188 | Yes, Mental Health Applies to YOU with Johnny Crowder
Our guest this week on the pod is Johnny Crowder. Johnny is the founder & CEO of Cope Notes, a Tedx Speaker and a Mental Health Advocate. He's a suicide/abuse survivor dedicated to rebranding the global mental health conversation.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
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Johnny Crowder Awarepreneurs Interview
SPEAKERS
Johnny Crowder, Paul Zelizer
Paul Zelizer 00:02
Hi, this is Paul Zelizer, and welcome to another episode of The Awarepreneurs Podcast. This podcast is all about the intersection of three things, conscious business, social impact, and awareness practices. Each episode, I do a deep dive interview with a thought leader in this intersection. Someone who has market tested experience, and is already transforming many minds. Before I introduce today's guests in our topic, I have one request. If you could go over to iTunes or whatever app you're listening to this show on and do a rating and review, it helps tremendously. Thanks for considering. Today I'm thrilled to introduce you to Johnny Crowder. And our topic is yes, mental health applies to you. Johnny is the founder and CEO of Cope Notes, a TEDx speaker, and a mental health advocate. He's also a suicide abuse survivor, dedicated to rebranding the global mental health conversation.
Johnny, welcome to the show. I am so happy to be here. I kind of hope listeners can hear there are a bunch of birds outside my window right now. And it's like a lovely backdrop for the conversation. Oh, nice. I'm listening. I don't think I hear right now. But hopefully, sometimes they chime in if we take a moment and be quiet. How cool is that? So we got a lot of talk about Johnny is some of the research I was looking at. Again, as I was getting ready this episode is just with COVID-19 levels of anxiety and depression, use of substances is through the roof. We just had a very significant loss in the entrepreneurial sector, Tony Shea died. And there's a lot of awareness of some of the substances he was using before he died. Although it may not be directly related to his death, there's a lot of conversation about addiction. And in general, entrepreneurs have a higher we're out of the box people we do incredible things. But our relationship with mental health is that we have higher levels of anxiety, higher levels of depression and higher levels of other mental health occurrences. So we got a lot to talk about, and you're the guy to help us. Before we get there. No pressure, right? Yeah, not at all right, fix it. No, I'm kidding. Before we get to the work you do and how you got into it, and what you see going on in the entrepreneur world as it relates to mental health, we're called to wear printers. And one of the ways we like to get to know somebody is to ask you about a wellness or an awareness practice that you personally use to resource yourself for this really important, but not always very easy work.
Johnny Crowder 02:35
So this is going to come off as kind of a curveball, maybe. But one thing that I do relatively often is I'll tell you what I do, and then I'll explain why it's a wellness practice for me. The what is what I put on deodorant in the morning, I will put a different amount of deodorant under each arm. And you might be wondering why I kind of want to let it hang in the moment there for a second. So why I do that is because I grew up with OCD. And I was in treatment for OCD for a decade. And I still very actively tried to combat my OCD. And one thing that I will do purposely to disrupt any sort of OCD rule over my life is I'll try to like throw it for a loop and try to challenge it. So one thing that I very regularly do is try to create imbalance in my life, just little things that my OCD might have a hard time with. And it's kind of my way of showing my OCD that it doesn't get to make decisions for me. So while it is uncomfortable in the moment, I do view it as a wellness practice because it prioritizes my ability to make decisions for myself versus my diagnoses ability.
Paul Zelizer 04:00
180 plus episodes and we have never heard anybody talk about deodorant as a awareness.
Johnny Crowder 04:08
That's awesome. I love it.
Paul Zelizer 04:11
So this work you do, obviously, there's some personal history here. Talk to us a little bit about your own journey, you know, with mental health and wellness and maybe sounds like in the past maybe that always hasn't been a very balanced part of your life. Yeah, I grew up so pretty much since elementary school I've been experiencing the symptoms of multiple mental health conditions. I just was never categorizing them as such. You know, when you're a kid, you kind of think everyone's wired the same way you are, you know, you don't know how what other people are like you only know what you know, especially when you're an elementary school and then adults can kind of look at you like well, he's a kid. All kids are weird and he'll grow out of it.
Johnny Crowder 05:00
So there was a lot of denial and justification in my childhood where everyone was just kind of willfully looking the other way. And I didn't actually started, I didn't actually start treatment until high school. But to be honest, I didn't start taking my mental health seriously until, you know, several years into treatment. It's not like when I first sat down with a therapist, I was like, Alright, time to straighten up and see if I can improve my life. I was like, This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. I had such a chip on my shoulder for the first. I mean, several years of treatment I didn't. I just didn't even see it as valid until I started taking psychology courses and realizing like, Oh, crap, this really is based in science.
Paul Zelizer 05:44
So you had some personal experience. And you along the way, that point, I'm not the only one who's ever struggled with mental health issues? Is that fair to say?
Johnny Crowder 05:56
We, I think I knew it on paper, but I didn't know it in practice, like you, you know, I went to school for psych and I would read in the textbook, it would say like, you know, this percent of Americans deal with a mental health condition, or this percent of Americans have sought treatment for mental health condition. I was like, Yeah, I get that there are other people, but like, I guess I've never met any, and then,
Paul Zelizer 06:18
You didn't realize they were sitting in your psych class with you.
Johnny Crowder 06:22
Yeah, I didn't realize it. Most people who have a psych degree didn't do it for purely altruistic purposes. A lot of them like me were like, what the heck is happening up inside of my skull. And I think, when I got involved with Nami, the National Alliance on Mental Illness and I started getting more involved with peer support, I think it sort of put a human face to some of the diagnoses that I felt and I realized that it's not some arbitrary number of people or like, a figurative percentage, it's like, like you said, These people are sitting right next to you in class, they're in front of you in traffic, they're in line with you at the grocery store, like they're real humans.
Paul Zelizer 07:03
And somewhere along the way, you said, I want to help these real humans with some of these complicated and when they're not supported, when they're not, I should back up. Many listeners might know this. But if you haven't been listening that long, I should probably disclose my first career was in community mental health. I did 15 years on the ground did things like working with, you know, multi generational trauma and domestic violence and substance abuse … mostly in rural communities, so it was kind of like, whatever was there, that's what we were working on. So this is not a theoretical conversation to me, like, hundreds and hundreds, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of families, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of individuals and really sticky, complicated situation. So what I did for 15 years, so I just want to say thank you for this work, Johnny. And I burned out this awesome work, I learned an incredible amount, but I came to entrepreneurship, like I was really tired. It was hard, beautiful, complicated for. And ultimately, I was like, I gotta do something else. And that's how I got into social entrepreneurship. So I was gonna just dive right into the next question. But I felt like our listeners who don't know me that well should know that. When I say, I'm really glad you're here, Johnny. I mean, I'm really glad you're here.
Johnny Crowder 08:27
That's awesome. Very few people will understand the compassion fatigue that one must experience while working in that field. So I have a lot of respect for you for dedicating so much of your time to people like me.
Paul Zelizer 08:43
So what I was going to ask is, like a certain point, or like, it's great that we have individual therapists and their support groups like NAMI, we'll put a link in the show notes. There's way more support than when I first started in this. We're talking like, almost 30 years ago, actually, it was more than 30 years ago that I started volunteering in a rehab for teenagers when I was still a teenager, right? So a lot has happened in the past 30 years. But somewhere along the way, you said all that is great, but we need a more kind of scalable, accessible, using technology approach to having more support - we need a good mental health app. Is that fair to say?
Johnny Crowder 09:27
Yeah, and I learned this lesson from creating a couple things. So I was doing peer support through Nami. And then I thought, well, I want to make my own peer support network and it will be for the the metal and hardcore and tattoo and skateboard kind of community. And these are kids that I grew up with that would never walk into a therapists office would never walk into a support group. It just like wasn't there. They didn't feel accepted in those environments. So I created a support group that eventually went virtual. And the support group went virtual, because I realized that it was very limited in our ability to serve people based on geographic location. And then when I went virtual, I said, Wow, we're really limited by the amount of people that we have supporting, like, you know, if there are only so many hours in a day, and you can only hire so many people or draft so many volunteers, like if you're gonna, you know, I was talking to an employer, and they said, Well, we have 50,000 employees. And we were gonna, we wanted to offer them a therapy benefit. That was going to be eight therapist sessions as part of your wellness program that you can redeem eight sessions per year. And then they said, that's when we realized how do we guarantee 400,000 therapy visits?
Paul Zelizer 10:56
And you did the math? Like the average therapist, I don't, you know, $80 to 150 per session. That's a massive amount of resources.
Johnny Crowder 11:06
Yeah, I think I never really had to think that big until I tried to build smaller things that couldn't sustain people. And all I could think when I was building coconuts was, if I build something that people can fall through the cracks of then I've just contributed to the problems that I faced, like, I have to build something like a mental health app that doesn't accidentally neglect or marginalize people like me.
11:30
Yeah, yeah.
Paul Zelizer 11:33
So talk to us a little bit, like as you were kind of, we'll talk about the specifics of Cope Notes and how it works. And we usually do that in the second part of the show. But talk to us a little bit about the when you're doing your homework, and you're looking out there and you see support groups and you see therapy, you're starting to answer some of the question of why Cope Notes. right, like just, this is a a set of circumstances that you don't have to go too far to find a family, or a community that's been significantly impacted by somebody in that community are in that family with a mental health issue. And you started looking around the resources and you're like, wow, right now, while therapy is awesome, and support groups are awesome. The cost and the accessibility issues are pretty profound. Talk to us a little bit more about that. What were you seeing that limiting the access of people, like you mentioned, like yourself, who maybe didn't feel comfortable, or they have something that felt like a fit for them? Or was too far away? Like, what were some of the issues you were seeing?
Johnny Crowder 12:40
Yeah, I need to, I need to frame this question. In. So I'm going to take a slice of humble pie. And I will talk to you about some of the complaints that we received when we ran the program before cope notes. So this was the virtual peer support program that we ran. Here are a few common complaints. Number one, I don't like the fact that you guys know who I am. That really makes me feel weird. I don't want it you know, if I'm using a resource, I don't want the person on the other end of the line to know who I am. So privacy. Yeah. And then another concern was how the heck am I supposed to know what my schedule is gonna look like? You know, I don't know, if I'm gonna have 45 minutes, in two and a half weeks, like what I, you know, stuff comes up every day. So there was the convenience aspect. And then, we were hearing a lot of people say, even though coat notes was, or code notes didn't exist yet, but the program that I was running at the time, it's called not a therapist, and it was completely donation based, and everyone chose the donation of $0. But a problem that we were running into is people were saying, Well, I would pay for this if it was more consistent. Because you can only do a session every other week, or whatever the cadence was. So then consistency was a concern. And then of course, cost a lot of people said, Well, I don't even have 150 bucks for one session a month, let alone multiple times a month. So we were hearing a lot of these concerns around consistency. What else did I say privacy, cost and convenience. And above all, what we heard the most was people saying, I need something to come into my life. Because there are days where I don't feel you know, I think one of our biggest mistakes as a mental health care field is we say to people reach out. If you're feeling down, reach out, and it's kind of like saying, you know, if you're feeling malnourished and weak and exhausted and fatigued, just pick up this boulder and then climb up a mountain with it like what are you talking about? Reach out if if anyone's ever felt depressed or angry. anxious are crippling, crippling despair. The last thing that you have the energy to do is phone a friend. So I think that that was one of the main things that made me realize coke notes had to be intervention, we had to reach out to people, we couldn't wait for them to reach out to us.
Paul Zelizer 15:18
Beautiful. I've never thought about that before. And it makes a lot of sense. When you were thinking about Cope Notes and getting ready to build it, were there specific diagnoses or specific situations like were you like, you had depression a lot on your mind. And, you know, something like a psychotic break or schizophrenia like that, like was it all mental health issues, or were some more in your mind than others?
Johnny Crowder 15:47
So I, I just so people have a base understanding of my condition, some of them are OCD, bipolar one, PTSD and schizophrenia. That's just a little sampler platter for listeners. So you have an idea of, of what I've dealt with. And as I looked into a lot of the things that I was experiencing, I found that nothing existed in a vacuum, right? Like, it wasn't like, my depression was totally separate from my schizophrenia, or my bipolar was totally separate from my PTSD, like everything was kind of intertwined in this big sticky web. So when I set out to work on coke notes, I thought, you know, instead of focusing on diagnoses, because we know that, you know, more than half of mental illness goes untreated, and a lot of that is because it's going undiagnosed. So, I thought, instead of trying to camp out on specific diagnoses, like there are people who have never been formally diagnosed with depression, who feel depressed, and same is true for anxiety and stress, burnout, you know, in even like guilt, and shame, and doubt, and grief, like, you know, what is the clinical basis for those and I just thought, instead of focusing on the diagnoses, I want to focus on these common stressors and habits and triggers, like the parts of the human condition that cause us the most distress.
Paul Zelizer 17:16
So, talk to us a little bit, Johnny about, have you done any looking into the I've seen some research that says, entrepreneurs struggle with these more than the average population? Have you seen any research like that?
Johnny Crowder 17:32
Yes. And I think it is identical to the research that says that creative people experienced that because I, before I started a company, I, you know, I've been touring as a musician for over a decade, like music has been my whole life up until now. And then for work, what did I do? creative copywriting and design. So like everything I've done in my life up until entrepreneurship and including it has been creative work. So when I see stats about creative people experiencing higher levels of these symptoms, I'm not surprised at all. And I think that a lot of people forget that entrepreneurs are creatives by nature.
Paul Zelizer 18:17
Don't fit in boxes very well. I think a lot of our audience would say I resemble that remark. I certainly do. Right? I'm great at getting things up and running and long term in a box. Somebody else designed it just like every cell in my body just sort of. It's not what I'm wired for, let's just say, Yep. Okay, so you decide, alright, it's got to be affordable. It's got to reach out to people kind of on their terms, or in a way that they feel good about, it's got to be private. And along the way, you come up with this idea called cope notes. Tell us a little bit about it.
Johnny Crowder 18:56
Well, tell you, you mean tell you about what Cope Notes is today.
Paul Zelizer 19:00
Yeah. What is it? Well, what was the early iterations look like? And what does it look like today?
Johnny Crowder 19:06
Yeah, so originally, thank God, it is what it is today, because my original idea wasn't nearly as good as what exists now. But initially, I was just thinking, how do we move? You know, when I ran out a therapist, most people would pick text message as their method of communication. Like, you can choose Skype and email and Facebook message and all the phone call. And more and more over the months that I ran it, people would just choose text message, and I thought, Well, why don't we just have a text message component of not a therapist, that is interventional and preventative, and then we'll still do everything else. And eventually, mentor helped me realize that the text message component was the most valuable thing that not a therapist could offer. And I was like, I just need to completely start fresh and focus on this one idea. And so now, I mean in a couple sentences to keep it short. Coke notes uses daily text messages to improve mental and emotional health. So you never know when we will text you or what the text will say. But you know that the text was written by a peer with lived experience, it's been approved by mental health professionals. And it's written in this casual, informal, conversational way that invites you to sort of text back and journal, then and speak freely and kind of work through whatever you're working through. And over time, it trains the brain to think in healthier patterns.
Paul Zelizer 20:37
So I just want to wind back a little bit listeners, you know, I have my spiritual highlighter. When a guest says something really important for social entrepreneurs, I want to circle something you said and and ask you a little bit about it, john, you're doing, you're doing something that had sort of a wider angle and had a bunch of data, you could, I'll reach out to your Facebook message, I'll email you, I'll reach out on Skype or whatever, like, I'll send a plane that has pulling a thing. And now and you landed on text and getting that kind of clarity and like, kind of doubling down focusing there. If there's somebody who's listening, I want to circle the simplicity of that. And the scalability of that, if there's somebody who hasn't quite landed on their version of Oh, it's text messaging, that's where the value is, there's somebody listening is still working towards that, what would you recommend to that person?
Johnny Crowder 21:35
Well, I would recommend, I think I'd recommend two things. So first thing is, look for trends and ask the people you're already serving, where they find the most value. Because people will tell you, lots of people will tell you, unsolicited, whether you want to hear it or not. But the truth is that the answer might already exist in the data that you have collected previously, like, you might not even have to do more outreach. So just keep an eye out for trends and ask, but the second thing I'd say is, you need to ask yourself this question. And this is the what my mentor asked me that really shifted my perspective. So just to set the scene, I went to get dinner with this mentor of mine, and I was telling him, oh, yeah, we're gonna have video series. And then we're going to have training modules. And there's going to be like a third party app that integrates with it, there's going to be all of these different sections for the end. He goes, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. I love that. That's where you're thinking this will go. But if you had to pick one thing, out of everything you just told me about that would that would create the most amount of value for the most amount of people that would have the largest positive impact? First, what would it be? And I said, Oh, duh, the text messaging? And I didn't even know that I knew the answer to that question, because I had never asked it. So if you can ask yourself that question, because I believe that, subconsciously, you already know what would help the most people the quickest. You just want to admit it to yourself, because you're so ambitious, that you want to do everything all at once.
Paul Zelizer 23:16
Hmm. Beautiful advice. I'm thinking of the book. Do you know the book essentialism by Gregory McEwen? Is that one
Johnny Crowder 23:24
that you know, I do? Not. But I have to add it to my list.
Paul Zelizer 23:26
Yeah, it's a great one. And one of the things that that was my book of the year for 2019. And one of the core ideas in there is that in our culture, we misuse the word priorities. Because originally, when you look at the root of the word priority was singular. So there was a priority, not multiple priorities, like it's literally not meant to be used priorities. And what I heard you like land on when you got that priority, oh, it's done. It's the tax, that's the bath you like, your life got easier. And you can actually impact more people by being, you know, honest about that priority.
Johnny Crowder 24:09
And we want to clarify this to like, people ask us to make integrations every day. Yeah. Like people say, Oh, can you do an email version? And can you do a Facebook Messenger version? And the answer is always the same. I say, I will make a note of it. And I will look into it. And so far, out of hundreds and hundreds of people asking us to create special unique versions just for them. We've realized that if we can just establish ourselves as the text message mental health company, then we can expand But until that point, there's not enough value in US branching out because we need all of that energy and momentum and effort to go towards what's already succeeding
Paul Zelizer 24:54
listeners. If you take nothing else from this interview, take that and and I'll give you this then. are aware of printers and 2020, we double down on our podcast. That's there's a tremendous amount of value. And people ask us to do all kinds of things. But literally where printers is still a one person company with some contract help, you're looking at the one person, or at least you're listening to them. And that's one person, like, you know, we're impacting a lot of people, we have a community with 300 plus members, right? But the podcast is where people over and over and over again, we're saying what you're doing right there, those interviews, that, boy, just that that's the single biggest reference point that people had, when they said, they're getting value out of the openers brand. And we get asked to do all kinds of things. But there was no consistent theme that ever touched how much impact we were having with the podcast. And so I double down on that. And that meant saying no to some other things. And again, Gregory McEwen talks a lot about that in the book essentialism. So just love what you're saying, Tony, and really want to encourage our listeners to know where it is, you're having the most impact. And when you do that, then it doesn't mean that you never do that video question you. But when you do turn it on, it'll be with the foundations of a company that's grown and as stable, as opposed to what I see many social entrepreneurs do is say, Sure, we can do this. And we can integrate that and we can do the Facebook messaging, and we can do the video course or we can do podcast, and then they're exhausted, and they can't pay their bill.
Johnny Crowder 26:36
Yeah, I would. I would also say this, too. It's not like once I figured out text, was the communication method that I was, like, ushered into this multi year season of clarity. Like I have to do this constantly. When I look at verticals, right, like we serve schools from for student wellness, we serve businesses, for employee wellness, we work with insurance companies and hospitals and governments. And even just this past month, I had to look at myself and say, where are we having the greatest impact on our community? And how do we double down there? So if I, let's say, if I am making great traction with working with foster youth, for example, how do I reinvest some of my time that I'm spending on slow conversations with employee wellness? How do I put that in and double down on foster youth so that we can serve them. And it's, it's a daily thing. So anyone who's listening, if you've, if you've found the one thing in one category, tomorrow, you'll have to find your one thing and another category, and it's part of making sure that you can actually sustain the growth of your business.
Paul Zelizer 27:51
So let's do this when we come back on asking more about that, Tony, and who you're working with. Now, before we do that, a word from our sponsor? Do you have a business that's about making positive impact, and you want it to grow, to help more people, and you want to grow in terms of revenue, so you can live a good life? If you do, I want to suggest that you think about podcasting as a way to do it. And here's why. The average podcast episode is 42 minutes and 43 seconds long. Think about that for a minute. It's not like 13 words on an Instagram meme, or 12 seconds on a Facebook ads video, you really have time to go into some nuance and some depth and talk about how things combine your journey of getting to what works with certain populations. And the listeners of podcasts. They're what we call early adaptors. In other words, they love new ideas, and their natural leaders, people in their networks in their family and in their peer group, turn to them for new ideas. And where do they get their new ideas. One of the ways is they listen to podcasts. They also make more money. So this is quite a unique population. There's not much like it, you get more time. And they're really smart people who are looking for the kinds of new ideas that the people who listen to this podcast tend to have. So whether you want to be a guest right now, Johnny's in the gassy, or you want to be a host, you want to start your own podcast, I happen to have that honor today, where do you want to do both? If you could use a little help thinking about how you use this incredibly powerful medium to help you grow your impact and your income aware partners has a podcast access T will show you how every step of the way. And you'll do it in a community of entrepreneurs that have the same kind of commitment to positive change every step of the way. If you'd like more information, go check out the podcast success team at aware printers.com forward slash podcast dash success. And thank you to everybody who sponsors this podcast through the podcast success team. So Johnny talked to A little bit. Yeah, like, Alright, you got this idea that it was going to be text based and not so where you could provide the most value, like, give us an example, what might be one of the text or a couple of the texts that your team sent out this week, just so people can kind of get a little bit of like, what does it show up on the ground? What does it look like?
Johnny Crowder 30:18
Well, I actually get this question a lot so often that I choose not to answer it anymore, because we've replaced the header of our website with a phone that has seven a week's worth of example, texts on it. So now, instead of me reading a text to people, I encourage them to go to the website and see them firsthand. That's part of the reason why I don't answer that question. But the other part is this intervention is different than me just reading something to you. So if I read you a text, you might think that's cute, or that's nicer, I can see how that would help. But if that text interrupted your life, if you're in a meeting being yelled at, or if you're sitting in traffic, or if you just spilled coffee all over your slacks, and you get a text message, the timing of that text message is what Prime's your brain to frame that content in a way that is relevant to you. So I've found that it actually cheapens the content, if we read it much in the same way that if I told you that, I taught improv comedy for eight years, if someone says, tell me a joke, I would say, Oh, you won't really find it funny, because this is not the time or place or setting that would allow your brain to appreciate the humor. Does that make sense?
Paul Zelizer 31:45
Totally makes it nice. So you work with peers, workers, folks who've, you know, struggled with some of these issues, and you come up attacks and show up once every day. And like, talk to us a little bit about what happens when people use coke notes through time. Like, if I sign up, then I'm struggling with depression, or I've got, you know, I'm really feeling I've already had anxiety, and then along comes this year called 2020. And my anxiety goes through the roof. Like what kind of what are you hearing from people who are using covenants?
Johnny Crowder 32:25
Yeah, I want I'm glad you asked. And I want to say this before I share some of the awesome stories we've heard. A big misconception around coconuts is the idea that it's kind of like a brighten your day kind of tool. And I always want to clarify this, if we brighten your day today, because of our text, that's great. But it's not what we came to do. Lots of things can brighten your day, you know, a puppy, or ice cream coupon or something like lots of things can brighten your day. But not everything can train your brain to think differently. Not everything can mold the way that you respond to new information in a way that makes you healthier. So coke notes is a long term thought pattern and behavior change tool. And it's all about incremental growth. And what we go for is, you know, if we can make you smile today, like I said, That's wonderful. But we are more concerned with in nine months when your partner says that they want to go on a break, or you find out that your position might be eliminated at your job. We are invested in that future you that has to hear some difficult news, that has to feel some difficult feeling. And we want to make sure that that brain that interprets that stimulus is equipped with coping skills and resiliency, we want to make sure that that brain says Bring it on, I have 15 different healthy ways that I know of right now that I can respond. Because I've spent nine months investing in my brain with a little bit of knowledge every day. Beautiful. And you also asked about some of the stories we've heard. All sorts of stuff. We've heard lots of stories, like I just mentioned, where over time people start recognizing that they are interrupting their own negative thoughts with positive alternatives, which warms my heart to no end. But we've also had people check into treatment. We've had people go to rehab, we've had people divorce, abusive partners or move across the country or start a college program that they were scared to start like so many personal breakthroughs in people's lives, even people who actually relevant to entrepreneurship. People who have started businesses who are afraid to and also people who hung up unsuccessful businesses that they were afraid to let go of
Paul Zelizer 35:01
Lots of changes. Wow. So how many users does coconuts have now? Well,
Johnny Crowder 35:10
it's on our website. It's on the homepage, we measure it as lives impacted. Let me load it up real quick and see what it says it'll probably be different by the time the episode airs. Right now we are at 16,158 lives impacted in 92 countries around the world.
Paul Zelizer 35:30
16,158 probably be more right 92 countries now that that would take a lot of therapists.
Johnny Crowder 35:38
Yes, absolutely. When I also the other stat, on our homepage that I see is our texts exchange right now it's at 508,042. And I just can't help but think, how many therapists how many peer support specialists, how many social workers, how many mental health professionals or peers, even just people like you and me, how many people would it take to send a half a million text messages?
Paul Zelizer 36:08
Wow. And how are people finding coconuts?
Johnny Crowder 36:13
So, if you Well, this is an entrepreneurship channel, and we you talk about some stuff like this. So I can say this. We are completely bootstrapped 100% DIY. And with that being said, we don't have this big marketing budget. So pretty much everyone who has used coconut so far, has either found out from like organic media, like some, you know, a local news piece that people share around or from individual people sharing with each other. And even some of our larger enterprise deals have come from individual people using coke notes and saying, you know what, I'm going to show my boss, so it's been really cool to watch word of mouth, do some heavy lifting and the social stickiness of what we're doing actually lead to really sizable national and even international press coverage.
Paul Zelizer 37:07
That's awesome. So, yeah, you've been on it a while. And and when you first started, I have to imagine mostly it was like one to one it was it was to individual people, right. And now you're starting to get into what we might call b2c. Right? You talked about working with insurance companies, or whole hospital systems or whole wellness systems within a business? Like, how, how is that different? working, you know, an individual who has a mental health issue and how you think about approaching that person? And what have you had to learn to think about somebody who's like, Well, let me approach this business that has 10,000 employees and see if they might sign on what have you had to learn as somebody who's, you know, leader in this company, as you've been invited into conversations where there's a lot more humans than?
Johnny Crowder 37:59
Yeah, I want. So this, I want to preface this answer by saying that it is not the way I wish it was. So I'm telling you what it is and what I have learned. And this is going to clash with a lot of people who listen to this show. So I just want to preface this by saying I am on your side. What I have learned is that when I speak to an individual about what I do, they understand immediately they understand the value they understand the need, they are passionate and moved and ready to make a difference whether it's in their own life or that of a loved one. And I'm very, I consider our messaging to be pretty astute at communicating that. However, when meeting with someone who represents a large group, one of the unfortunate realities is that many decision makers are insulated from the pain points of the individuals that they serve. So when you're speaking to, let's say, it's a wellness coordinator for a company that has 50,000 employees, you can spend the entire meeting telling them how much it will help Jamie or Scott or Tiffany. But at the end of the day, that person who you're speaking with might be so insulated from those people that they don't understand the value through that lens. So it's a matter of reframing it to help them understand the benefit that you're doing for the benefit that your company is providing for their company. And I wish it wasn't that way. I wish that more people were moved with compassion for the lives and quality of life of other people. But lots of these folks need to hear like bottom line, they need to know ROI. They need to know how it's going to make their lives easier and as an administrator. And while that isn't our primary focus, it is something that needs to be covered. indicated probably, for everyone who runs a business is listening to this, the most difficult pill to swallow has been that other people don't care as much as you guys care about what you do, you really have to help them care by unfortunately, framing parts of what you do as Listen, if I if I talk more about how it'll make it easier for you, does that mean you will help the community that you say you serve? So there's, there's some frustrating friction there when you realize you get to the top of the ladder, and you realize this person is in charge of wellness? And and yet, it seems like they don't even really care about wellness, you know?
Paul Zelizer 40:38
Yeah. Such an honest answer, Tony, and in a company that has, let's say, 50,000 employees, they may not even the wellness coordinator may not really have a sense of how many people of those 50,000 are dealing with mental health issues. Isn't that fair to say? Oh, yeah, yeah. So like, when it's your, you know, your partner, your spouse, your child, your girlfriend, your somebody at church, like, when you know, hey, my loved one, my close, in my heart person is suffering. Like, you can speak to it in one way. And then when you're the wellness coordinator, 50,000 people, it's it's a different vocabulary, it's a different conversation in many ways, even though they're human being. That's part of the reason I asked this question. And I'm not surprised to hear you say there's a different messaging. And if you take that approach, but this is going to make a giant difference in Tiffany's life. Yes, it will. But that may not be what motivates that wellness coordinator, or the person who's in charge HR who signs the check, right?
Johnny Crowder 41:45
Yeah, it's been, it's been very sobering in, it's kind of something that makes me just want to really prioritize advocacy, like not only within coke notes, but you know, one day, if then when coke notes is acquired, and I have time to go pursue other things, I'm just going to go full force in advocacy, because the big reason why the suits in the corner office don't understand or care about individual mental health struggles is because they haven't really been properly educated or made aware. And advocacy, I would say that if you're doing something good for the world, through your business, three quarters of your job, is going to be helping people understand why it's relevant, because the one quarter is actually serving people, the three quarters is getting people to kind of pull their head out of the sand and realize that they are in a position of power, and they can leverage that to make a positive
42:44
impact. Yeah.
Paul Zelizer 42:47
So Oh, god, there's so much I want to ask you to. So so one of the things I want to ask you is to that entrepreneur, like our, our listeners are such a dedicated group of humans. I'm so blessed to be in ongoing connection, I'm thinking, just a number of just beautiful humans as I asked this question. And sometimes there's a real uncertainty or even a skepticism and I have a healthy skepticism about, you know, if they were on this show, they'd say, county, do you really believe that sending somebody a text message, even in this ongoing, care filled way that you do it is going to help somebody as much as a human like sitting with that therapist in an office that that the depth of care cannot really come through in a scaled program like this? So that's the first question, what would you say to somebody who's in a place of skepticism about that?
Johnny Crowder 43:49
I would kind of say, I would frame it like this. Let's say the person who asked me is a dentist or something. And I would say, you know, does it really make a difference for people to brush their teeth and floss every day when they can just come to you and get their teeth cleaned. You know, it's like two completely different things. I think that it's not feasible to go to the dentist every day and have the dentist clean your teeth. And of course, when you brush your teeth, they just get dirty again, and you floss and they get dirty again, it's more about the ongoing maintenance and the incremental improvement of your dental health. That really makes it really cuts down the amount of work that the dentist has to do when you go visit them. And I remember I got a question recently when I was presenting someone said, Isn't coke notes a temporary fix? Isn't a text message a temporary fix and I I thought to myself and I said yeah, much in the same way that a meal is a temporary fix. You're going To be hungry later, so why bother eating breakfast? And you're just going to be hungry for lunch or dinner? Like what
Paul Zelizer 45:04
a great answer. You're gonna have to brush your teeth again tonight. Right? Right. Even if you press a really good this morning, what is my goal?
Johnny Crowder 45:11
My goal has never been fur coat notes to be everything to everyone like you got to keep in mind. I'm someone who is alive because of traditional treatment. I went to therapy, I took medication I did I did proper CBT. I did exposure therapy. Like trust me, I've been through the wringer. And I support mental health professionals who are carrying that out. My concern is, do the people in treatment have daily support from those people? They do not? Because they don't have access, providers don't have the capacity to serve. And then on the other hand, I say what about the majority of people who are not in treatment in the first place? So I view coconuts as a gap filler, we will never replace therapy replace medication, we coat notes is not trying to be that coat notes is trying to be the toothbrush and the floss to complement the dentist trips.
Paul Zelizer 46:08
Not a great answer. So what we know Johnny is surround the world with, you know, the COVID situation and people needing to be at home and disconnected. I haven't seen my immediate family in 2020 not seeing them in person, right? We know that that's having significant mental health impact, just you know, abuse is up use of drinking and drugs anxiety is up depression is up, right? Like how has this sort of unprecedented global situation that we find ourselves in? How is that impacted coke notes and how people are receiving?
46:53
Well,
Johnny Crowder 46:54
I will be honest, at the beginning of this year, when COVID hit I thought coke notes is going to have to close down. Because we lost a lot of subscribers and a lot of enterprises level clients because everyone you know, during an economic crisis, the first thing you do is cancel everything right? any money that's leaving your account gets, you know, it's just gets boarded up, like screw all of my monthly expenses you
Paul Zelizer 47:23
take you can I eat it, or can I live in it? Nope. Okay, get rid of it. Right?
Johnny Crowder 47:28
Yeah, so we saw a lot of that. And it was scary, really, because I knew, as someone who has, you know, experienced a fair amount of trauma that this is a collective traumatic experience. And maybe one of the worst things you can do during a traumatic experience where your mental health is in jeopardy is to cut off the very few investments you are making in your mental health. And that's that's what we saw a lot of people cut out anything they didn't see as an essential and it kind of breaks my heart to see that most people don't consider mental health care to be essential. And I will say that there were definitely several months this year where I thought this is the end of coconuts we lost. You know, we had amazing momentum early this year. I mean, it was like, I felt like we were unstoppable. And then COVID hit and it was like, you know, bullet hitting that ballistics gel where it just completely slowed down. And only over I say late q3 early q4 is when we really started seeing these agencies and organizations and businesses and schools come back and say, Wow, we definitely shouldn't have dropped our contracts with you. But not only that, we're gonna reach out to our network and let them know what you've been doing for us over the last couple years. So we saw a big dip. And we thought we lost these people, but they actually came back and brought their friends.
Paul Zelizer 49:03
Nice. So when you look ahead, what do you see for coconuts?
Johnny Crowder 49:10
I mean, my dream is for coke notes to be integrated into all sorts of things. So if you go to the YMCA or you know if you have a wellness plan through your job or through your school, or if you go to the hospital for something, it's part of aftercare, like I see cope notes being this sort of culturally relevant way to maintain mental and emotional health. And I, I can only hope that we play that big of a part in the change of the conversation because whether it's by my words or my actions or through the company or whatever one thing is certain by the time that I die. The wellness conversation will include mental health. I'm not saying, you know, there's the wellness conversation where we talk about physical health. And then there's the mental health conversation. No, it's not separate your brain is inside of your body. This is part of the health conversation. So by the time that I die, it will be an equal piece of the pie.
Paul Zelizer 50:19
Johnny, I could hang out and talk to you all day. But I won't do that to you. And I won't do that to our listeners. If there was something you were hoping we were going to get to on this topic. And we haven't talked about it yet. Or if there's something you want to leave our listeners with, as we start to say goodbye, either. Something to think about practice or resource a final thought, what would that be?
Johnny Crowder 50:41
Yeah, I I'm gonna kind of say a few things. So cope notes does have a podcast and your mid episode plug really made me feel like Oh, crap, I need to pick that back up. We've been on. We ended our last season a couple months ago. And we were gonna start in the new year, but you're definitely firing me up to get back into it.
Paul Zelizer 51:01
My name is Paul. And I'm podcast obsessed. I like about that all the time.
Johnny Crowder 51:06
And so yeah, if you if you are interested in hearing conversations around mental health, very casual, informal ones with people that don't always have a voice in the mental health conversation, I encourage you to check out the coconuts podcast. But also, one thing that I wanted to mention is there are people listening right now who have made it all the way through this episode. And they think to themselves, wow, you know, this is really important. I need to send this to kindle. And it's like, Don't let your desire to share this with someone overshadow the fact that it's still relevant to you. I mean, look at the title of the episode, right? Like I didn't, I didn't, I did this for Kendall, but I did it for you, too. So whether you're gonna buy a coconut subscription for yourself, or for Kendall, or you want to buy it for a group of people, or you want nothing to do with coke notes, but you want to take a step in your personal life to improve your mental and emotional health. I personally don't care what the heck you do, all I care is that you do something, and you do it consistently. So if you live with a diagnosis, that's great. If you don't live with one, that's great. It is irrelevant to me, all I care is that if you have a brain, you are doing at least one thing every day to prioritize and take care of that thing. If it's Koch notes, I'm happy to help. If it's the podcast, I'm happy to help. And if it doesn't have my name on it, that's fine, as long as it's helping you.
Paul Zelizer 52:43
We'll put links to everything you mentioned, Johnny, including the podcast and where you find coke notes and the Nami site, all the good things that you've mentioned, Johnny, I just want to thank you so much for being on the show today.
Johnny Crowder 52:54
Thank you for having me. This was awesome.
Paul Zelizer 52:57
So that's all the time we have for today's interview. Before you go, just a couple things. First of all, we now do two episodes a week, we drop them early in the morning, every Tuesday and Thursday, 5am. Eastern. And we'd love listener supported guests and topics. So if you have an idea, go to the aware printers website and look at our contact page. And it'll tell you what we're looking for and kind of how we decide. If you read those three things. And you say yes, this is totally a fit, please send us an email, and we'd love to hear from you. For now, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care. It's intense out there right now. And thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in our work.