Episode #220- Did India's Thugs Really Exist? (Part I)

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show on the choose yourself network. Today on the James Altucher Show. I mean, you you say it in the book, and I believe this strongly, that happiness is not necessarily the events that happened to you, but how you think about them later. But I find that that's easy to read and intellectually acknowledge, but when it's actually happening to you, it's, like, almost impossible to live by that. 18, you're homeless. 19, things start to change. What happens then? I never thought that I would become a musician. I didn't even have dreams of becoming a professional singer. It was just something I enjoyed doing. I didn't know the dream about it. The reason I went to singing when I was homeless is because I couldn't hold down other jobs because I kept getting sick so much. It was just strictly survival. So, Jewel, I'm reading your book, and I can't take it. Like, you you've survived all these incredibly difficult moments. And I don't think if I was 19 years old and homeless and living in a car and have nothing to my name, I actually don't think I would have survived, or I would have just, like, totally fallen off a cliff. Yeah. So what what we're gonna go into everything about your book, by the way. The book is called sorry for being so haphazard. It's called Never Broken. Songs are Only Half the Story. Great book. I read it. And, again, 19 years old. You have so many down and out moments. Actually, we're gonna get to all of them. You're like, you could've called this down and out. My name is Jewel. But what happened in 19? Gosh. Where to start? It was 18 when I became homeless. My boss propositioned me. He took me aside one day, and I thought he was gonna reprimand me for not being very good at my job. It turns out he, tried to have sex with me. And when I turned him down, he wouldn't give me my paycheck, and so I got kicked out where I was living. I hate when that happened to me. I know. Right? Everybody has that story. Actually Actually, a lot of people do have that story. A lot of females for sure. And so that's how I ended up living in my car. I didn't think it was that big a deal because I grew up in a saddle barn, you know, with all men and no one to myself where they keep saddles in a barn. So there's a barn, and then there's all just saddles in their beds? Yeah. My dad Alaska. Right? Yeah. Just to make sure. I'll go somewhat chronologically. So my family were pioneers. They came from Europe during the 2nd World War. They were one of the last to make it out on, like, the last ship. My grandma was actually on the last ship. And there had been this group of artists, and they wanted to form this utopia utopian artistic colony outside of the war. And so they found out that the government would give you land in Alaska for free if you were willing to go up there and just not die for a whole winter. So they sent the scout ahead, my grandfather. Nobody ended up joining him except my grandmother. And so they started the life there where, she was an aspiring opera singer, and so she gave up those dreams and taught all of her children to sing and write and play instruments. And so I was raised in this very beautiful place, in Homer, Alaska on a homestead. Homesteading is when you live off the land. So it's not traditional agricultural ranching for profit. It's really, actually, just for subsistence. So, like, what would you what would they grow? Everything. They cleared about 200 acres by hand. They sowed Timothy bluegrass for hay, so they cut all the hay by hand. My dad's childhood photos look like the 1800. You wouldn't think it was the 19 fifties. You can only get to town by horse and wagon on low tide on the beach. Only thing they bought was sugar and salt. So everything else, you had to kill it or can it or starve. So that's how my dad was raised. So my mom left us when I was 8. We were living in Anchorage, and my dad took us back to the homestead. And so the saddle barn got converted into a living space. We took the saddles out and put beds in. I'm sorry. I I tend to be a serial interrupter. Mhmm. So I just get curious about things. So your your mom leaves you when you're 8, and I guess you must have had some sense that that was an odd thing that, you know, leaving the mother and stay and all the kids staying with the father. Was your dad, like, depressed at this? Or what was what was happening in his life at that moment? I would've been depressed if Yeah. My, ex wife left me with all my kids at Yeah. When when they were 8. I didn't know that she had left. I knew my family was getting a divorce. I actually didn't find out till I was an adult that it kind of went down the way that it did. My my I just remember them saying they're getting a divorce. That was, of course, very crushing. And we were living with my dad, and that's just sort of seemed to be the way it was. And it's funny with kids. You don't tend to question things. They just are. And my dad had very little coping mechanisms. It was very hard for him. He, was raised in an abusive household and, you know, swore that he would never become an abusive parent because who wants to be? You know, when you're being a child and you're being hit, it feels terrible. And you go, I'm never gonna do this when I grow up. But all that does is create a vacuum, because we're each taught an emotional language in our households. And unless you learn a new language, all you have is a vacuum. So if push comes to shove, you're gonna revert to the language that you know. How do you know, you have you have a son, Kayce. He's 5 years old. How do you, how do you how did you learn a new language so that you obviously don't turn into an abusive parent? Yeah. We inherit a lot from our families. You know, there's the genetic inheritance, physical inheritance, and an emotional inheritance. And I knew that at 15 when I moved out. I moved out at 15 because my dad was abusive. And I thought, you know, why live in a cabin with a guy who's mean to me if I could just live in a cabin by myself? So By the way, you just dropped another bomb. We're talking after you talk later, but go ahead. And I knew at that time that, statistically, girls like me end up repeating the cycles they're raised by. So I knew when I looked at, you know, what I was calling emotional English in my family, I knew that that meant I was destined for this life of, abuse or to be in an abusive relationship. And so my life's work became at that moment when I was 15 to look at nature versus nurture. And if I didn't receive good nurture, could I ever get to know my real nature? And could I re nurture myself? That at 15. Yeah. I called it my happiness journal. This is I started keeping a journal. I'd read quite a bit of philosophy. I had a really good teacher that had me reading a lot, when I was probably 13 and 14. So the time I moved out at 15, I had read quite a bit of Greek philosophy and was familiar with concepts like nature versus nurture. And I thought, you know, maybe my mind can get me out of this. Maybe if I'm clever and I look for the pitfalls and the the traps, maybe I can avoid being a statistic. It actually turned out it wasn't my mind that saved me, but I wouldn't know that for many years. Well, I I don't think that's true actually. From from reading the book, it looked like repeatedly, your your mind plus action saved you. I mean, actions start with thoughts. And, you know, I think there's a line in the in the book, shadows are or or emotions are the shadows of thoughts. Mhmm. So at some point, they're all connected. Mhmm. And they have to start with some kind of positive outlook. And living in a car at age 18 is probably goes against every attempt to have a positive outlook. Mhmm. So okay. So you're 15. You go to school at an art school in Michigan. You raise the money. Oh, by the way, actually, even before that, what was really amazing about your story too is you really started singing professionally at an early age. You and your dad were singing at bars all around Alaska. It sounds like it sounds like such an incredible experience. Like, on the surface, it's this, like, incredible artistic experience. Like, oh, I grew up in a homesteading Yeah. You know, house, and we just sang all the time. And that's how I learned how to create a career as a singer Yeah. And develop this talent. But then all these things happened in the middle. It was both. You know? I had a really beautiful childhood. It was very creative at its best and abusive at its worst. It's true for a lot of people's lives. You know, it's not all good and not all bad. But I I feel like you had it at extremes because I think, it's a it was of great benefit to you to to also have those thousands of hours, experience, not just singing, but performing Yeah. In front of adults in a bar who so you have to figure out how to keep their attention too. It's supposed to have been incredibly difficult for a young person. Yeah. I started singing on stage when I was 5. My parents did a show in hotels for tourists. The the first time I ever got on stage, I got the hiccups while I was yodeling, which makes yodeling sound impossibly more ridiculous than it already sounds. This is a stupid question. What is yodeling? Yodeling is when you go from your low register voice to your high register, and you go across that line in your voice. Do you sing at all? No. No. So My daughters do. Oh, really? Yeah. Don't yodel at all? Yeah. So country singers have a yodel crack often or the cranberry singer. That's yodeling. It's just not the tongue twister involved with the yodeling. But yeah. That's And so were you yodeling all over Alaska? I was quite the young little yodeler. Yes. I was on morning shows yodeling and things like that advertising the show for my family. So let's say you're in a bar, and you're 12 years old, and everybody starts fighting, like, in a bar fight, which I imagine must have happened at some point. How do you keep people's interest, or you just get off the stage? I never saw bar fights happen a ton. It was usually, like, 1 on 1. I never saw, like, a big movie scene, you know, full bar fight breakout. But the cops would get called sometimes because somebody was overdosing or things like that, and I would've go hide in the bathroom so the cops wouldn't, you know, bust the joint for having an underage kid singing in there. Oh, you underage kids. I know they're not allowed to drink, but you're not even allowed to sing in a bar? Yeah. You're not supposed to be in there. Yeah. So okay. So so 15, you move out, which is, of course, the oddest thing in the world, but we'll skip it because you went to you went to a school for the arts in Michigan, so a couple of 1000 miles away. Mhmm. You managed to raise the money for it. It was it's an incredible story that's in the book. And I and I really wanna get to 18. You're homeless. 19, things start to change. What happens then? Mhmm. So after graduating high school, I'd went to take care of my mom. She was in San Diego, and she was sick. So I went down to pay rent and help take care of her. And that's when my boss fired me for not having sex with him. And so I ended up living in my car. My mom moved into her car. We both thought, you know what? It'll last a couple of months. I'll get a new job. I'll save up enough for deposit on a new apartment and get back on my feet. And and okay. Stupid question again. Mhmm. Just the mechanics of sleeping in a car, is it because you were, like, you're I don't know how tall you were. Like, 52, 51? 6. Oh, 56. I didn't even know. So 56, you can't fit in the back seat of a car. What did you do? The I had a little car that had a back seat that folded down. And so I I had a futon that was in the house that I was living in, and I just put the futon kind of over this folded down back seat. And, it it kinda worked. Okay. Alright. I just needed to Yep. Get a little visual. I like it. So so then then you start okay. Sorry. I interrupted. Not at all. So that's how I ended up in my car. And then my mom went back to Alaska, and I ended up staying there thinking I was gonna get back on my feet. But I had bad kidneys, and I got sick all the time and a lot of stress, obviously, in my life. And, I had a kidney infection, and I went into the hospital to try and get treated for it. And they turned me away because I didn't have insurance. And Oh, my gosh. So what would have happened? I mean, is that even I don't I don't really know the law. Like, if you're having infection, you're a kid, you're dying. I know. Are they supposed to, like, take you in the emergency room? Been illegal. You know, it's funny. I had such a bad fever at the time. I just remember being very busy in there and them showing me you don't have insurance. You know what I mean? And just kinda getting turned away. I'm sure if I'd advocated for myself or stood up, I just I it was all a haze, and I was so sick. And I ended up being too sick to drive anywhere else, and so I just sat in the my car and was throwing up all over myself. I had blood poisoning from kidney failure. And luckily, a doctor had seen me get turned away, and he tapped on my window and gave me antibiotics and his business card. And he treated me for free for many, many years, actually, well into me becoming famous, which was he was like an angel in my life. And then When you had never showed up, would you have died? I think so. That's what the urologist had said. Yeah. You're it's a kidney infection is a really serious thing, and it it needs serious treatment. So yeah. And then the car I was living in got stolen, and that's how I ended up becoming homeless. And it lasted about a year, and it was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. Where did you stay then? I stayed at a variety of places. There was a little bush that I really liked, that I had flowers, and I would sleep under that. I ended up borrowing money from somebody to buy another car, so I could have a a safe place to to stay. And, you know, I ate by going to happy hours and just having the free potatoes and chips, you know, that they put out at bars. I never drank. And you just learn to get by, you know, wash your hair in bathroom sinks and those types of things. Alright. Well, that's a lesson on, being homeless for a year. So then then but you were still you were still pursuing the singing, obviously. You had you had I had never pursued it, actually. I grew up singing with my dad. It was like a blue collar job. We did cover songs, and he wrote some songs. But he'd given up his dreams of becoming a nationally known singer when my mom left, and it just sort of became this, like, blue collar gig. You know, you do 5 hour sets in bars while people drink and eat. Nothing that sexy. I never thought that I would become a musician. I didn't even have dreams of becoming a professional singer. It was just something I enjoyed doing, but I didn't think I had a hope of, you know, being famous. If you hadn't done that as a child, like, these 5 hour sets, I don't know how many times a week from the ages of, you know, 8 5 to 15, do you think you would have had the performance experience to do what you were able to do later on? Absolutely not. It's certainly, it's just I didn't know to dream about it. You know, my life didn't lead me to dreaming of, like, oh, I'm gonna grow up to be a famous singer. Like, that was not in my, you know, my whole paradigm. The reason I went to singing when I was homeless is because I couldn't hold down other jobs because I kept getting sick so much. And, I was like, god. I used to get paid a couple $100 a night to sing. I wonder if I could go find a gig somewhere. And it was just strictly survival. I'd begun writing my own songs, and I was looking at coffee shops, and no coffee shops would pay you. In fact, they wanted to charge you to play there. And so it was like, well, now what am I gonna do? I finally found a coffee shop that was going out of business. And I said, hey. If I bring in customers, you know, I get to keep all the door money, and you can keep the food and beverages. And so we struck a deal, and then I needed to start getting people to come seeing me. And so that's when I started, passing out flyers and doing whatever I could to try and get a following. So you were, like, a manager, a marketing machine, a performer. You did you did the whole thing. That year was just incredible. The first part of the year was really difficult. You know, my car getting stolen stolen, being homeless, the sick. Were you depressed when you found out your car was stolen? Obviously, you were. But, like, how do you how do you even try to bounce back from that? My life has brought me to my knees over and over, and resiliency is really nothing other than, you know, the stubborn well, success, I'll say. Success is, like, just stubbornness. Like, I'm going to keep standing up, and that's really just comes down to the grittiness of saying I'm going to keep standing up. I mean, you you say it in the book, and I believe this strongly, that happiness is not necessarily the events that happened to you, but how you think about them later. But I find that that's easy to read and intellectually acknowledge. But when it's actually happening to you, it's, like, almost impossible to live by that. Like, I'm gonna be happy later. I need to a bed to sleep on now. Yeah. I have two thoughts on that. One is, you know, what makes us special as humans? Why are why is being a human being unique? I think it's that we're able to take thoughts and dreams and put them into action and create things out of them. We build cities. We we build something out of nothing. It's an incredible power of being human. But when you're reduced to an animal, you don't have that luxury. You know, that is a luxury. When you're reduced to homelessness and those types of things where your standard of living is stuck on survive, all of your creativity is just used on am I gonna eat today, where am I gonna sleep, and how am I gonna stay safe. And so it's a very demoralizing thing to be in that type of position where you're just stuck on survive mode. And the other thing, you know, as I looked at that concept of I was starting to shoplift a lot, I started with carrots, which apparently are the gateway vegetable because that's when it led to the harder stuff like imported pistachios and things. I was very You never get you know what? No one in history ever got caught shoplifting carrots because no one would ever believe that someone wants to steal a carrot. Like, that's just disgusting. Like, I would steal, like, a pack of Oreos or something like that, but who steals carrots? Well, somebody who's sick a lot. Shoplifter. Watch out for her. I know. Oh, just let her go. She's the healthy shoplifting kid. But there was this one day, you know, when I there's a sundress, and I coveted it. And so I went in this window, and I wanted to steal it. And I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, like, shoving this dress into my baggy jeans I was wearing. And I was like, oh, s**t. I'm a statistic. I didn't beat the odds. You know, 3 short years later, I am a statistic. I'm having panic attacks. I'm agoraphobic, and I'm stealing, and I'm gonna end up in jail or dead in short order. And then I remember this quote by Buddha that I had read that happiness doesn't depend on who we are or what we have. It depends on what we think. And that's all I had left. I had the great luxury of not having nothing else to distract me. And if the building blocks of our lives really are thoughts, then what blocks was I working with? I wanted to really try and get a grip on what was I thinking. But at the time, I didn't have the capacity to self monitor and witness my thoughts in real time. And so I started watching my hands because if you wanna see what you're thinking, just watch what your hands are doing because they're the servants of your thought. I mean, I thought that was so interesting. So you you talk about it in the book how you were you were watching your hands and you kinda give us suggestion. Like, you were watching how many times you opened doors for others because that's an example of, that you're doing these acts of kindness, which in turn will make you happier and so on. But, I've never heard of that before, actually. That's a good kind of mindfulness technique. But, what else would you watch in your hands? Like, I don't like, right now, I'm kinda moving my hands around as I talk to you. But, like, what else would signify for my hands that I'm either happy or sad or stressed or whatever? By strictly observing and not trying to intervene in my behavior, but by getting very curious about my behavior, it made me just keep a log sort of all day of like, oh, this is when I shook hands. This is when I opened doors. This is when I refused to just shake hands. Oh, I didn't shake hands all day. I didn't shake hands for a week. This is my hand stealing. This is my hands writing. 2 very, you know, different things. And it was interesting. It, a, got me in touch with what I was thinking. I quit believing myself. Like, flat out, all of my behavior showed me that I quit believing I was capable of earning even $40 to buy a dress, much less support myself. So so your behavior meaning, like, the shoplifting Mhmm. Sort of showed you that you were that you felt not that you were incapable, but that you felt you were incapable. Believing in myself. Yeah. But it had an interesting side effects that I didn't really realize at the time when I started this watching my hands experiment. Is it forced me to be open door. Sorry. Go ahead. No. Much later. My OCD, much later. No. It forced me to be in the moment, and it forced me to be present. And that had a really interesting impact on my anxiety. Every time I just was focusing on what was right in front of me presently, my anxiety really calmed down. And I learned a lot about fear and anxiety. That fear is this thief, and it takes the past, and it projects it into the future. And it robs you of the only moment you have to create any change in your life. And so if we have all these habit cycles and these habit loops that are forming in our mind through all these well worn neural pathways, how do you start to create new habits? And can you make happiness a habit, an addiction, if you will, instead of a negative, thing as an addiction. So those are the concepts I started playing with when I was homeless. And, how did you I mean, that's a beautiful way to put it that, fear is a thief. I've I've never, again, heard it referred that way. But how did you start you know, other than this log, how did you start kind of observing your your thoughts and changing? Because it seems like you had to do that before you started, like, really dressily going out there saying, hey. Can I perform in your place? You had to have a whole change of mindset. Yeah. When I was young in barre singing, when I was about 8, I watched people in pain. And I watched how people tried to handle pain. A lot of them used drugs or alcohol, kinds of medicating things to help themselves numb pain. And I saw that it actually never worked. And so when I was eight, I sort of made this vow to never drink or do drugs, to try and handle pain as it happened because there really is no outrunning it. And I turned to writing because I was always attracted to writing from a young age. And I noticed again, whenever I wrote, my anxiety calmed down. And having read philosophy, I remember reading Descartes' said, I think, therefore I am. And if I could refine that a little bit very humbly, I would say, perceive what I think, therefore I am. If you can perceive your thoughts, you're something other than your thoughts. If you can perceive you're sad, you're something other than sad. There's an observer in you observing that you're sad or observing that you're happy or observing that you're angry. And that concept, for me was what really changed my life of going, alright, there's an observer. So if you use a car as a metaphor, so pretend your body's a car, what's the driver? Your brain is not the driver. Your brain is like this amazing steering wheel. It's a tool of the car. And your observer, what I call your greater sense of intelligence, that's actually the driver. Most of us don't have a relationship with the driver or the observer because we mistakenly think we are our thoughts, and we don't curate our thoughts. We don't discipline our thoughts. We just any thought that comes into our head, we'll believe it and follow it. And even if it's not based in reality. And that's how these sort of anxiety cycles really start to kick up. And I I think, the practice of that is extremely important, but it's extremely hard also at at a low and at a high. Mhmm. So even a high is just as bad as a low. Yeah. So when you, you know, you sold 30,000,000 albums. You had one of the best selling debut albums ever. When you're at that high, it's also hard to observe the thoughts and think, oh, well, I'm still this is just a hot potato, like, just like being, you know, incredibly sad is. Mhmm. But, again Our brains are very binary. So our brains have a lot in common with sea slugs, believe it or not, because we move toward pleasure and away from pain. We lay down memories to help us remember where pleasure is and where pain is. And so we create habit loops in our mind, where there'll be a trigger and then an action and then a reward. And so it's the same behavioral science of any animal, frankly. Dogs are trained this way. And so it's learning how to work with your brain's habit loops, and putting a positive action when you're stressed instead of a negative one, and then that becomes very addictive. And what's interesting about it is if you think about panic, anxiety, anger, do you have a tight feeling in your body or an expansive feeling? Definitely a tight feeling. Yeah. So if you think of excitement suicidal, and that's addictive too. So when all of these things were piling on and things were horrible, as you say, it's addictive, How did you avoid not getting even suicidal about it? Well, I wanna make one point about what you're saying with the highs, being as hard as the lows. So if you think of excitement, do you think of a contractive feeling or an expansive one? Usually, expansive because when I when I'm at a high, I do think that things are only gonna get better Uh-huh. Which is dangerous too. Yeah. It's actually a contractive feeling. And so science has been able to prove that excitement people confuse excitement for happiness. Excitement is actually constrictive. It's adrenaline, and it's a funner it's a much more fun feeling than feeling scared, but it's still a constrictive feeling. And so you can get addicted to distraction and and the need for excitement and thrill as much as any other thing, which is so interesting. Let's stop to take a quick break. We'll be right back. I'm actually gonna totally change topic Yeah. But on that on that route, and then we'll get back. I told we still have to get back to the original thing, which is when you were 19. But, in the middle of the book, you talk about you're you're talking with Neil Young, which is an odd thing to say to somebody. Jewel you, Jewel, were talking to Neil Young. You're having a conversation. And he says, don't ever, write for radio. Like, meaning, don't write for the hopes of a wide popular audience liking your stuff is, in some sense, what he's saying. And yet, this is related to what you were saying. You there's this pull between writing artistically for yourself and making music that you find beautiful, and, also, it's certainly pleasurable to write something that sells 10,000,000 albums because you then you know, oh, they really like me. Yeah. So how do you deal with that conflicting anxiety? I was very lucky. On my first album, I almost didn't sign my record deal, and I turned down a $1,000,000 signing bonus because I was scared to go. When you were living in a a homeless way. When I was homeless. Yeah. Because I read a book and realized you owe that money back. And so I was gonna make a folk record at the height of grunge. I didn't think my record would sell very well. I know I was gonna make a very honest record that was counterintuitive to what was happening in culture. And if I worked very hard, maybe I could get a career out of it. And so I worked hard for that. I didn't think the record would blow up the way that it did. I didn't think anything had a shot at getting on the radio. I ended up working very hard and ended up getting on the radio. I ended up doing really well. And all of a sudden, I was like, wait. What do you do now? Like, I don't know how I wrote a hit. They were just very sincere, earnest songs, and I don't know if I could do it again. And then I realized, I made so much money on that first record that I didn't have to do anything else ever if I didn't want to. And so I really But did you get addicted to the stimulus of, oh my god, Jewel. I love you. Like Never did. I I always avoid that? It's because, you know, when I was homeless, I was like, what is fame? Fame is a path a lot of people lose their footing on. And I don't again, like, I don't wanna be a statistic. How do I avoid that happening to me? Because I'm a perfect candidate for fame ruining me because of a lot of emotional insecurities, especially at that age. And so I don't think fame changes. You would exaggerate. It just puts fuel on whatever little fire you have smoldering. So if you're insecure, you're gonna get more insecure, not less. If you're an egomaniac, you're gonna become a bigger egomaniac, you're not less of one. And so being aware of that, I tried to set up my career in a very specific way where I led with my flaws. I never When did you lead with your flaws? I never tried to use art as propaganda to make myself seem more perfect than I was because I never wanted to be put on a pedestal, only to be knocked off of a pedestal when I never wanted to be on a pedestal in the first place. So I kept taking myself off of any pedestal by leading with, these are my downfalls and these are my dreams. I'm a real human. And that gave me room to grow and change and adapt, in real time. And it also allowed me to sort of have this dialogue with my fans online and through the Internet of talking about, you know, if we have holes inside of us, you can't fill them from the outside. If you have an internal hole and you try and fill it from the outside, your hole's gonna get deeper. It's actually not gonna fill up. The only people that can create happiness, it's internal. It's an internal process. It isn't an external one. So you'll be very miserable if you're looking for approval by trying to validate it through fame or through applause. It'll make you a very unhappy person, and you'll be addicted to having to stay famous. And that to me is like hell. Like, I would never wanna do it. And yet, let's say you put out a record, particularly during these, you know, early times, and not that many people liked it or didn't get good reviews Yeah. Or your fans were like, we're we're not gonna do 10,000 likes on this. We're only gonna do, like, 12 likes on this. What wouldn't that wouldn't you feel a little bit like, oh, did I do something wrong? Like, wouldn't what it wasn't fan response part of the process of, you know, developing a style that you know would be, you know, a moneymaker for you because you had to also make a living. Yeah. Every time I sing live, people responded to it. I didn't have to change who I was to get that response. So I thought, you know, if push comes to shove and I never sell a record, I can sing live and I'll make a career this way. But my first record was considered a failure for a year. And if I had taken that $1,000,000 signing bonus, I would have been dropped within 6 months because my sales were so bad. And I definitely felt the pressure because I you know, you hear the stuff on radio, and I was like, I can write that. Is that what it takes? And that's when Neil Young and Bob Dylan took me on the road, and they just schooled me. And they were like, don't you dare. You stay just like you are, and you keep doing it. And During that 1st year, did you cry about album sales? No. I didn't expect it to sell a lot. I knew what type of record I made, for sure. But you do have fear that you'll get dropped from the label, and you won't have the chance to keep getting the support to go out there and try and build something grassroots. But that's why I kept myself affordable. You know, every time there were factions in the label saying, hey, we should drop Jewel, it's been a year, I had champions that were saying, she cost us $12. What's it hurt? You know, let her keep let her keep doing it. And I was slowly able to create that tide shift. And then the record did do well. So, yeah, that was validating to be like, okay. What was the shift? Why did it suddenly go from, like, failure to success? A couple of things. A lot of time, the gatekeepers of an industry don't always sense change coming. And so Grunge had had this tremendous movement of people expressing angst. I feel bad. I wanna talk about the fact that I don't feel good. I'm not gonna pretend things feel good. So that was grunge, if you summed it up emotionally. I had felt that. I had just felt it several years before the grunge movement, and so I was solution oriented of, like, alright. There's no true cynic alive. They actually kill themselves. Everybody else is pretending to be a cynic so that they can protect their feelings of being vulnerable. I'm gonna move toward feeling vulnerable because you're actually more safe the more honest you are. And so I started leading with somewhat of an antidote to where culture was all headed. Everybody was starting to go, okay, how long can you feel bad? Now what am I gonna do about it? And that's where I happened to be in my life and in my music. And so I think it was just the right time, right place. And I did, you know, 700 shows a year, and I did 2 3 cities a day, and I worked my hiney off to try and create that tight shift. 700 shows a year. Easily. Yeah. I bet it's 4 and 5 shows. Of the album. I did that for probably 3 or 4 years. I was doing easily. Like, I mean, I was doing 2 and 3, 4, 5 shows a day sometimes. So so then, so so so, basically, 19, the the you you start singing at that one cafe you were talking about. The record executives start to notice. They offer you the $1,000,000. I, again, I just you can only relate to what your own experiences are to to some extent. And and I can't imagine being homeless and turning down a $1,000,000 check. I just can't imagine doing it. Yeah. But but you did the research. You saw that you were thinking long term. Somehow, you had this talent of thinking long term. And I saw this continually throughout the book. You you took a long term stance where I think most people would think very short term. Mhmm. Where do you where do you think you got that ability to think long term about these sort of almost life or death situations? When I was living in Alaska, I watched nature a lot. I learned a lot about life and being a human by watching nature. You see a lot of patterns. You see a lot about how everything works. Nature's an amazing teacher. And one of the things I learned was that hardwood grows slowly. And that's not the sexiest life motto, but it's been my life motto. I would see the softwood trees shoot up really quickly and then just fall over. And I wanted to be a hardwood tree. I wanted to have a beautiful shape. I wanted my life to have meaning. And why do these hardwood trees that are so dense never fall over in a storm? What does that? I wanted to be that shape. And so I set about trying to really think about, you know, there is no shortcut. Shortcuts lead to softwood trees that fall over quickly. So it helped me in every aspect of my life, from how I was thinking about my career. So when I got signed, I go, alright, Jewel. Why are you doing this? Do you wanna be famous? Do you wanna be rich? Do you wanna be an artist? Like, what's your goal? All of those goals are fine, by the way. I don't think one's better than the other. It's just what is speaking to your soul. And for me, I wanted to be an artist. And so that meant, you know, as you make a 100 decisions every day, it has to be based on what your values are. So So if you can identify your values in one of the exercises, I'm launching a website called Jewel Never Broken. And so I share a lot of the tools and exercises that helped me in these times of my life of, like, hardwood grows slowly and identifying your values so that becomes your compa*s. And every day that you make decisions, make sure decisions are in line with those values and those goals, and you're going to end up where you want to end up. But a lot of us don't think that far ahead and we don't act in line with our values. And it's kind of like being in a car with no direction. You just kinda wander around life, and you wake up at 40 and 50 and go, my life doesn't feel like me. Who am I? Well well, let me ask you about that because and then I wanna get to some other catastrophes in your life because those are always the the funnest to talk to. Let's say you wake up in your forties or fifties, and you're like, what have I been doing? What do you do? You started you you started seeing at 5. Like, most people can't do that. Yeah. You, of course, correct. When we all are raised with these filters. So in our family, we're raised with an ideology and a system of belief. And when we become teenagers, we start to question that. We begin to have autonomy and separate out. And then we dream our own dream. And if you're lucky, in your twenties, you might have a job or a career that was in line with what those goals were as a teenager. But now that you're in your twenties, you had a dream come true of a teenager and it might not always fit you in your twenties. And so you have to readapt your filter, relook through your lens, and go, alright. What is my reality currently? Who am I currently? And how do I make my outer world match my inner world? And you make some shifts. You make some decisions about love, about the friends you surround yourself in, about maybe changing your career, getting more serious about whatever. Is it possible, do you think, to make the change at, in in your fifties or forties? Absolutely. You do it over and over and over in your life. You constantly are course correcting. And I think the more comfortable a person can get with the idea that we're always changing, no matter what, and you can change with it or you can try not to change. When you don't recognize change happening around you and you're late to the game, your course corrections have to be bigger. There's, like, bigger Hail Mary moves. That happened to me during my divorce. You know, I realized, oh my gosh. I'm not the woman I want my son to know. And I had to make some really big course corrections. In what way weren't you the woman you wanted your son to know? I was in a situation just within myself where parts of me had become domesticated that shouldn't have. I needed some of the wildness in my heart to come back out and to be able to express itself. I had become very muted and very tamed and very small from a lot of the damage and trauma of my life. And I didn't realize it happened, but it did. And all of a sudden, when I looked at my son, I was like, I saw it all. But I I sort of see that so we're we're kind of skipping different pieces, and I know, you have a a time constraint. But I do wanna mention when you were there was a period you were making so much money. Your mom was managing your money. You you lost all your money. You went broke. So, again, you went from homeless to riches to totally broke and 1,000,000 and in debt. Yeah. You fired your mom. You haven't spoken to her since, I guess, 2003. Mhmm. She did all again, I encourage people to read the book. The story is fascinating. But, again, you had to reinvent yourself and find this kind of, you know, inner strength to to to keep going and to to make back your wealth and and bring back your art and so on. Maybe the kind of the intensity of that led to this relationship where you started to get more and more muted because you felt safe there. Mhmm. Yeah. Realizing the truth about my mom and I's relationship was a really difficult, time in my life. It literally felt like my mind was made out of glass, and somebody had just shattered it into a 1000000 pieces. And then I was looking in the mirror one day and I was like, oh, you know, what if I'm looking at this problem wrong? What if it's not that I'm broken? What if it's there's part of me that exists whole at all times? And I just have to do a very loving archaeological dig back to my whole self. And so getting rid of all the things your own archaeological dig? I caught played a game called self and other. It's something it's an exercise I'll be offering on my website, where anything that made me feel anxious were usually thoughts that didn't belong to me. It was lies my brain was telling me. Anything that made me feel calm and expansive, I was like, that's me. That's who I am in my real nature before the trauma and the abuse and the heartache and the betrayal and all these things. And I was able to find my way back to that, and I didn't have therapists at the time. I didn't trust anybody to have any kind of, you know, say over my brain. And that's why I really built the website is because happiness is for everybody. You don't have to have the right therapist, or the right car, or the right house, or even have a house. It really has to do with our thoughts. Buddha was right, I guess. Well, so so, you know, you realize at some point your mom was grossly mismanaging your money and your career and a lot of things. You had this this break with her. Do you think it's ever possible like, just as you kind of rebuild your relationship with your father after, you know, you had this intense childhood that was abusive in various ways and but now you've rebuilt this beautiful relationship with your father, do you think you'll ever talk to your mom again? I mean, I would never say never. The reason my dad and I have a relationship is because my dad's really earned it. He did a lot of the work that it takes to I forgave him instantly, and, I was right there in step with my mom. You know, I look at myself as culpable, frankly. But the difference for me and I forgave my mom instantly, as well. I think that, you know, forgiveness is is the last way to free yourself. You know, it's a gift you give yourself. It's not for somebody else. But the difference for me and my mom and my dad is my dad did the work it took to change his behaviors. So to earn back a relationship actually takes new interactions, new behavior changes, and working on yourself. So forgiveness is a gift to give yourself, but the other side, just because you forgive them doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna have a relationship with you again. No. No. Forgetting the forgiving doesn't mean condoning. Forgiving doesn't mean you get a relationship, you know, granted to you. It just means you quit hair you you quit holding that heaviness in your heart. You let it go. You forgive and you feel love. And so so so after this moment when you kind of took charge of your career again, did you have faith that, okay. I'm just gonna make a bunch more albums, and I'm so great that everyone's gonna buy them and I'm gonna, you know, rebuild again? No. I've never had hubris, and I've never been arrogant. I've never felt entitled. Which works to me? Genres. You went to I did. It happened in a risky time. Yeah. I went into the pop world thinking I was completely safe. I didn't know that I was broke at the time. You know? So I was like, I get to take any risk I want. Like, it doesn't matter if it fails. It doesn't matter if it succeeds. I'm gonna do what Bob Dylan told me and follow my muse. Meanwhile, I was like, once I found out, you know, at the high like, right when I dropped this pop record, which was a very risky thing to do, you know, I found out, oh my god. I actually do need the money. Wow. I hope this works. But I don't believe in letting fear roll in my life. Like, it's just not what I'm gonna let happen. All I can do is show up and really commit myself and work hard. And so that's what I did. And luckily, you know, it really worked out. But it talk about stressful. But what if it hadn't worked out? Like, how would you have dealt with the stress? And you owed, like, 1,000,000 of hours. Yeah. I always figure things out, you know. But that's the thing is if you let yourself get obsessed about the future that hasn't happened yet, you can't show up right now to do a thing about it. So learning to mitigate my stress, keeping up my mindfulness and my meditation, staying very focused on what step can I do today is the type of thing that got me out of jam after jam? What's the what's the next reinvention for you? It's funny. I don't see them as reinventions as much as becoming more myself with time. I think grace is a refinement of a soul through time, and I'm just getting better at making my outer world match my inner world. It's a journey in learning and growing and pushing myself and pushing the edges of who I am. The edges of the definitions of who I perceive myself to be is the best creative project. You know, it's better than any song. And, you know, we've been talking a lot about, almost sort of self help or personal improvement type themes, and now you're starting that site, jewelneverbroken.com. This book, you know, Never Broken. Songs are only half the story. This has come out, and it has, again, that personal improvement type of style. And it will you talk a lot about kind of the the development of your musical style and how you go about it, and I I definitely encourage people to to read it for that as well. But, again, it's a it's a beautiful book. I encourage people to buy the book, to visit the website. Jewel, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. We covered a lot of ground. This is I I'm gonna give you another Grammy for a great book and podcast and all around music, and I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thank you. For more from James, check out the James Altucher Show on the choose yourself network at jamesaltucher.com, and get yourself on the free insider's list today. Hey. Thanks for listening. Listen. I have a big favor to ask you and it will only take 30 seconds or less, and it would mean a huge amount to me. If you like this podcast, please let me know. Please let the team I work with know. Please let my guests know. And you can do this easily by subscribing to the podcast. It's probably the biggest favor you could do for me right now and it's really simple. Just go to iTunes, search for the James Altucher show, and click subscribe. Again, it will only take you 30 seconds or less. And if you subscribe now, it will really help me out a lot. Thanks again. 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