The Case for Investing in SAGE

In August I spent a day hiking with my friend Bill Ury, co-founder of Harvard's Program on Negotiation, who was gathering negotiators to work on preventing a third world war, while others devote themselves to climate change and disease so that we get to live another day. My own focus is helping the people who are given that day appreciate it and enjoy it (the full story opens The Age of Ownership). I'm devoting myself to the human experience, and this document is my case for why SAGE is the most hopeful way I've found to change that experience at scale, at the level of a culture, the way mindfulness did, not one book, course or therapy room at a time.

The question underneath it all is simple. If the human experience is the measure that matters most, will we improve it by changing what people experience, or how they experience it? Almost all of the attention, spending and effort goes to the first, and the distance between the two is what we call the human experience gap. We're betting on the second, because we believe the crisis is in large part an epidemic of disempowerment, and that people can learn agency back in the language they use every day.

If this rings true for you, please continue.

SAGE (Subjective Awareness and Genuine Expression) is the mindset and method of ownership. The mindset is owning the meaning you make of what happens to you, and the method is inside-out language, the way you think and speak. The practice is built for three outcomes we hold as equals: inner agency, deep connection and self-awareness. SAGE is taught through trained practitioners and scaled through the AI-driven SAGE Companion and SAGE Translator, and over time through a SAGE app that works in the background of daily life. Own the meaning you make.

For the finished product this round begins, see The Age of Ownership. For what people experience when they practice SAGE, see The SAGE Phenomenon, and to try the practice yourself, Experience SAGE and the SAGE Language Guide.

1. The Diagnosis

After decades in the self-improvement industry, and deep conversations with many of the world's leading experts in psychology and human potential, I've come to believe the ownership construct and linguistic practice of SAGE is our best hope for elevating the declining human experience at scale. SAGE goes beneath the tips-and-techniques approach, to how we experience life to begin with. If anyone has faith in another initiative they feel has equal or greater hope, I would greatly value knowing about it.

Most explanations of the mental health and well-being crisis point outward, at phones, isolation and the economy. Those causes are real, and we don't believe they account for the crisis on their own. The public health researcher Michael Marmot has written of an epidemic of disempowerment, and his meaning is structural, people losing control over their lives because of the conditions they live in. That work matters, and SAGE complements structural change rather than replacing it. We believe that epidemic has an inner side that almost no one is addressing, people losing authorship of how they experience their lives, and that's the side SAGE works on.

Why do we seem to be going backward? Our hypothesis is that we chased certainty, because uncertainty generally reads as danger. A fact, a measurement, someone else's opinion, something we can point to and call settled, offers an easy version of that, while owning our own subjective experience requires more awareness and discernment. So we built our sense of control on the outside, on facts, other people's opinions and whatever the culture had already settled was true. That was a reasonable trade, and we believe it's also significantly backwards, because the very thing we handed control to has quietly begun controlling us, and we gave away the one thing that was never negotiable, our own capacity to interpret our experience. Erich Fromm named this trade more than eighty years ago in Escape from Freedom, the idea that people will surrender their own freedom for the certainty of something outside them. We didn't invent that insight. What we seem to have found is that we've made the trade culturally, at a scale now showing up in a measurable mental health crisis.

2. The Contradiction

We are statistically safer, richer, freer and more resourced than almost any generation in American history, and yet we're reporting some of the worst mental health and overall well-being on record. Over the same decades, people came to feel less in control of their lives. In a meta-analysis of more than 24,000 students, Jean Twenge and her colleagues found that between 1960 and 2002 American college students and children increasingly saw their lives as driven by forces outside them, and the average college student in 2002 was more external than 80% of college students in the early 1960s. The researchers found the shift went hand in hand with helplessness and depression. In those years poverty fell and lifespans grew, while family stability and trust in one another declined. Anxiety was climbing long before smartphones, too. In another meta-analysis, Twenge found that on a standard anxiety measure, the average American child in the 1980s scored higher than child psychiatric patients had in the 1950s. Language shifted with it. Johan Bollen and colleagues found that words and phrases tied to distorted, depressive thinking surged in English, Spanish and German books from the 1980s on, beyond their levels during the Great Depression and both world wars. Phones may have accelerated something already underway. Circumstances matter, and we don't believe they explain the depth or the timing of how much less in control people came to feel. We believe the decline in trust and in family stability belongs to the same story, an epidemic of disempowerment that has been building for generations. We believe the lens we experience life through has gotten dirtier, and we dirty it ourselves with the sentences we default to, the ones that hand the authorship of our experience to something outside us, said thousands of times a day by people who'd never call it that.

American healthcare spending is at record levels ($15,474 per person in 2024, up from $353 in 1970), and chronic disease keeps climbing anyway. Self-improvement follows the same shape. The industry is already a market of tens of billions of dollars a year, climbing toward $90 billion by the mid-2030s, and mental health and well-being keep hitting new lows alongside that growth. Nearly 40% of Gen Z has been through mental health treatment, versus about a quarter of Gen X, and by most measures they're doing worse, not better. The spending isn't wrong, and we believe it shows we're funding symptoms instead of the root. The self-improvement industry markets itself on happiness and fulfillment, but what it teaches and rewards is achievement and approval, and those were never built to produce what's being promised. I'll own this as one of that industry's voices. I believe an industry built on promising transformation has given people more knowledge and some benefit, but seldom the kind of transformation that changes a life at its root.

3. Why Insight Hasn't Been Enough

Wise minds across history, from the Stoics and Buddhist teachers to a long line of psychologists, kept arriving at the same insight, that we experience our interpretation of life, not life itself. Every time, that insight ran into the same wall, a belief that didn't move. We believe that's because the belief was never built by agreement. The belief was built the way a habit is, through years of outside-in sentences repeated until they stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like the way things are. You can't easily displace something built with that much repetition. You have to out-repeat it, and the same repetition that quietly disempowered us is why re-empowering has to run on repetition too.

None of our psychological insight, therapy and effort was a mistake. What's been missing is a mechanism that works the way the belief was built, through deep immersion and constant repetition, not through understanding alone. SAGE works through the language we use all day, which gives the practice the one thing insight alone has never had, constant, real-time repetition in the moment a belief is either used on autopilot or caught. The shift this produces is closer to what the Apollo astronauts described seeing Earth from space for the first time. Nothing outside them changed, only how they saw it, and that changed everything after. Ownership isn't meant to become a new rigid belief either. It stays dynamic, your current best interpretation, always open to being caught and remade.

4. Why Now: Agency

Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, argues in his new book, Agency, published this September, that human progress tracks periods when people believe their actions matter, and that agency can be raised on purpose. I'm seeing the same shift firsthand, as I estimate about half of my recent podcast guests put agency at the center of their new books. The same attention is turning to how our experience is built. Michael Pollan's A World Appears, published this February and widely covered, including on NPR's Fresh Air, brings the science of consciousness to a general audience, along with the view that what we perceive is something the brain constructs rather than a direct view of reality.

Most of that attention points to external agency, the ability to act, choose and shape your circumstances. SAGE focuses on inner agency, how much you recognize your own part in creating your psychological experience and how much responsibility you're willing to take for it. Inner agency is the kind Viktor Frankl described, agency over your inner experience regardless of what's happening outside you. We believe our culture has given this away. The Coddling of the American Mind and Bad Therapy, two bestselling critiques of how we're raising young people to see themselves as fragile, describe a generation taught to treat catastrophizing and blame as insight rather than distortion, and underneath the data I believe is something simpler, thousands of small, automatic sentences a day ("he made me feel," "that's just how it is"), each one handing away authorship of our own experience. That doesn't make what affected you any less real. It means the response is still yours to own. Bill Ury told me on that same hike, "Agency is the antidote to hopelessness; when you're hopeless, you surrender your agency." He's now using SAGE himself.

5. The Mechanism

You've said this a thousand times: "he made me angry." The sentence sounds like you're reporting what happened, and what you're reporting is how you happened, handing someone else ownership of your own feeling without noticing. That doesn't make you unaware or bad at this. "He made me angry" is the sentence almost everyone defaults to, because it's the one our culture handed us. We call this Attribution Grammar, whether the sentence you reach for locates the cause of what you feel inside you or outside you, and whether it owns itself as your read or states itself as fact. "I'm reading this as unfair" owns it. "This is unfair" hands it away. In the same way, "The meeting was a total waste of time" states a perception as fact, and "I didn't find value in the meeting" owns it.

That choice happens in the sliver of time we call the Waking Point, while meaning is still forming and before interpretation hardens into belief. And that choice starts in your head. We narrate our experience to ourselves in words all day, long before any of it reaches another person, and the moment a thought is formed in inside-out language, the experience itself changes. Speaking or writing the thought extends that shift outward and makes it durable. This is why SAGE works upstream, as meaning forms, while most other approaches work afterward, making sense of experience that has already set.

The research points the same direction. Cognitive scientists Lera Boroditsky and Caitlin Fausey found that a single grammatical choice changes how much blame people assign and what witnesses remember. Analyzing more than 2.7 million social media users, Simchon, Hadar and Gilead found that each additional passive, non-agentive verb in someone's writing predicted a 46% drop in follower count, and that passive voice ran 65% higher in lower-agency writers and 42% higher in depression-support forums than in matched controls. James Gross's decades of research at Stanford tie cognitive reappraisal, consciously reinterpreting a situation rather than reacting to it, to better well-being and closer relationships. And in expressive writing research pioneered by James Pennebaker, the people who benefited most were the ones whose words changed, and those changes in language accounted for much of the benefit.

What we've found, beginning with my own experience, as people began using inside-out 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. Mindfulness asks you to set time aside for meditation, while SAGE lives in the language you're already using all day.

How it works

1. Works like a non-native language. Having to stop, notice and choose different words slows you down, the way speaking a language you're still learning does, so you respond more deliberately (the foreign-language effect).
2. The Waking Point. The practice works in the moment meaning is still forming, before interpretation hardens; most approaches work afterward.
3. Full immersion. Used all the time, inside-out language builds the mindset through repetition, and asks for no time set aside.

What people experience

1. Lived awareness. Connection to the moment; awareness becomes something you live rather than understand.
2. Self-revelation. Connection to yourself; owning your part reveals your assumptions, motives and the meaning you've been making.
3. Inner agency. From recipient to creator; each owned sentence is an act of agency.
4. Connection with others. What comes out of you is aware and owned, with less friction, so others meet you with less defense.
5. A shift in reality and identity. You recognize you experience your interpretation rather than reality itself, and identity becomes less rigid and less defended, bringing more security and peace.

The SAGE Phenomenon describes each of these and the research closest to it.

6. Connection

Agency is half of what SAGE gives you, and connection is the other half, the part people generally care about most. Constructing and communicating thought with ownership connects you first to the moment, then to yourself, and then to the people you're speaking with. With inside-out language we regulate our own nervous system and, in ways people don't consciously register, theirs too, because our words don't carry the friction outside-in language so often creates.

When you speak with complete ownership, there's little for anyone to dispute, because all you've done is share your perspective and own it as yours. Conversation after conversation, the friction in ordinary exchanges lessens and leaves room for a depth of connection most people haven't experienced. The SAGE Phenomenon gives the research behind this, and The Age of Ownership describes how the app measures connection.

7. The Experience, and Where It Goes

Day to day, someone opens the Companion to talk through a thought, a feeling or a conflict, and the Companion asks the ownership question back, whose interpretation is this? Before sending a hard message, written or spoken, they run it through the Translator the way they'd run a draft through Grammarly, except the Translator checks ownership, so what goes out connects instead of triggering defensiveness.

Where the experience goes from there is the part I've already done by hand. I've worn an AI pendant that records my conversations, taken the transcripts into the SAGE Companion, used the Translator before hard conversations, and watched my own nervous system regulation, inner agency and relationships change. Every piece of that technology exists today. The Age of Ownership describes the finished app, its scores and the phases that get there. This round funds phase one.

8. Competition

We haven't found another psychological model built on this concept or this specific mechanism, ownership at the level of the language you use to interpret your own life, or anyone training the act of catching and rewriting sentences as a continuous, all-day discipline. The nearest neighbors deserve naming. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy also treats language as shaping experience, and works with thoughts after they've formed. E-Prime, drawn from Alfred Korzybski's general semantics, removed the verb "to be" from writing so judgments couldn't pass as facts, and it remained a writing exercise with little uptake.

The real competition is the status quo, which is failing by its own numbers. Therapy and counseling apps, mindfulness apps, growth-mindset content and the broader self-improvement industry compete for attention and dollars while the numbers in Section 2 keep moving the wrong way. SAGE isn't a rejection of therapy. We see the practice as a correction to the language even good therapy inherited from the culture around it, and our intent is to be harnessed by all of these, so they all get better integration.

Inside the AI coach and mentor category, most players deliver generic support and conversation, without a focus on agency or a specific linguistic mechanism. Capital already agrees the category is real. Woebot has raised $124 million, Wysa $30 million, and a16z and Slingshot put $93 million behind a competitor in this space. Of everything already out there, we measure ourselves against mindfulness and growth mindset, not against a rival version of SAGE.

Where SAGE sits among the tools people already use:

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

Market figures: Grand View Research, wearable technology market (grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/wearable-technology-market), meditation apps market (grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/meditation-management-apps-market-report) and AI in mental health market (grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/ai-mental-health-market-report).

9. Team

This didn't start with us. From the 1960s on, John and Joyce Weir taught what they called Percept Language inside NTL's Personal Growth Laboratories, and Jake Eagle, a psychotherapist and licensed professional counselor, and his partner Hannah began working with them in 1998 and have taught and refined the practice since. Who We Are tells the full history.

I discovered the Eagles and Percept Language in late 2023. The practice showed me how much of my agency I had been giving away to other people and circumstances, disempowering myself from the inside, and what that had been doing to my nervous system, my anxiety and my whole perspective on my life. The change was deep enough that I'm now all in. What I bring isn't the practice, which was already proven in people. I bring the expansion of the psychological model, the case for using it all the time, and the reach to carry it past one person at a time, through fifteen years of relationships across our most influential voices in human potential and institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown and the American Psychological Association. And AI, as we're already using it in the beta Companion and Translator, gives us the scalability John and Joyce Weir felt wasn't possible.

On the technology side, I've hosted Lyle Maxson, founder of the AI wearable company ABOVE, on my podcast, 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. I've also met with Nick Besbeas, founder of FitMetrics and former CMO of LinkedIn. For this first phase, we're also weighing a lower-cost path, a minimal public-facing version of the Companion built and released before any deeper technology partnership is finalized. We'll also be pursuing partners in operations and marketing.

10. Proof

Fifty years of practice plus the network and technology to scale it are already producing evidence ahead of any paid marketing or finished product. In early testing, nearly all of our beta testers reported significant benefit, most using the word "breakthrough" unprompted. "I experienced awe for the process and clarity for a relationship that was no longer serving me, and I cried in gratitude," said Marby, a licensed therapist. "I know it's not therapy, but it sure felt like it, minus the tension of imagining I'm being judged," said Nora. "I could not escape or hide from myself while using the SAGE Companion. Powerful," said Peter, a prominent attorney who credits SAGE with a new depth in his marriage. When I asked one user recently what had changed his life most, he said it was the language, becoming aware of how he was speaking to himself and to others.

Stephen Porges, whose polyvagal work underpins how much of the field understands the nervous system, has called SAGE's inside-out language "truly polyvagal in its implications." James Pennebaker, in correspondence with us about SAGE, suggested pairing language measures with heart rate variability to validate the practice, the same pairing our finished app is built on. And the William Glasser Institute, founders of Choice Theory and Reality Therapy, have asked us to train their trainers in seventeen countries.

11. The Hard Questions

These are the objections we hear most, or expect to, and how we answer them today.

Doesn't telling people they make the meaning of what happens to them amount to blaming them? What happened to someone is real. It can be wrong and cruel, and someone else may be entirely responsible for it. SAGE never asks a person to own what was done to them. The practice asks them to notice the meaning they make of it afterward, which we see as the one place a person still has a say. The trauma research partly agrees. Anke Ehlers and David Clark's influential cognitive model of post-traumatic stress holds that the way people appraise a traumatic event and its aftermath helps keep them stuck in it. SAGE works in the territory of anxiety, not acute fear or crisis, as The Interpretation Construct explains. Timing and care still matter, and SAGE is not a substitute for clinical treatment.

Where is the evidence? Today the evidence is fifty years of practice in person, the reports of many beta users and the interest of serious people in the field, which is encouraging and isn't proof. SAGE has never had a controlled study. The pilot in phase one is the first formal test, and we intend to share what it finds, including anything that falls short. A result that held up only in self-report, or didn't show up in how people actually speak, would tell us something important.

Isn't this reframing, or cognitive behavioral therapy by another name? The practice draws on the same insight that runs from the Stoics through Viktor Frankl to modern therapy, that our interpretation shapes our experience. The difference is where and how often the work happens. Therapy works on thoughts after they've formed, usually in a session. SAGE works on the sentence as it's forming, all day, in ordinary conversation, and we intend it to make therapy and other approaches more effective rather than replace them.

Why a for-profit company? We believe a product is the only way a practice like this changes a culture. Even if we were funded anonymously and stayed anonymous, I don't believe we'd have the impact unless we built something people want and are willing to pay for, and you could give every dollar of profit to charity and that would still be true. For fifty years this practice relied on goodwill and face-to-face teaching, and it stayed in small rooms. Alongside the product, we intend to work through institutions, the way mindfulness moved through hospitals and universities before it reached the wider culture, beginning with the William Glasser Institute.

Can one practice move a national trend? Not alone, and we don't claim SAGE will. Isolation, declining trust, economic strain and the design of our technology are real causes, and the efforts to address them are worth making. Almost all of those efforts focus on what happens to people. SAGE works on how people experience what happens to them, a layer we believe is badly underserved and belongs in any serious answer.

Will people stick with the practice? This is a real risk. Most wellness apps lose most of their users within weeks. Our bet is that SAGE asks for no time set aside, because it lives in language a person is already using, and that its benefits show up quickly enough to keep people practicing. We haven't proven that at scale yet, and the pilot and the soft open are where we'll learn.

12. The Return

This is, first and plainly, a humanitarian effort, an attempt to address something at the scale of a generation, the experience of being alive. What we're building toward is measurable re-empowerment at cultural scale, something I believe this culture has produced perhaps once in our lifetime, through mindfulness. That's what I'd want you to weigh first, whether you come to this as an investor or also as someone who believes this work needs to exist.

This is also, we believe, a serious financial opportunity. The AI coach and mentor market, the category SAGE sits in, is sized at $37 billion for 2025 and growing at 31% a year. Mindfulness took roughly forty years to go mainstream, clearing belief, credibility and distribution one barrier at a time. We see AI collapsing that sequence, and we bring the kind of network that carried Jon Kabat-Zinn, paired with technology that lets us move immediately instead of over decades.

13. The Ask

We're raising $250,000 in pre-seed financing through a SAFE (a standard early-stage agreement that converts to equity later, rather than pricing the company today) to fund phase one. We're in discussion with PhD candidates at UC Berkeley who would help facilitate the pilot. Founders retain majority control and all governance rights. The people who invest at this stage are the first to believe in this before there's anything finished to point to, and we consider you our founding investors, people we want to stay close to as this grows. If proof and validation matter more to you than equity, the same pilot can be funded with charitable, tax-deductible dollars through our nonprofit fiscal sponsor.

For the seed round that follows, Kevin has personal relationships at two funds focused on our space, Next Ventures, which backs whole-person health and invested in Oura, and Wisdom Ventures, which invests in technology for well-being and human connection. The SAGE Snapshot describes these relationships.

In simple terms, this is what investing now means for you as an early investor.

• Instrument: a post-money SAFE, with no interest, no debt and no maturity date.
• Valuation cap: $1.65 million post-money.
• Conversion: automatic at our next priced round, which we expect roughly 10 months out.
• Pro rata right: a side letter securing your right to invest additional money at that round to keep your same ownership percentage rather than being diluted.
• Governance: no board seat or decision rights attached to this round, which keeps a clean cap table and a relationship with us that stays personal, not procedural.

To put the cap in perspective, if our next priced round lands near the $10 million mark we're working toward, your investment converts as if the company were still valued at $1.65 million, roughly a six-times step-up on paper. That's illustrative, not a guarantee, and final terms are governed by the executed SAFE, which we'll always put in front of an attorney before anything is signed.

This price is available only in this round, to our founding investors. Anyone who waits and invests at the seed round will pay that round's price instead, so the same investment would buy far less of SAGE. At a $10 million seed price, $25,000 would buy about a sixth of the ownership that amount buys today.

14. Use of Funds

Several things are pulling on this money right now, not someday. The Glasser Institute is ready for us to train its trainers, the pilot is ready to move, and people are already asking for SAGE. Phase one, in this order.

1. Finish the SAGE Companion and Translator as a working subscription product ready for individual memberships, with the privacy and memory to track a person's growth over time instead of resetting every conversation. Programming begins immediately.
2. At the same time, build SAGE's public presence, the brand, a real website and social media, with the Companion, the Translator and supporting content available for people to join, use and share. Until now SAGE has lived almost entirely in personal contact, and this is what makes it exist publicly.
3. Put that product in the hands of the William Glasser Institute's trainers and our pilot participants. WGI believes SAGE can further operationalize Glasser's Choice Theory and Reality Therapy, and this collaboration is the first of many steps toward the credibility and exposure institutions like this can bring.
4. Run the pilot study, the first formal validation of SAGE.
5. Soft open SAGE to the public, with professional counsel on positioning.
6. Pursue grant funding through our nonprofit fiscal sponsor for deeper research into the root mechanisms of human transformation, not only SAGE's own validation.

The round also funds the people doing this work, Kevin Miller, Jake and Hannah Eagle, and a project manager or COO.

By the end of phase one, SAGE will be a working product with paying members, a public brand, an institutional partner and pilot results, which is what gives the seed round a real basis for valuation.

15. Positioning

Ownership is the concept the world needs, and connection is what people come looking for, so our public promise leads with connection, "Stop reacting on autopilot. Start connecting from the inside out," alongside "Own the meaning you make." We intend practicing an ownership mindset to become something people are proud to be known for, the way "I meditate" and "I have a growth mindset" became part of how people describe themselves, and we'll launch a website, social media and a podcast bringing the same influential guests from the Kevin Miller Podcast into the conversation.

Making SAGE work is half our job. The other half is getting people to want it, try it and keep using it. We give that second half as much effort as the first. To do it, we draw on behavioral science, the research on why people take up a new habit and stick with it. Three of our decisions show this.

First, the name. Psychologists are paying growing attention to agency, the sense that your actions matter. Martin Seligman's new book, Agency, is one example. We believe the deeper need is inner agency: owning how you experience what happens to you. "Building inner agency" sounds like work, so we call it an ownership mindset, something a person can simply claim.

Second, the promise. Most people come to SAGE looking for connection, so our promise to them leads with connection. Within that promise, we're choosing a specific way in. SAGE offers people a great deal, but the most tangible and common need they feel is connection, with themselves and with others, and their most pressing interest is relational conflict. We intend to offer people what they want, as the way to give them what they need. About two-thirds of conversation is about people and relationships (Dunbar, 1997), and much of it is people sharing their perspectives, including frustration with others who see things differently. That's the moment a SAGE user can offer something that helps a friend and makes them look good, what researchers call social currency (Berger, Contagious, 2013). So our likely entry point is a contrarian one: conflict prevention. Most experts treat conflict as inevitable and teach people to fight better. In our experience, disagreement is inevitable and conflict isn't. Inside-out language invites curiosity, so people often find they disagree less than they thought, and the disagreement that remains tends to stay harmonious. Research supports the distinction: disagreement over ideas differs from conflict that turns personal, and the personal kind does the damage (Jehn, 1995; De Dreu and Weingart, 2003). People also overestimate how far apart they are from those they disagree with (More in Common, 2019).

Third, the practice. Most self-help gives people a long list of things to do. SAGE asks for one keystone habit. Charles Duhigg uses that term for a single habit that sets off other changes without separate effort. Our keystone habit is translating your words into inside-out language. Our users report that it opens the door to a cascade of increased inner agency, deep connection, and self-awareness. Self-awareness here means seeing the meaning you're making while you make it.

16. The Close

So what would you be investing in? SAGE, the mindset and method of ownership, delivered through the AI-driven SAGE Companion and SAGE Translator, taught directly and through trained practitioners, and built toward a SAGE app that reveals people to themselves in the moments that matter, to build inner agency and deepen connection.

Why would you be investing? Because you want to be part of an effort that, from everything I've seen, is one of very few truly working to improve how we experience life, at significant scale.

Our intent is to close this pre-seed round by November 1, 2026, with five to ten investors. We'd be honored to have you as one of our founding investors.

Kevin

SAGE · SUBJECTIVE AWARENESS AND GENUINE EXPRESSION