Most of that was Iraq, Afghanistan. I did some drug warfare in South America. Again, a lot of combat time. And out of all that, the biggest one that hit me was the first teammate of ours that committed suicide. Because for us, we came from a community where we thought we were invincible. We thought we— that, you know, we saw it happen in other organizations in the military. But not us, we're Navy SEALs, we're the, you know, the top tier units and that won't happen, that won't impact us. And he was the first. And James, today I've lost more teammates to suicide than I have to war.

Wow. Why is that?

And I got— I don't think— there's a few things. I don't think we ever talked about it. I think in general around the world, mental health, there's shame associated with it. You're not incentivized to bring it up. If you think about the corporate setting, I worked at Goldman, you're not going to raise your hand and say, "I'm having some depressive thoughts or maybe even suicidal thoughts." Nobody's going to do that, right? I sense that the narrative's shifting. I sense there's teammates of mine and other folks around the world that are talking about it and it's making some people comfortable. And we're going to keep doing that. We're going to keep talking about it because it should be something that we're open about and not letting somebody isolate themselves. And that's the second thing. What do we do? Well, we're so shameful about it. We don't think anybody else is going through this. So we isolate ourselves from our family, from our friends. We don't want to put this burden on anybody else. And then the inevitable happens, right? You get to a spot and it's a fleeting moment. It doesn't matter. But that person, uh, you know, does something that they can't take back. And it's, and it's heartbreaking because the generational impact that that has, I mean, it's forever. There's a ripple effect that will, will go on forever in time. I also think the medical system's, you know, it's archaic. It's, it's a massive system. I'll speak to the US system, the VA system. So the Veteran Affairs is what helps the military, but the medical system in general is just really challenged. Somebody that wants to talk to a therapist, well, you get put on a waitlist. Like for me, when I got out, I was too prideful to go out and raise my hand. When it finally got to a spot so bad that my wife and my friends are like, dude, you gotta go. I went to the VA. I tried to find parking. I was early because I'm in the military and I'm disciplined. I was an hour early. It's my first time doing this. I just didn't, you know, traffic. I've never done it before. I want to kind of realize where I'm going, make sure I couldn't find it. I had to park a mile away. I ran to my meeting. I was 2 minutes late and I got scolded by the administrator up front. Hey, show up on time next time. That's all it took. I turned around because I got too much of an ego and I walked down. That's the last time I ever visited the VA. I don't hold that woman to task. She was probably doing her very best. At the end of the day, it's just, it can't handle, the system can't handle that in its current state, the problem around mental wellbeing and mental health, in my opinion, to include the current medical solutions, the medicines like SSRIs and antidepressants, like that's not a solution for somebody with traumatic brain injury, in my opinion. If you, you know, a CTE, if you're a rugby player and you get your head banged up, like there's, there needs to be alternatives. And we're just now in America starting to explore other alternatives like psychedelic-assisted therapy, or we're also using technology, the same technology we use to find bad guys overseas. Well, guess what? We can use that technology to identify through biometrics and wearables, like an Oura Ring or a Whoop strap. You can identify when you're not doing well mentally and then get the appropriate resources for you specifically. So long-winded answer there, but just thought I'd maybe rant for a bit. Thank you.

No, that's great. I appreciate you sharing that. And I mean, it's a global pandemic, really. Mental health, suicide, anxiety. I mean, the numbers are mind-blowing, and the numbers that are reported are not even accurate. I mean, it's even worse than it is here in New Zealand. We've had for a long time one of the highest teenage suicide rates in the OECD. Uh, I think we're the number one. And, uh, you know, it's always troubled me. I worked, taught drums in a high school for a long time, and, you know, the number of kids that take their lives in that school alone was mind-blowing. And, you know, as an adult, I've had many friends take their lives. Um, it's weird because as a kid, Jonathan, in Ireland, I don't remember any suicides, and I'm sure they did happen, but I don't think it happened at the rate that they're happening now. Um, so I think the time is right to be having the conversation and to be looking at prevention. Uh, wouldn't it be great if a Navy SEAL in BUD/S, uh, during that training was taught about emotional awareness and being vulnerable and being courageous with talking about your feelings? That would be a game changer. Might never happen.

Yeah, you know, it's an interesting thought, right? Because initially I had a similar thought and I, and I still believe that that's the right approach. I think we should, I think it makes a more holistic warrior that can raise their hand and say, hey, I need some time to heal. I need some time to recover. Like you break a leg, you get all this medical support, you get time off, but you know, you break your brain, you get an explosion just because you can't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen. And we give no time for that. We should be giving the same amount of time or more in some regards to somebody that's raising their hand saying, "Hey, something's going on. I think after that last mission we blew the door in, I got a big acoustic concussion. I need us to do some work to see what I—" And there's no shame in that. But there was when I was in, you wouldn't raise your hand until later on in my career. And that was only when you were really in a bad situation and your teammates forced you to do it. So I think it would be a brilliant idea, honestly. And it's not just for the SEAL Teams, but imagine every young man and woman that, that was empowered or taught how to communicate better about their overall well-being, or when something is awry. Oh, by the way, we all will experience this in our lifetime, probably multiple times. It's not just you, young man, you're young lady, and this is how you can bring it up to your parents or just somebody that you trust, or even a a provider of sorts. I think that would be tremendous.

And that's the goal here. Yeah, I love it. And it's interesting, it's high performance. We think of, you know, you have to be at your best. And of course, you wouldn't have any mental health issues if you're a high performer. I think it's far from the truth. And high performance up here often creates even more anxiety, even more challenges from a mental health perspective, because your self-expectations are very high. And the expectations of others on you are often very high. So, understanding what's going on underneath the hood is key. Now, more than ever, we've got all the data in the world, but we've got so much data, what do we do with the bloody thing? For me, it's like, okay, I've got a Garmin, I've got the Oura, the Whoop. That's awesome, but jeez, what does it even mean? Where do I start? I'll pick one metric and we'll just stick to that. You've kind of changed that and flipped it on its head with Envi. So do you mind telling us a little bit about MV, why MV, and what it actually does?

Yeah, um, so our observation was your observation, and it was a lived experience, right? I'd wake up in the morning, I'd feel like, oh my God, I'm going to conquer the world today, and I look at my Whoop score and it said you're in the red, no recovery, horrible sleep. And it, regardless of how I felt prior to looking at that, I tell you how I felt absolutely after looking at it, and it was, I was confused. I was like, okay, maybe I don't work out. It changed my behavior. At one point I ripped all these devices off. I was like, I know myself, I don't need this stuff, right? When it comes to my physical well-being, I know when I'm sore, I know when I need to taper down, I know when it's a recovery day, light jog or getting in the sauna. Like, I mean, in time we all, we all get to that point. And that's my belief. I started to be able to predict, you know, how my sleep was, how much deep sleep I got, REM sleep, etc. But regardless, the, you know, there's a, there's tons of data and it's just overwhelming. We have these conversations at Envy all the time. So what are we? Uh, I mentioned that suicide. His name was Bill Mulder, legendary SEAL. We were supposed to meet with him as a foundation. As mentioned, we started a nonprofit here to help SEALs transition. We started getting into the wellness space because a lot of our SEALs had experienced explosions, were having head issues. So we started helping some of these SEALs, and Bill was going to be one of them. We were supposed to meet with him Monday, and over the weekend he FaceTimed his wife and shot himself. Wow. So this whole idea was birthed from his suicide. What did we do is I took a step back and I said, hey, what's the current solution set in the marketplace for people with PTSD, TBI, depression? And it was almost consistent across the board. You get an antidepressant or you talk to a therapist. And I felt, man, that doesn't seem like the right solution for, for this specific problem set, for the PTSD. Like, feels like there needs to be something else. And we did a roundtable with some of the folks on my team, other SEALs, and we started thinking, well, you know, we're using all this technology overseas, as I mentioned, cell phones and cell towers to ping and and tracked it. I mean, we were doing quite more than that. I'm being very high level. I mean, there's a lot of technology that went into finding these guys. But can't we do that with kind of seeing the signals is what we always said, but in our body, in our system? And the answer is yes. And we partnered with Whoop at the time, and it was a Boston-based company that had 5 employees. They were on the verge of bankruptcy. They're a $10 billion company, or yeah, I think they're a $10 billion company today. They got 700 going to 1,400 employees. I was just at their headquarters a couple weeks ago. But we put 1,500 Whoop straps on Navy SEALs, and instead of using them for recovery, we used it as an early warning indicator to see when their mental health was trending downwards. We looked at HRV and we looked at disrupted sleep. And this conversation, when we saw somebody wasn't doing well or in the red, we'd pick up the phone. This conversation was the same conversation every single time. And it went something like this: "Hey James, how are you doing?" And you would respond, "I'm good, I'm doing okay." It's like, "Dude, are you sure? Like, like, you know, what's going on?" "No, man, I'm good." "Bullshit, I can see your data. What's going on?" "All right, well, I got in a fight with the old lady. I think we're getting divorced." It was consistent. It was almost a version, like a slight version, differentiated version from that every single time. When we saw that we could do that with the SEAL teams using just one strap, we thought, or I thought, can we, can we do this on a bigger scale and help humanity? And that's truly our goal. It's not just the military first responders, it's not just men, it's women, it's global. We want to help every country that is impacted by global health. And as you mentioned earlier, this is a pandemic and it affects everybody at some point in their life. I didn't know how to build a tech company. I got accepted into an incubator program at Oxford, so their Oxford MBA program, they pick a couple ideas and here we go. We got accepted and we worked on it for 2 years. We built codes to every wearable. This is pre-AI and I spent millions of dollars doing machine LLMs and machine learning only to have AI come out. And, you know, we've got a lot of research and we got our own models, but man, we spent a lot of money right before it got to the level it was. But what is Envy? We pull the biometric information from any wearable you got. And if we don't have an API to that, we'll build one. The idea isn't to sell your data. That's not what this is about. We're trying to help you understand what's going on, or the people that you care about, what's going on with their mental health. So we're not selling your data. We're really trying to empower you. But we pull that information into what we call a MindScore. And the MindScore is an important fact. We might even remove the number in some cases. Like, you might be like, you know, my story earlier is like, I don't want to see I'm a 50 because I don't know what the F of 50 means, even though they're telling me a 50 is good for me. That's still like, it's on a scale to 0-100, it's, it's, I'm losing my mind here. We might just put plus or minus or arrows, like you're increasing different color arrows. We're exploring that with different study groups right now. But what's really important isn't the score because it's a baseline to you. What's really important is the trends off the score. And our whole system's built off of that. What we do is we alert you because we can see all your data. We alert you and tell you, hey, small decrease last night, and it's specific to this one thing, deep sleep. Here's a deep sleep solution from our Navy SEAL human performance sleep expert. If it's a really big decrease over a duration, then it alerts what we call a swim buddy. So I mentioned that earlier in the podcast. Every SEAL team member had a SEAL team swim buddy. We did the same thing here. James, you get to pick who it is. It could be a partner, it could be a sibling, it could be your coworker, it could be multiple people. You can create teams so the whole podcast group can support each other and see how they're doing. And you can kind of select what you share and what you don't. If you just want to share the trendlines, great. If you want to share your actual MyScore, great. If you want to share all the data, great. It doesn't matter to us. But the point there is that trendline now alerts your swim buddy, and then we have that same conversation. I get a text, you know, checking on James, his MyScore decreased, and again, it depends on what you share, decreased by 20%. What's up, brother? He's like, oh man, I went to a concert last night. I don't normally drink, you know me, but last night it was an exception. I'm feeling it. Great. That's awesome. Happy to hear that, man. Be easy on yourself today. Or it could be something worse than that. And that's where we would step in. The final thing that we're doing now is we analyze the data so we can see whatever input you give us access to. So if it's a pill, if it's a psychedelic, if it's a talk therapy, if it's a walk, if it's a hike, if you're in the pool, if you're in the sauna, we measure all that and we show you what's the best combination or the best solution when it comes to improving your mental health. And, you know, what I stated earlier is so true. What works for me most likely isn't gonna work for you. There's variations, we got different heredity, different experiences. So yeah, that's what we do. We're in the App Store, we're in Android, But we also have big contracts with companies exploring new novel treatments. I've mentioned psychedelics quite a bit. So we got a $4 million contract with the government to explore psychedelic treatment for combat veterans. I never thought I'd say that in a sentence in my lifetime, but here we are. The government gave us $4 million to see, hey, is this a good solution for the problem set of these, of these folks with PTSD? So That's incredible. That's in short what we're doing. Yeah, well done.

Honestly, it's amazing. And this MindScore, so I'm definitely keen to understand more of it. So what are the key things that, from your understanding with the data, that impact your overall MindScore? You mentioned heart rate variability, sleep, anything else?

Yep. So heart rate variability, sleep, and specifically the phases of sleep. So we're analyzing— you got light sleep disruptions, deep and REM. Deep and REM are really important because that's where your body is recovering. We look at activity. So are you working out? What— and how we measure that is just like heart rate. So when we see you pass a certain threshold, again, you can share with us, hey, I'm going on a swim, I'm going on a hike. But we can also assume when you hit a certain heart rate threshold that you're in an activity stage or working out. And then we capture that. So are you doing physical activity? And Then you can also input some of the other things. So activity, heart rate variability, and in its current state, sleep. We also roll that into a questionnaire loosely built off of the traditional, it's called a PHQ-9. So in the morning you get 3 to 4 questions, you select what they are, and it's based off these professional questionnaires, depression questionnaires, anxiety questionnaires. And we, we picked some We worked with doctors from Walter Reed here in America and we picked 4 questions and it could be libido. Is your libido on a scale of 1 to 5 high or low? And then the combination of your answers to those 5 questions plus the quantitative, the biometrics, we roll that up and it gives you your overall MIND score. We're exploring so much more now. We're looking at skin temperature, so we're looking at skin temperature and the impact that that has. We can see if there's an increase by a degree, you're most likely sick. In fact, there's some research that showed the big tech companies were able to predict, predict that you had COVID 48 hours before you showed a symptom because you had an increase of 1 degree in skin temperature. So we're thinking about including that. And then the other, you know, I guess R&D that we're really testing out that's super fascinating right now, and we'll probably roll it out here maybe at the end of the year, most likely early next year. Is voice. So pitch analysis. So we did research on 10,000 people that they recorded their voice and they answered one of those questionnaires. I feel depressed, you know, the PHQ-9. And then we ran our algorithms on top of it to see if we can identify through voice, through pitch specifically, when that person was in a depressive state. And we, we got to 86%. We're at 86% accuracy right now with you speaking for 6 seconds. Wow. Yeah. So again, if I think about we're trying to help somebody and, you know, what's, what's a mode that everybody constantly uses day in and day out? It's voice, right? So not everybody has access to this. And if we're claiming we want to help everybody, well, there's, you know, this is a demographic of people that have access to other means. They can afford this. Not everybody can afford one of these. Majority of the world has a phone. That's how we're thinking about helping some of the other demographics. That's brilliant. I absolutely love that.

And are you seeing the correlation between the low MIND score and depression, anxiety, etc.?

We are, yeah. And we can almost start— we're starting to predict. So part of this whole idea was, can we be predictive? Can we do predictive analytics? And we're getting really close to predicting when people are starting to move towards depression, anxiety. And we not that we can guarantee it because we can intervene, and that's the idea as well. That's the whole idea behind this company is can we intervene and provide you with the solutions that work for you? But if we let that person go on, historically what we're seeing is that there is high correlation between low, low MIND score and either depression or anxiety. And then we can also, with high probability, detect if we don't do anything and intervene that they're going to move into that state. Wow.

And For the person listening, in terms of habits, let's say they have a low mind score, it's, it's trending downwards, and maybe you see their sleep score, it's pretty poor, they're getting not a lot of REM, or the deep sleep is pretty poor. What might be some of the things you would recommend to them as habits to improve those things?

Yeah, so, you know, we're, we're pretty lucky in the sense that having been a SEAL, we have access to our human performance facilities and the SEAL SEAL teams, the Delta Force, mostly US-based teams, but we're also working with, uh, the SAS guys over the pond, across the pond. So SBS and SAS guys, and we're now just starting to talk to their human performance teams as well. And plus we have a medical staff, we have MDs, PhDs on our team, and we have a medical board that is made up of just subject matter experts in heart rate variability, you know, deep sleep, psychedelics. Like, we're really trying to create a holistic solution here. And again, we're agnostic to what the solution is. There's no judgment. As long as it's legal, we'll show you the data and you do with it what you want. But to answer your question, what we've done for that is you'll get in a specific alert. It'll say your score is down by, you know, 10%, and it's because of these two things. And your example was deeper REM. We're going to have one of our human performance doctors come in. And if you have— it's almost like the Peloton model. If you only have 3 minutes, then you can access a 3-minute, like, quick hack. This is what you need to do to change your environment. Consider taking magnesium. Consider changing, you know, turning off the technology 45 minutes in advance. Things that we all know, but it's just a gentle reminder, like, these are the things, and we'll prove it to you with data too. We'll show you that it improves if you just do these things and acknowledge you do them. If you got more time, like 15-20 minutes, we can introduce other tools and hacks. We're really big into meditation, mindfulness, and breathwork. So A lot of what we see is, you know, in corporate America, you got these really intense— you know, I'll use trading as an example. Your heart rate's through the roof any given moment. Maybe you need to step away and do a quick breathwork. Well, we'll ping you and just realize, hey, it seems like there was an event. Here's something to consider to bring your heart rate back even faster. Just a quick box breathing or, you know, rapid session breathing can bring it down by upwards of 10 beats. Do you want to do a session, yes or no? And then If not, we'll remind you later in the day, hey, you passed on this probably because you were in work. Totally get it. Not everybody can just stop what they're doing and do this meditation. But are you in a better spot now? It seems like you're, you know, out of the office. Historically, you're at home at this point. And you'd be like, yeah, I need to do a meditation. I'm jacked up still. So that's awesome.

I mean, I look at my own life. I speak on stages 2 or 3 times a week. And I know when I come off the stage, I look at my heart rate.

I was like, whoa, it's like 120.

I'm like, what is happening here? This is ridiculous. Breathwork. I get straight in the taxi and I sit and I just close my eyes and meditate or breathe. Totally. It works. So for you, what have been some of the things and the new habits that you have installed because of Envy?

First and foremost, I start the morning every day, every day with a gratitude journal. And I'm faithful now. I wasn't I grew up in faith. I lost it in the teams, and I'm back to faith again. So I do a Bible verse, and I just write a little bit about that. And then I start my day with gratitude. I think it's, you know, I had a boss of mine, Abram McCraven, that wrote a book, how to, you know, I think it was Make Your Bed. Great book. Amazing idea behind that. It's tremendous. And the idea is like, start your day off with a win, right? Like, just make your bed. And no matter what happens the rest of the day, at least you accomplished one goal for you and you can feel positive around that. And that's kind of how I approach my, my, my, my practice in the morning is like start the day off with gratitude, not with the anxiety, with the thoughts of what's to come that may never come. Let's not get anxious about those, but instead just go into like this practice of just being grateful for what you have, not what you want, not what you had, but what you have in the moment and, and how many, so many other people don't have that. And it really does set me down a different trajectory than When I used to wake up as a, as a, you know, somebody that used to work on Wall Street that had accumulated some wealth, but now as a startup entrepreneur that has depleted most of his wealth, there's a lot of anxiety around that, right? Is this going to work? Did I make the right decision? I have kids. The answer is absolutely yes. And now with this practice, I go away from that anxiety and I focus on the positivity. So that's one thing I do every day.

That's awesome. I love it. And may I ask, so you had Faith, you went into the teams and it disappeared and it came back. Why did that happen? Why did it disappear in the teams? And then why did it come back?

Yeah, there was just some— I, you know, it was a couple of things. One, as they always say, as you get older, you get wiser. Right? And you start asking more questions. You start reading philosophy. You start getting in the Bible, maybe. I don't know, like I did, and start reading some of these verses. And it's like, wait a second, this kind of makes sense. But when I was in the teams, we were doing things and seeing things, and it just made you question all of it. Like, how— if there's a God, there's a God, like, how can he let this happen? How is this just? I don't understand. And I just parted ways with, uh, with my faith as a Christian. And I walked away from it. And I struggled immensely afterwards. I kind of alluded to some of that at Goldman. The whole world was congratulating me. You got an Ivy League degree, you're a Navy SEAL, you're at Goldman Sachs. But I was depleted inside because I didn't have purpose, and I didn't know how to communicate these things because of the shame. All these things were happening, and I tried everything. I really did. I tried the VA, I tried magnetic stimulation, I talked to people, and just the world didn't get me. And when I finally dropped to my knees and prayed, and I hadn't done that in decades, I just weeped and it felt like the whole world, all of that stress was removed from me. And from that moment on, I realized, yeah, this is it. There is a God and he's always been here. So that's my personal belief and that's my journey today. That's incredible.

Thanks for sharing that. And it's Yeah, it's not something we spend a lot of time in the show talking about, is faith or God. But actually, in the last 6 months, it's come up more often than it has in the last 6 years. And wow, I feel like there's a lot more, a lot more people moving towards faith. And I grew up in Northern Ireland, and, you know, it was essentially a conflict zone for most of my childhood, and it was over religion. And so I'm not a very religious person, but I'm very like yourself, practice gratitude every day. I believe there's a higher power, kind of the universe kind of guides me. You could call that God if you wanted, I guess, but I just don't have a name for it. Sure. But I think that there's something very special about knowing that you're part of a bigger picture, that you're part of a bigger purpose. So appreciate you sharing that. It takes a bit of courage to do that on a, on a show.

Yeah, no, absolutely happy to share. Um, you know, I don't know if you want to pull in this thread, but I, I've mentioned psychedelics as well, and, uh, that's a big catalyst for me, believe it or not, coming back to my faith, but finding healing in general. And there's a lot of teammates of mine— there's a documentary on Netflix, In Waves and War. I don't know if you've seen that yet, but not yet. I'll watch it this weekend. Yeah, you should check it out. Um, but we've helped thousands of, uh, veterans and first responders and their families with psychedelic-assisted therapy. The Veteran Affairs is now administrating psychedelics. It's on Capitol Hill. There's a bill that was just passed that we're gonna explore psychedelic-assisted therapy in the VA system for combat veterans. So there's been enough research around here that shows that there's some true benefits that come from that compared to the, you know, the current solution. And again, I'm not bashing SSRIs or antidepressants. They work in in a lot of different capacities. But we're also seeing other tools out there and I think we need to keep exploring those.

Yeah, I'm very curious about those. And I've had a number of people on the show that are, you know, deep world-leading specialists in psilocybin, in bufo, and what's the other one? Ayahuasca. And I haven't tried any of these things yet myself. And I say yet because I'm not closed to it. But I've got a lot of clients in the corporate world, and they won't say this openly, but they share with me privately, James, I went away with my wife and I did a psilocybin experience, and my God, it's changed my life, and I'm not depressed or I'm not anxious anymore. So I definitely think there's— if you do it right and it is overseen by professionals, I think there's a lot of potential upside. But also there's a whole world of idiots who sell this stuff in the black market, and people do it unsupervised, and it can be I imagine a horrific experience.

That's so true. Great, great points there. There's some great organizations like Invi's partnered with a few of them beyond Ibogaine, uh, Ambio. Uh, we also partnered with a few, uh, above-board psychedelic interventions. And what we do for them just quickly is, uh, every participant that goes through their program gets an Oura ring. We get a baseline 30 days prior to intervention. They do the intervention. We show the changes that have happened because of the psychedelic intervention., and then we track the changes over duration just to show like, hey, it's improved your heart rate variability. And it does. It improves your deep and REM sleep. And it does. In fact, we just had a gentleman come back from, uh, there's a psychedelic called ibogaine and, uh, it increased neuroplasticity by 46%. That's huge. So just to give somebody, you know, everybody in the audience like a little reference point here. 3 months of weekly going to do, it's called neurofeedback training. So if you go and do neurofeedback training for 3 months, once a week, I mean, 4 to 5 times a week, it'll get upwards of 30% on average of neuroplasticity increase. One dosage of ibogaine, and it's a powerful psychedelic, put this person into a neuroplasticity state of almost 50%. What does that mean? That means it allows you to break those bad habits— the drinking, the drugs— and that's what this specific psychedelic does. It, it stops heroin, heroin cold in its tracks, and it allows you to replace it with good, good, uh, new habits, new, uh, new, new methods of, uh, of training, if you will. So just thought I'd share that. It's just really fascinating stuff coming out of there.

It's incredible. And so for the person right now who's going, actually I'd like to know my mind score. Actually, me and my family, maybe even my kids, I want to help them prevent mental distress and mental health disorders. I want to get Invi. So what I'm hearing is all they need is some kind of wearable, whether that's an Oura, a Whoop, a Garmin. What else is there out there in the market that I'm missing?

Apple. So Apple Watch. Yeah. Fitbit. Okay. Fitbit.

And if they've got one of those, All they need to do is go to the App Store to INVI, and I'll put that in the show notes. So yeah, it's INVI Mind Health.

Okay, INVI Mind Health.

Awesome. And once they download that, I'm assuming it's like a monthly subscription.

So again, we, you know, with the idea of wanting to help everybody, there's a basic version that's free to everybody. It's— there's limitations to that. And then there's a subscription that allows you access to more people as swim buddies or or Teams, you get access to Teams, and you get more of the solutions, right? In the basic model, you get educational videos. What is psilocybin? What is TBI? Do I have these symptoms? It educates you, not so many symptoms. The paid version gets you all the solutions from the SEAL Team human performance staff, et cetera. It's amazing.

And I'm assuming it's global, so people, whether they're in South Africa or New Zealand or America, they can all access this.

Yeah. And if, if we're not, but we are, uh, there's been a couple countries where I've, I've went on podcasts. I'm like, yeah, we're absolutely there. And then the audience is like, no, you're not. Give me a week or two and we will be there. But I'm pretty confident prior to this call, I checked, uh, we're available in all the countries that you just mentioned.

Well, that's awesome. I'm so deeply grateful for what you've created. I'm excited to see it fly high and anything that I can do to support in connecting you with people that can help spread the word because at the end of the day, if you save a life, then the millions of dollars and the years that you've put into it are worth it. But if you could save 100 or 1,000, 100,000, a million, like the numbers keep going. That's just incredible. Yeah. And that's our mission.

And, um, you know, we got one option. We'll bring this, we'll bring this full circle. We will succeed because we have to, in my belief. So we got one option.

Non-negotiable. I love it. That's right. That's awesome. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me today. I'll be sure to put all the details of EnviMind Health in the show notes and for your socials. I'll be sure to encourage everyone, go and check this out. You know, you've got a wearable. All of us have a wearable. Go and check it out and give it a try.

Jonathan, thank you so much. Thanks, brother.