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The Age of Ownership: The World SAGE Is Building

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

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

SAGE is intended to address the declining human experience at scale

In August 2026, I spent a day hiking with Bill Ury from 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. 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 working out how to prevent it. His answer was almost no one. Less than two months later, he was in Ireland with 52 negotiators and mediators doing exactly that.

Other leaders 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. With SAGE, we focus on the people who receive those days, the days so many are working to protect. We want to help them appreciate and enjoy those days.

Across the developed Western world, we're living through a mental health and well-being crisis. We aren't enjoying the days we have. We see much of the crisis as an epidemic of disempowerment: people losing authorship of how they experience their lives. The Case for Investing in SAGE sets out the evidence.

We have movements to save the planet, our bodies and our societies. The mind we experience all of it through is in crisis, and no movement is working on how we experience it. Spending on treatment and self-improvement has reached record highs. Nearly every large-scale effort addresses what we experience: our circumstances, our phones, our medications, our isolation. Almost none addresses how we experience our lives. We call this the human experience gap: the distance between how much we've improved what people experience and how little we've done for how they experience it. That gap is where SAGE works. This document describes what we're building to close it.

What SAGE can do today is the beginning. What we intend to do with it is the reason we're here.

Kevin Miller

The finished product

The SAGE app works in the background like a constant coach. It listens wherever you communicate and reads how much ownership and connection show up in your words and voice. It pairs that with data from the wearables you already own. Then it reports back, with guidance for making a different choice next time. The aim is to reveal you to yourself: how you're making meaning, and how that meaning shapes your experience.

  • It captures what you say and write: live conversation, calls, voice messages, dictation, texts and email. Written communication comes from the apps you choose to connect. A small wearable, worn around the neck or on the wrist, adds your spoken conversations. You can turn it on all day or only when you want.
  • It gives you a daily overall score, with an Ownership Score and a Connection Score beneath it. It also shows a number most people have never seen: how many interpretations they stated as facts that day.
  • It picks up the verbal habits that tend to signal insecurity: filler words, rushing, repeating yourself and interrupting.
  • It pairs with Garmin, Oura, Whoop, Apple Watch and others. Over weeks, you can see trends in your heart rate variability (HRV), stress and sleep alongside how much ownership you express.
  • It brings together the two tools that exist today: the SAGE Companion, a guide you talk with, and the SAGE Translator, which rewrites what you've written inside-out. You can still talk with the app directly and work through specific issues and relationships. If you choose, you can share your view with a coach, therapist or SAGE practitioner.

Capturing your own conversations means capturing other people's voices. We take that as seriously as your own privacy. Everything is opt-in: you choose which channels connect, turn capture on and off, and decide what's kept. Our design principle is that SAGE keeps the meaning, not the recording. The words are analyzed, and the scores and patterns are kept. The raw audio and transcripts are deleted or stay on your device. The industry is already building answers to this. The Limitless pendant has a Consent Mode that pauses recording when it hears a voice that hasn't consented. Thirteen US states require everyone in a conversation to agree before it's recorded. We intend to meet the strictest of those standards, starting with asking people's permission.

The discovery at the center of SAGE

We believe we experience our lives through the meaning we make. In our view, much of that meaning is made in words, often silently in the words we think with. The meaning then hardens as we speak and write.

SAGE is the mindset and method of ownership. The mindset is owning the meaning you make. The method is inside-out language. Outside-in language places the cause of your experience outside you: "He made me angry." Inside-out language places it where the meaning is being made: "I'm angering myself because of how I'm perceiving him." Outside-in language also states a perception as fact: "The meeting was a total waste of time." Inside-out language owns the perception: "I didn't find value in the meeting."

When people switch fully from outside-in to inside-out language, several effects come together in a cascade. Some are well established in research. Others are what SAGE adds. Together they seem to produce something none of them produces alone.

How the practice works

  1. It works like a non-native language. Inside-out language requires you to stop, notice what you were about to say and choose different words. Speaking a non-native language asks the same of you. Research shows people think more deliberately and less reactively in a second language (the foreign-language effect). We find inside-out language gives you that effect in your own language.
  2. The Waking Point. The practice works in the moment meaning is still forming, before interpretation hardens. Most other approaches work after meaning has already been made.
  3. Full immersion. Languages are learned through immersion, and so is this one. Used all the time, inside-out language builds the mindset through repetition. Unlike meditation, it asks for no time set aside.

What people experience

  1. Lived awareness. Connection to the moment. Awareness is one of the most talked-about ideas in therapy, spirituality and self-help, and one of the least lived. Inside-out language asks for awareness in every thought and sentence. Awareness becomes something you live rather than something you understand.
  2. Self-revelation. Connection to yourself. Owning your part in what you're experiencing reveals your assumptions, your motives and the meaning you've been making.
  3. Inner agency. From recipient to creator. Each owned sentence is an act of agency, so felt inner agency tends to grow with every one.
  4. Connection with others. What you say is aware and owned, with less of the friction outside-in language tends to create. Others tend to meet you with less defense.
  5. A shift in reality and identity. You recognize that you experience your interpretation rather than reality itself. Your identity becomes less rigid and less defended, and many people report more security and peace.

The SAGE Phenomenon describes each of these and how one sets off the next.

The practice has worked this way for decades, one on one and in small groups. The words people think with have always surfaced in what they say and write. What's new is that technology can now hear them and reflect them back, all day, with no teacher in the room. The finished app will show with data what the practice already reveals from the inside.

A true audit of how you show up

When we speak outside-in, we hand the meaning of what we feel to other people and circumstances, and we tend to feel less secure. Insecurity pulls our attention toward defending ourselves, away from the moment, from ourselves, and from the person in front of us. Owning the meaning we make tends to steady us and frees that attention to connect.

Most people don't come looking for agency. They come looking for connection, so that's where our promise begins.

Stop reacting on autopilot. Start connecting from the inside out.

Most of us are working hard to connect. We mean well. We wear ourselves out being kind and communicating as well as we know how. Still, many of our relationships stay distant, and as a culture we're more isolated than ever. We believe much of that distance lives in the gap between how we intend to come across and how we do come across. Almost none of us can see that gap from the inside. Research on self-knowledge suggests the people around us often see how we come across more accurately than we see it ourselves. Kevin and others who practice SAGE every day often hear the outside-in sentences behind the friction people describe to them. They say it feels like being handed a superpower.

For years, Kevin has wondered why nothing like a 360 review exists for everyday life. A 360 review gathers feedback from the people around you. Companies use them because self-assessment is skewed by how we see ourselves. That's the same reason self-reported personality tests so often tell us what we already believe. The finished SAGE app will work like a 360 review that needs no one to fill out a form. It measures qualities research ties to trust and connection: owning your views as yours, curiosity, humility, listening as much as you speak, and letting people finish. It shows you where your words and your voice work against what you intend. The app can't read anyone's mind. It reports how you're likely coming across, not what any one person thinks of you. Those patterns tend to start in the meaning you make, so the same view also shows where you've been making meaning in ways that hurt you.

What the app measures

SAGE operationalizes ownership and connection. In other words, it turns both into something a person can see in their own words and hear in their own voice. Each day, the app gives an overall score, with the Ownership Score and the Connection Score beneath it. People can see how one score moves with the other. The categories beneath each score show exactly where they slipped.

The Ownership Score reads five categories: interpretation, attribution, choice, certainty, and ownership without blame. The Connection Score reads three: presence, self-awareness and relationship. Those three are a person's connection to the moment, to themselves and to others. Voice habits such as pace, volume, interrupting and filler words feed both scores. How the scores work, at the end of this document, gives the detail.

Humility and confidence

Humility is one of the qualities most tied to trust, and it's easy to mistake for insecurity. We believe inside-out language may be one of the few ways of speaking that sounds humble and confident at once. "I see it this way" is humble, because it's only your view. It's also confident, because you stand behind it. Insecurity sounds different: piles of qualifiers, apologizing, putting yourself down and fishing for reassurance. Arrogance sounds different too, because it states a view as fact. The app reads all of these, so people can see which way they lean in a given relationship or setting.

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
heart rate climbs
You said: "He always does this to me."
Inside-out 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.
  • The morning after a hard day, the app shows you yesterday. Your Ownership Score was 10, against your usual 70. You stated 50 interpretations as facts, and your Connection Score fell along with your Ownership Score. That may explain why you felt anxious.
  • Most of the drop came from two conversations, one with a colleague and one with your spouse. In both, you spoke faster, repeated yourself and interrupted. Your certainty words spiked.
  • The app lines those conversations up with data from your watch. Over the weeks you spoke most outside-in, your HRV tended to run lower and your sleep scores dipped.
  • It shows you the words, offers the inside-out version and asks what you'd like to try next time. You might even decide to reach back out to those people and have the conversation again, inside-out.
  • The same view explains your good days. On the evening you felt closest to your family, your ownership was high and you listened more than you spoke.
  • By the end of the month, you can see your ownership and connection trends next to your sleep, recovery and stress trends. You can 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, then talk, type or paste. 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. 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 is designed to do the same for how we make meaning and how we connect.

Many of us have sat with a coach and wished the coach could come with us through the rest of the week. We'd want someone who wouldn't tell us what to do. That person would simply show us what we did and help us back toward who we said we wanted to be. The finished SAGE app is designed to be that companion.

A continuous glucose monitor is a useful comparison. It doesn't tell anyone what to eat. It shows people 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 aims to do the same for the meaning we make. Each person chooses ownership as the standard they want to live by. The app shows them how they thought and spoke today against that standard, and guides them back when they drift.

This is how we intend to close the integration gap at scale. The integration gap is the distance between understanding an idea and living it, and most psychological content never crosses it. The app meets people in their real conversations, the place where change happens.

Keeping the work at the source

We intend SAGE as a humanitarian effort, and we're realistic about how people start. Most will come because they want better relationships for their own sake. Many people start exercising to look better and end up healthier, and we're glad to meet people the same way. Whatever brings someone to SAGE, the app helps only by taking them back to the meaning they're making. In our experience, people who keep doing that grow more secure and less driven by ego, which serves them and everyone around them. The risk we design against is the app becoming one more coach for surface behavior. Five principles are built in.

  • Feedback starts at the meaning behind the behavior. When the app flags an interruption, it asks what the person was making the moment mean, such as "I'm not being heard," and works from there.
  • Feedback follows the sequence we use throughout SAGE. The app shows you the pattern in your own words and names what that sentence was doing. It sets the inside-out version beside it and leaves the choice with you. In our experience, seeing your own sentence next to its alternative changes people in a way advice doesn't.
  • The person sets the standard. At the start, the app asks how they want to show up, for example curious, steady and warm. It measures against their own intention, never against whether other people approve of them.
  • The scores are theirs to own too. People make meaning of their feedback, the same way they learn to with everything else. SAGE applies its own practice to its own data.
  • Private by default, with no leaderboards and no comparing yourself with others.

Why now

  • Conversation capture is already on sale. ABOVE (goabove.ai) sells a 12-gram pendant for $199 plus $9 a month. It 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 phones, computers and AI tools. All of it can now be captured and read.
  • Physiological tracking is mainstream. Oura has sold more than 5.5 million rings. It 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. 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 the data.
  • Reading psychology from language has a research base. Seligman's CAVE method scores explanatory style, the way people explain the causes of events, from verbatim speech. Pennebaker's LIWC software links everyday word use to well-being. Mehl's Electronically Activated Recorder has captured natural daily speech for research for years.
  • Large language models can now read meaning in live conversation. The practice's originators believed that couldn't happen outside face-to-face teaching. The SAGE Companion already does it in beta.
  • Lyle Maxson, founder of ABOVE, calls this benevolent AI. Most technology uses these capabilities to capture our attention. Benevolent AI uses them instead to help people see themselves clearly and show up with more ownership in their own lives.
  • Measuring how people come across has a research base too. Alex Pentland's research at MIT found that voice patterns alone, such as pace, interruptions and energy, predicted the outcomes of negotiations, sales pitches and speed dates.
  • The pieces exist separately: 360 reviews inside companies, speech coaching for presentations, voice analytics in call centers, and early conversation-capture devices like ABOVE. As far as we know, no one has brought them into everyday life for the public, or paired them with a way to change what they show. We believe that combination is unprecedented, and we see significant implications for the culture.

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. It was taught 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 far more people.
  • Kevin has already run the full loop by hand. He took transcripts from ABOVE's pendant into the SAGE Companion and used the Translator before hard conversations. Our technology partners are in conversation with us, and The Case for Investing in SAGE has the detail.
  • James Pennebaker's computational analysis of language is among the most rigorous in psychology. In correspondence with us, he suggested that biometric measures such as heart rate variability are a promising way to validate SAGE. That's 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. The practice, the language framework behind it, and the supporting research and documentation are built.
  • The people using SAGE keep pointing to the same thing. One user was asked recently what had changed his life most. He said it was the language: becoming aware of how he was communicating with himself and with others.

What we believe it will show

  • In our experience, expressed ownership tracks with nervous system regulation and with connection. People who express the least ownership seem to 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. It shows where change seems most possible: in the meaning a person makes.
  • We expect to show that raising ownership moves both connection and physiology. That's the study we intend to run once these pieces are connected. Two people in nearly the same circumstances can have very different experiences of the same event. We believe this study can show how much of that difference comes from the meaning each person 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. Much of what we suffer seems to live in the meaning we make. SAGE could make that visible in a person's own words, voice and 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. They keep wearing it because it tells them truths they'd otherwise miss or talk themselves out of.
  • Tracking changes behavior. Umbrella reviews find activity trackers add roughly 1,800 steps a day. The effects are larger when there's feedback and another person involved. 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. They 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. The one addition, for full passive capture, is 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 people don't sustain that.
  • Inside-out language lives in the thousands of sentences people already think and speak every day. 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. We see it supporting the awareness mindfulness builds, not competing with it.

The path

  • Phase one, this pre-seed round. We finish the Companion and Translator as a subscription product and build SAGE's public brand and website. We soft open to the public, put the product in the hands of the William Glasser Institute's trainers and our pilot participants, and run the pilot. The SAGE Snapshot has the detail.
  • Phase two, funded by the seed round. We combine the Companion and Translator into one SAGE app and connect it to the channels people already use and to health data. We add an optional wearable for passive capture, white-labeled from an existing device maker or offered through partners like ABOVE, under the consent standards described above. We validate the Ownership and Connection Scores against established measures of agency, connection and well-being. This is where the finished product described above comes together.
  • Throughout, we don't intend to invent hardware. The SAGE wearable is optional and white-labeled from an existing device, and the app also works with devices people already own. What we build is the ownership and connection model the hardware runs on.

The age of ownership

We see a culture that has drifted toward living outside-in, handing authorship of how we feel to other people and circumstances. The numbers on anxiety, well-being and loneliness suggest what that drift has cost us. We don't believe there was a golden age of ownership to return to. What we see instead is a chance to use tools people already own to make ownership and connection visible in their words and felt in their bodies, until living this way becomes the default. That's what we mean by the age of ownership, and it's what we're committed to building.

How the scores work

The Ownership Score

  1. Interpretation. Whether you own your perceptions as yours or state them as facts: "She's selfish" versus "I'm seeing her as selfish right now." SAGE counts how many interpretations you state as facts in a day.
  2. Attribution. Where you place the cause of what you feel: "The meeting made me furious" versus "I'm furious with how I perceived the meeting."
  3. Choice. "I have to," "I can't" and "I should" versus "I'm choosing," "I will" and "I won't."
  4. Certainty. "It is" may be the most habitual phrase in our language. With it, we claim certainty, objectivity and fact for subjective experiences. Related habits include "always," "never," "obviously," "the truth is" and "everyone knows." These words turn one interpretation into the only possible reading, and one moment into a permanent condition.
  5. Ownership without blame or accusation, of others or of yourself. Self-condemnation is read separately, so the score never rewards blaming yourself as though it were ownership.

The Connection Score

  1. 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.
  2. Self-awareness: your connection to yourself. Whether you notice and own your own state as it shifts, instead of being carried by it.
  3. 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. That's when we often feel least secure and grow most certain. Outside-in language shows up in how we speak as much as in what we say. Most people have never been shown their own verbal habits, or how those habits shape their experience and their connection. In our experience, these habits are what insecurity sounds like, and the app reflects them in both scores.

  1. Pace. Speeding up as you get defensive.
  2. Volume. Raising your voice.
  3. Intensity. Growing emphatic and forceful.
  4. Repetition. Making the same point again and again to be heard.
  5. Cursing.
  6. Filler words. "Uh," "um," "like," "you know."
  7. Stuttering and false starts.
  8. Nervous laughter. The chuckle after most things you say.
  9. Interrupting. Talking over the other person.
  10. 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. As ownership grows, security tends to grow 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. They can also be viewed against trends in your biometrics over weeks. You can see the moment in a conversation when your ownership dropped and your pace and certainty rose.
  • The Companion already responds to ownership in the moment. With the full picture, it can show you the pattern and walk you back to the choice you have.

Sources

Next: The Case for Investing in SAGE
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