The Case for Investing in SAGE

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. 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 it at scale.

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. We're betting on the second.

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 ownership language, the way you think and speak. It is built for two outcomes we hold as equals, inner agency and connection, to the moment, to yourself and to others. It's 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 it 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.

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. It 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. That contradiction is difficult to blame on circumstances. 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. It's 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. It 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 it 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 it 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.

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 it a thousand times: "he made me angry." It 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. It's 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.

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 it 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 ownership language, the experience itself changes. Speaking or writing it 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, 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.

1. It works like a second language. Ownership language requires you to stop, notice what you were about to say and choose different words, the way you do when speaking a language you're still learning. Research on the foreign-language effect shows that people who think through a problem in a second language decide more deliberately and less reactively. Ownership language gives you that effect as a byproduct, in your own language, all day.
2. 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. People tell us it reveals their assumptions, their motives and the meaning they've been making, often more clearly than years of other work had.
3. It builds agency as you use it, because choosing the owned version of a sentence is itself an act of agency.
4. It connects you to the moment and to yourself, because you can't reword a sentence without being present for it, or own your part without looking at yourself.
5. It changes how you connect with others, because what comes out of you is aware, intentional and owned.
6. It shifts how you hold reality and identity. As people own the meaning they make, most find a significant shift in what they had taken as reality, recognizing that they experience their interpretation of it rather than reality itself. Their sense of who they are becomes less rigid and less defended, something in motion rather than something to protect, and they describe more security and more peace as a result. This is where SAGE began, in its first premises, that we experience our interpretation of reality rather than reality itself and that identity is evolving, not fixed.

And it works best all the time, for three reasons.

1. You'd want these all the time. There's no moment in your day when you'd rather be less aware, have less agency or be less connected.
2. Repetition builds the mindset. Used only in a conflict or a hard conversation, ownership language stays a technique. We've seen the strongest results, beginning with my own, in people who use it all the time.
3. It asks nothing extra of your day. Growth mindset never had a repeatable daily act. Mindfulness has meditation, which you have to set time aside for, and most people don't sustain it long enough to compound. SAGE has language, which you're already using all day, with no gatekeeper and no time set aside.

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 it 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, you communicate in a way that's much harder to argue with. People may not share your perspective, but there's little to dispute, because all you've done is share it and own it as yours. You may be the only person in the exchange who isn't labeling, accusing, blaming or stating something subjective as though it were objective. Research on intellectual humility finds that people who hold their views this way are trusted more, and people tend to mirror someone who is present and centered. Conversation after conversation, the friction that shows up in ordinary exchanges lessens, and what's left is room for a depth of connection most people haven't experienced. In some cases it also becomes clearer who you're simply not in alignment with, and you get to choose how you engage.

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 it checks ownership, so what goes out connects instead of triggering defensiveness.

Where it 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 finished SAGE app brings it together, listening across the places people communicate, pairing with the wearables they already own, and revealing each day how much ownership and connection showed up in what they said, how many interpretations they stated as facts, and what their heart rate did in the moment they lost their ownership. People are at their least defended and most reactive when speaking to someone in real time, which is where autopilot takes over and where retaining ownership matters most. The Age of Ownership lays out that finished product and the phases that get us 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 it 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.

9. Team

This didn't start with us. John and Joyce Weir spent the 1960s onward teaching what they called Percept Language inside NTL's Personal Growth Laboratories, making the same core claim SAGE makes now, that you experience your perception of a moment, not the moment itself, and the sentence you default to either owns that perception or hands it away. They taught it face to face, for decades, to thousands of people, largely outside anything written down, and they believed it was too deep to teach any other way.

Jake Eagle, a licensed psychotherapist, and his partner Hannah began working directly with the Weirs in 1998 and have spent the decades since teaching and refining the same practice in thousands of real conversations, again mostly face to face.

I discovered the Eagles and Percept Language in late 2023, and it changed how I experience my life to the degree that I'm now all in. What I bring isn't the practice, which was already proven in people. It's 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 it, 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 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 it needs to exist.

It 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.

12. 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.

In simple terms, this is what it 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.
• Discount: 20%, whichever gives you the better price at conversion, so you never pay full price at the next round. Even if that round prices lower than we hope, you're in at least 20% below what a new investor pays at that moment.
• 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 it buys today.

13. 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.

14. Positioning

Ownership is the concept the world needs, and connection is what people come looking for, so our public promise leads with connection, "Stop communicating on autopilot. Start connecting with awareness," 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.

15. 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