The Age of Ownership: The World SAGE Is Building

Ownership and connection, and the technology that already makes both measurable

Fall 2026. A companion to the SAGE Snapshot, from the SAGE team. This is the finished product we're building toward, so anyone investing in our first phase can see clearly what the whole of it becomes. The current pre-seed round funds phase one, described under The path below.

In August I spent a day hiking with my friend Bill Ury near his home in Crestone, Colorado. Bill co-founded Harvard's Program on Negotiation and has spent more than four decades working inside some of the world's hardest conflicts, and he told me how close he and colleagues he respects believe we are to a third world war. He'd been asking himself who was sitting down to work out, specifically, how to prevent it, and his honest answer was that almost no one was, so less than two months later he was in Ireland with 52 negotiators and mediators doing exactly that. Others are devoted to climate change and to chronic illness and disease, so that we get to live another day. On that hike Bill asked me how I'd describe my own focus, and my answer clarified it for both of us. I want to help the people who are given that day appreciate it and enjoy it.

Across the developed Western world we're living through a mental health and well-being crisis, most visible in young people, while spending on treatment and self-improvement reaches record highs. Nearly every effort working at scale addresses what we experience, our circumstances, our phones, our medications, our isolation. Almost none addresses how we experience it. That gap is where SAGE works, and this document describes what we're building to fill it.

Kevin Miller

The finished product

A SAGE app that works for you in the background. It listens across the places you communicate, reads how much ownership and connection show up in what you say and how you say it, lines that up with what your body is doing through the wearables you already own, and reports back, with a guide to help you make a different choice next time.

It captures what you say and write, in live conversation, calls, voice messages, dictation, texts and email.
It gives you two daily scores, an Ownership Score and a Connection Score, and a count most people have never seen of themselves, how many of their interpretations they stated as facts today.
It picks up the verbal habits that give insecurity away, like rushing, repeating yourself and interrupting.
It pairs with Garmin, Oura, Whoop, Apple Watch and others, so you can see your heart rate and HRV move with your words.
It brings the SAGE Companion and Translator into one place to guide you, and lets you share your view with a coach, therapist or SAGE practitioner if you choose.

How people will use SAGE

Phase one, funded by this round

On any device, people open the SAGE Companion and speak, type or paste in whatever they're working through, and it guides them in the ownership mindset and ownership language.
The SAGE Translator is part of the same experience, helping them put what they want to say into ownership language before they say or send it.

Phase two, the finished product

Every day people open their SAGE app, which is still there to talk with directly, just as the Companion and Translator were.
The app gathers their communications from the other apps they choose to connect, like text, email and messaging.
A small wearable, worn around the neck or on the wrist, can be turned on all day or only when they want, and it adds their spoken conversations.
From all of it, the app gives them overviews, scores and feedback on how they're communicating and how much ownership shows up, and it's there to talk through specific issues and relationships.
Over time it shows them how they're showing up for themselves and for others, and guides them toward showing up with ownership, with all the benefits that brings.

The discovery

We believe we experience our lives through the meaning we make, and we make it in language, much of it silently in the words we think with, before it hardens as we speak and write. What we've found, as people began using ownership language all the time rather than only in hard moments, is that familiar pieces come together into something none of them produces on its own.

It works like a second language. Ownership language requires you to stop, notice what you were about to say and choose different words, and that gives you the foreign-language effect as a byproduct. Research shows people who think in a second language decide more deliberately and less reactively.
It reveals you to yourself. The new sentence asks for your part in what you're experiencing, so the pause turns your attention toward yourself, revealing assumptions, motives and the meaning you've been making.
It builds agency as you use it, because choosing the owned version of a sentence is itself an act of agency.
It connects you to the moment and to yourself, and it changes how you connect with others, because what comes out of you is aware, intentional and owned.
It shifts how you hold reality and identity. People recognize they experience their interpretation rather than reality itself, and their sense of who they are becomes less rigid and less defended, bringing more security and more peace.
It works upstream, as meaning forms, while most other approaches work afterward, on experience that has already set.
It works best all the time, because there's no moment you'd rather be less aware or less connected, and because the repetition is what builds the mindset. It asks nothing extra of your day.

The practice has worked this way for decades, one on one and in small groups. What's new is that the words people think with surface in what they say and write, and technology can now hear that, reveal it back to them and guide them, all day, without a teacher in the room. The finished app reveals with data what the practice already reveals from the inside.

Ownership and connection, one practice

SAGE is the mindset and method of ownership, and it has two payoffs we give equal weight, inner agency and connection, to the moment, to yourself and to others.
Most people don't come looking for agency. They come looking for connection, for better relationships, fewer fights and feeling less alone, so our promise to the market leads with connection. Stop communicating on autopilot. Start connecting with awareness.
We believe the two can't be pulled apart. When we speak outside-in, we hand the meaning of what we feel to other people and circumstances, and that leaves us less secure. Insecurity pulls our attention into defending ourselves and away from the moment, from ourselves and from the person in front of us. When we own the meaning we make, we grow steadier, and that security frees our attention to connect.
SAGE operationalizes the three connections through terms most people already know.

Connection to	The familiar term	What we read in how you speak
The moment	Presence	Pace, rushing, talking over, attention to what's happening now instead of what already happened or might
Yourself	Self-awareness	Owning your feelings and interpretations as yours, noticing your own state as it shifts ("I notice I'm getting defensive")
Others	Relationship	Curiosity, questions, acknowledging the other person's experience, how much you listen compared to how much you speak

What the app measures

SAGE operationalizes ownership and connection, turning both into something a person can see in their own words and hear in their own voice.

The Ownership Score

Interpretation. Whether you own judgments as yours or state them as facts. "She's selfish" versus "I'm seeing her as selfish right now." This is the count we expect people to remember, the number of interpretations they stated as facts in a day.
Attribution. Where you place the cause of what you feel. "He made me furious" versus "I'm furious with how I'm reading this."
Choice. "I have to," "I can't" and "I should" versus "I'm choosing," "I will" and "I won't."
Certainty. "Always," "never," "obviously," "the truth is," "everyone knows," the words that turn one interpretation into the only possible reading and one moment into a permanent condition.
Ownership without blame. Self-condemnation is read separately, so the score never rewards blaming yourself as though it were ownership.

The Connection Score

Presence, your connection to the moment. Whether you're responding to what's happening now or to a story about the past or the future.
Self-awareness, your connection to yourself. Whether you notice and own your own state as it shifts, instead of being carried by it.
Relationship, your connection to others. Curiosity, questions, acknowledgment of the other person's experience and how much room you leave for them to speak.

What your voice gives away

We tend to be most outside-in when we're speaking live, because that's when we feel least secure and grow most certain. It shows up in how we speak as much as in what we say, and most people have never been shown their own verbal habits or how those habits shape their experience and their connection. We believe these habits are what insecurity sounds like, and the app reflects them in both scores.

Pace. Speeding up as you get defensive.
Volume. Raising your voice.
Intensity. Growing emphatic and forceful.
Repetition. Making the same point again and again to be heard.
Cursing.
Filler words. "Uh," "um," "like," "you know."
Stuttering and false starts.
Nervous laughter. The chuckle after most things you say.
Interrupting. Talking over the other person.
Talk time. How much you speak compared to how much you listen.

In our experience, people with strong inner agency show far fewer of these habits, and as ownership grows, security grows with it and the habits fall away.

Lenses and guidance

Both scores can be viewed by relationship, by setting, by time of day and over weeks, and against your biometrics, so you can see the moment in a conversation when your ownership dropped, your pace and certainty rose, and your heart rate climbed with them.
The Companion already responds to ownership in the moment, and with the full picture it can show you the pattern and walk you back to the choice you have.

A day with it

Morning · yesterday in review

Ownership Score

10your usual 70

Connection Score

31your usual 66

50 interpretations stated as facts

2:14 pm · a hard conversation

You said: "He always does this to me."

Ownership version: "I'm reading this as him not respecting my time."

Faster pace · interrupting · certainty words

Over the month

Ownership and HRV, side by side, so you can judge for yourself whether they move together.

An illustration of the finished SAGE app. The numbers are examples, not user data.

In the morning, the app shows you yesterday. No wonder you felt anxious. Your Ownership Score was a 10, against your usual 70, you stated 50 interpretations as facts, and your Connection Score fell right along with it.
Most of the drop came from a conversation with a colleague and then one with your spouse. In both you spoke faster, repeated yourself, interrupted, and your certainty words spiked.
It lines those conversations up with your watch, and your HRV fell and your heart rate climbed within minutes of saying "he always does this to me."
It shows you the words, offers the ownership version, and asks what you'd like to try next time. You may even decide to reach back out to those people and speak from a more SAGE interpretation.
The same view explains your good days. On the evening you felt closest to your family, your ownership was high, you listened more than you spoke, and your HRV held steady.
By the end of the month you can see your ownership and connection trends next to your sleep, recovery and stress trends and judge for yourself whether they move together.

From something you use to something that works for you

In phase one, SAGE responds when you come to it. You open the Companion or the Translator, talk, type or paste, and it shows you where ownership showed up in your words and guides you toward more.
Most mental health and self-help tools work the same way, and that's where most of them lose people, because they depend on the person remembering to show up. We see the same limit in meditation as the path to mindfulness.
Wearables changed physical health by removing that step. Nobody logs their sleep anymore. You put the device on, it measures, and you respond to what it tells you. The finished SAGE app does the same for how we make meaning and how we connect.

Many of us have sat with a coach and wished they could come with us through the rest of the week, someone who wouldn't tell us what to do and would simply show us what we did and help us back toward who we said we wanted to be. The finished SAGE app is that companion. A continuous glucose monitor is a useful comparison. It doesn't tell anyone what to eat. It shows them in real time what each meal does to their body, and many people change how they eat on their own once they can see it. SAGE does the same for the meaning we make. Each person chooses ownership as the standard they want to live by, and the app shows them how they thought and spoke today against that standard and guides them back toward it when they drift.

Why now

Conversation capture is already on sale. ABOVE (goabove.ai) sells a 12 gram pendant for $199 plus $9 a month that turns everyday conversations into transcripts and already scores clarity, energy and presence. Omi and Limitless sell similar devices, and the press has started calling the category cognitive wearables.
More of our communication is spoken aloud than ever, in person, on live calls, in voice messages and in dictation to our phones, computers and AI tools, and all of it can now be captured and read.
Physiological tracking is mainstream. Oura has sold more than 5.5 million rings, passed $500 million in revenue in 2024, projected $1 billion for 2025 and was valued at $11 billion in October 2025. Whoop was valued at $10.1 billion in March 2026 on a $1.1 billion bookings run rate.
Wearables already measure the stress side. Garmin, Oura, Whoop and Fitbit report stress from heart rate variability. They can tell you your nervous system is dysregulated, and none of them can tell you why.
Aggregation exists. FitMetrics pulls wearables, lab results and medical monitors into one place, and the user decides who can see it.
Reading psychology from language has a research base. Seligman's CAVE method scores explanatory style from verbatim speech, Pennebaker's LIWC links everyday word use to wellbeing, and Mehl's Electronically Activated Recorder has captured natural daily speech for research for years.
Large language models can now read meaning in live conversation, something the practice's originators believed couldn't happen outside face-to-face teaching. The SAGE Companion already does this in beta.
Lyle Maxson, founder of ABOVE, calls this benevolent AI, the same capabilities most technology uses to capture our attention, used instead to help people see themselves clearly and show up with more ownership in their own lives.

Category	Examples	Market	What it measures	What's missing
Health wearables	Garmin, Oura, Whoop, Apple Watch	Global wearables $92.9B in 2025, projected $229.9B by 2033	Sleep, recovery, HRV, stress	Why the stress is there
Cognitive wearables	ABOVE, Omi, Limitless	Early, not yet sized	Conversations, tone, patterns	A psychological model
Health data aggregators	FitMetrics, Apple Health	Built into the above	Body data in one place	The mind
Meditation apps	Calm, Headspace	$2.2B in 2025, projected $7.0B by 2033	Minutes practiced	Life outside the session
AI mental health and coaching	Woebot, Wysa, AI coaches	AI in mental health $1.7B in 2025, projected $9.1B by 2033, inside a $37B AI coach and mentor category	What you bring to it	Everything you don't bring
Biofeedback	HeartMath	Decades of research	Heart coherence during a session	Integration into daily life

Where we are today

The practice is proven in people. SAGE is built on a language practice taught and refined with thousands of people over some fifty years, almost entirely one on one and in small groups, which is why it never scaled. AI and today's technology let us take it deeper, make it available around the clock and bring it to people at a scale that wasn't possible before.
Every piece of the technology exists, and Kevin has already run the full loop by hand. He has worn ABOVE's pendant through his own conversations, taken the transcripts into the SAGE Companion to work on his ownership, and used the Translator before hard conversations, and he has seen his own nervous system regulation, inner agency and relationships change. The finished app automates what he's already doing manually.
The measurement approach has independent support. James Pennebaker, whose computational analysis of language is among the most rigorous in psychology, in correspondence with us about SAGE, suggested biometric measures such as heart rate variability as a promising way to validate it, the same pairing of language and physiology the finished app is built on.
We've invested our own time and money to get here. The SAGE Companion and Translator are working in beta, and the practice, the language framework behind it and the supporting research and documentation are built.
The people using it keep pointing to the same thing. Asked recently what had changed his life most, one user said it was the language, becoming aware of how he was communicating with himself and with others.
The partners are already in conversation. Kevin has hosted ABOVE's founder, Lyle Maxson, on his podcast and followed up with him directly, and Lyle introduced us to Aligned, the software studio founded in 2021 by Jonatan Littke that built ABOVE's technology. We've had multiple meetings with Jonatan and his team, remain in ongoing conversation, and see them as a strong technology partner for the seed round. Kevin has also met with Nick Besbeas, founder of FitMetrics and former CMO of LinkedIn.

What we believe it will show

Our experience is that expressed ownership tracks with nervous system regulation and with connection, and that people who express the least ownership struggle most with anxiety, well-being and their relationships. We expect the data to show low ownership, insecure verbal habits and poor connection traveling together.
If we're right, a low score may be the most hopeful number in the app, because it points to where the most room for improvement is, and that room sits in the one place a person has full say, the meaning they make.
We expect to show that raising ownership moves both connection and physiology, and that's the study we intend to run once these pieces are connected. Two people with nearly the same circumstances can have very different experiences of the same event, and we believe this is how we'll show how much of that difference comes from the meaning each of them makes.
If it holds, we believe it would be one of the most concrete demonstrations yet of something the Stoics, Buddhist teachers and Viktor Frankl described long before us, that much of what we suffer lives in the meaning we make, now visible in a person's own words, their own voice and their own heart rate.

Why people will want it

People already accept honest scores about themselves. Wearable owners joke about what their watch told them after a rough night, and they keep wearing it because it tells them the truth they'd otherwise be blind to or talk themselves out of.
Tracking changes behavior. Umbrella reviews find activity trackers add roughly 1,800 steps a day, with larger effects when there's feedback and another person involved, and sharing SAGE data with a coach, therapist or practitioner puts that person in the loop.
The buyer already exists. Our read is that the first customers will be people already wearing a device to stay accountable to themselves, who don't need convincing about tracking, only about tracking this.
Very little is new to adopt. SAGE asks people to keep talking, texting and wearing what they already own, with one addition for full passive capture, a small audio wearable like ABOVE's pendant.

Why we believe this can reach further than mindfulness

Mindfulness is the one mindset shift we can point to that reached the wider culture in our lifetime, and we're fans of it. It depends on people setting time aside, and most don't sustain that.
Ownership language lives in the thousands of sentences people already think and speak every day, so the practice is built into life instead of added on top of it. Paired with technology that measures it passively and reports it honestly, we believe it can reach further than mindfulness has, supporting the awareness mindfulness builds rather than competing with it.

The path

Phase one, this pre-seed round. We finish the Companion and Translator as a working subscription product ready for individual memberships, build SAGE's brand, website and social presence so people can join and share it, put it in the hands of the William Glasser Institute's trainers and our pilot participants, run a pilot study, soft open to the public, and build the first version of the Ownership Score.
Phase two, the next round. We validate the Ownership and Connection Scores against established measures of agency, connection and well-being, combine the Companion and Translator into one SAGE app, and connect it to the channels people already use and to health data from wearables and aggregators.
Phase three. We partner with cognitive wearables like ABOVE for passive conversation capture, under the consent and privacy standards that category is already building, and the finished product described above comes together.
Throughout, we don't intend to build hardware. We intend to be the ownership and connection model the hardware runs on.