Therapeutic Gameplay for Healing | Ryan Douglas
00:00 The start of immersive medicine
05:50 How games shift perceptions toward growth
12:59 Diverse culture in mental health therapy
16:06 Measure the impact of therapeutic games
18:40 The future of digital therapeutics
23:51 Potential risks and guardrails
31:56 Ryan's MAGIC
💕 Story Overview
@MAGICademy S3E5, we had a great conversation with @Ryan Douglas, founder of @DeepWell DTx focusing on digital therapeutics through immersive game design. There have been studies in this space showing how games can leverage immersion and interactivity for therapeutic applications like providing engaging distractions for pain management, simulating controlled virtual environments for exposure therapy in varied mental health conditions (stress, anxiety, etc), and creating motivating gamified exercises for rehabilitation, ultimately enhancing players’ experiences and outcomes. 😃
Story Takeaways
Digital Therapeutics: Digital therapeutics refers to the use of software-based interventions, often delivered through mobile apps, wearable devices, or online platforms, to prevent, manage, or treat medical conditions. These digital interventions are designed to modify patient behavior, provide education, and support adherence to treatment plans.
Games, when designed thoughtfully and with specific goals in mind, can be powerful tools for shifting our perceptions and promoting personal growth. The immersive and interactive nature of games can create engaging experiences that challenge our assumptions, encourage new perspectives, and foster positive mindsets. Here are some ways in which well-designed games can shift our perceptions toward growth.
Diverse cultural perspectives play a significant role in the development and implementation of digital therapeutics. As these technologies aim to provide accessible and personalized healthcare solutions, it is crucial to consider and incorporate cultural diversity to ensure their effectiveness and widespread adoption.
Ryan’s MAGIC: Connecting dots and people across discipline.
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00:00 The start of immersive medicine
05:50 How games when well designed can shift our perceptions toward growth
12:59 The role of diverse culture in mental health therapy
16:06 How do we measure the impact of therapeutic games?
18:40 The future of digital therapeutics
23:51 Potential risks and guardrails: monopoly & deferred cares
31:56 Ryan's MAGIC
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What is immersive medicine or digital therapeutics: https://youtube.com/shorts/Ixmwe37hoKk
therapeutical games for loneliness and anxiety: https://youtu.be/SMu1mF6Mo24
Action games make memories more accessible:
https://youtube.com/shorts/jwghQZBxLZs
Learning through play and rewards while we were kids: https://youtu.be/wbgtPfuPNLo
Taking responsibility as a method to develop motivation: https://youtu.be/HzswAZUxiMQ
Reframing and creating detachment to overcome crowd fears:https://youtu.be/688jH3yGjCA
It can be challenging to form healthy habits when we are not well even though we know better: https://youtu.be/7tfKrDoPWMY
flawed diamonds: the world is calling for us to be kindly different: https://youtu.be/axr58yeHLys
The challenge of trying to fit into the boxes of the world structure: https://youtu.be/BMtAiTQ0abU
Bullying can be everywhere, we need to learn to draw lines: https://youtu.be/iF5fazbbqNY
How about trading cards with top scientists and contributors instead of baseball players?
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Eve, Z., Turner, M., Di Basilio, D., Harkin, B., Yates, A., Persson, S., Henry, J., Williams, A., Walton, G., Jones, M.V., Whitley, C., & Craddock, N. (2023). Therapeutic games to reduce anxiety and depression in young people: A systematic review and exploratory meta-analysis of their use and effectiveness. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy.
Barnes, S., Chandler, T., & Granda-Salazar, M. (2022). Help over harm: practical and ethical considerations for the evaluation and deployment of therapeutic games.Mental Health and Social Inclusion.
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A noted expert and innovator in the fields of mental health, artificial intelligence, and surgical robotics, Ryan has been on the frontline of major paradigm shifts in healthcare for nearly 20 years. He is the co-founder of NeuFluent and DeepWell DTx, a new video game company dedicated to creating medically therapeutic games while maintaining 'best-in-class' gameplay. Ryan has participated in the commercialization of 20 medical devices, including treatments for depression, hypertension, women's health, chronic pain, and related neurological conditions. He holds pivotal patents for medical AI, robotics, and systems and frequently achieves FDA clearance for breakthrough therapies.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanjdouglas/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/deepwelldtx
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Jiani (00:00)
Welcome to MAGICademy podcast. I'm so excited to have our guest today, Ryan, and he has been leading a movement, integrating game design with a purpose for healing what he calls digital therapeutics
Ryan Douglas (00:18)
Thank you, I'm really happy to be here. I think most people are calling it digital therapeutics, but what we're really talking about is immersive medicine.
And that's the intersection between media and medicine, or really media as medicine, media as an enhancement to other medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and these sorts of things.
Jiani (00:37)
why Deep Well? Like how did you come up with this name and what is your mission and vision?
Ryan Douglas (00:43)
Actually a partner of mine came up with the name and that's very true of Deepwell. A lot of this has been a very collective work. So when you say it's a movement, you're right. It's not like a company because a lot of folks have shown up to give what they could, where they could. And that's really, we had a lot of folks show up from the gaming industry that were at the top of their capability. And that's really important. That means they were able to make some of the best games. And that was important because what we noticed when we looked at what kind of games had been really good for mental health.
It hadn't been the brain teaser games. It hadn't been even most of the series games and the things that have been designed for it. They were the commercially viable video games and they were most the time created by the masters. They were some of the best Tetris and animal crossing and plants versus zombies and games that were really otherwise surprising to people to like Call of Duty and other action games. But you know, where a lot of folks were like, well, is that actually good for you? But it turned out that they really were. And so.
We needed to work with people that understood this capability on the highest level. And the same thing, I mean, from the medical device standpoint, this was not going to be easy to put this sort of accessibility of care to place. So we called in and got some of the best neuroscientists and biologists and neurophysiologists and all of these folks that had been looking at a long time at what gets us motivated, what makes it so we can learn faster.
what makes us adopt new behaviors and new thoughts and new ways of looking at ourselves.
Jiani (02:14)
This is super fascinating. So we're basically facilitating change, like good change through gaming. And I'm curious, like...
of all those games what type of games tends to be more like more healing like you mentioned about like animal crossing i mean there's must be some general general and then you know
Ryan Douglas (02:33)
It really depends. It depends what you're dealing with, right? And where it is. So if you're someone who's more lonely and isolated, then there's certainly those social, those games with social interaction, like, like an animal crossing have been phenomenal, things like that. If you're somebody who's dealing with more levels of, let's say anxiety, then sometimes there are games that give you more agency, more control, the ability to complete something.
Jiani (02:46)
Mmm.
Ryan Douglas (03:00)
Certainly cooperative games, I've made a lot of sense, but the most therapeutic games across the board are action. And that's one of the most surprising things. Action games, you know, and there's a lot of reasons, I think, between the brain science and the fact that you really do need to be very dopaminergic. You need to be very engaged and you need a lot of visual spatial interference. We don't want a lot of cognitive interference while you're learning and kind of moving yourself along in these advanced stages.
What we find is when you are super engaged in a game, which is why it has to be a good one, because it has to have that thing that draws you into the flow state, when you're there, what it looks like is theoretically happening is you're making memories not only faster or you're more neuroplastic, but you're making them in a way that is more limbically accessible. So you see gamers have much bigger hippocampus. And that's kind of where we store the things that we're going to be using for the longest time. And where you...
you have sort of a stimuli and then you have a response that's almost precognition. Something happens and you do the next thing before you really even think about it. It's very hard to build that kind of behavior into somebody through sort of a cognitive process. That's a learning behavior takes a lot of time. It seems to be really accelerating when you learn it through play.
And if you think about it, all the hardest learning we've ever done from the time when you have a little child and you want them to learn to speak or understand social constructs or learn to walk, it's play that we use. It's not a work regime. And then there's a great reward mechanism and that reward mechanism is what you're doing right now. The smile from a mother or a father is just dopaminergic as all heck for a kid. So our praise, our rewards, our engagement with that child is the game.
And that game accelerates learning on the highest level. And we've learned a lot about learning from a science perspective. And just the last little, we used to think that we were only neuroplastic on the highest level when we were young. But now it turns out it's not about how young we are, it's how much we play. So you can take somebody who's quite senior and if you start engaging them in gameplay again and involving that gameplay as part of the learning construct, they become very neuroplastic again.
Jiani (04:45)
Mmm.
So playing helps us to be more adaptive and receptive. So it comes like just because people are being advocating for a fixed mindset versus the growth mindset. I think you provide the perfect solution, you know, have incorporated more play and therefore you will be naturally have, you know, a growth mindset with neuroplasticity.
Ryan Douglas (05:31)
And it turns out that, I mean, these game designers, these masters I'm talking about, the people that are at the top of their abilities to do this, to engage us, to bring us in, they might be the top observational behavioral scientists of the 21st century. They've come to know us in ways that in the medical industry, we don't really know how to get you to do a thing. We're pretty bad at that part, actually. We tell you you should because it's good for you. And that's not particularly, that's right. It's not particularly motivational for us. There's some folks that suggest that,
actually as we get more sick, we get more ill, we're more wired actually to not do what's good for us. So if you have type one diabetes, it's suggested that even though all you have to do is take some medicine or potentially these sorts of things, the reason people don't is that we're not really wired to longitudinally want to stay alive if we are not, if we're not well. So nature doesn't want us to procreate, it wants us to die before we procreate under those scenarios. Now that's one theory, but it does lead to the idea that...
We're just not very good at longitudinally taking care of ourselves in the moment. If something happens right now, you get a fight or flight response and you're like, okay, I know what to do in this moment. I'm going to either run away or I'm going to punch you in the nose. Or if you're really involved, you might punch me in the nose and then run away. You much the whole thing that you've got. But when we start talking about, or if somebody hands you something else to take care of, you know, a baby or a parent, you've got all of these neurological hooks and wires. You start making oxytocin, other neurochemicals, you know, what you want to do. You find motivations.
Some of the motivations are so strong and apparently, and a mother, mothers can't even smell how terrible their baby smells. I can. We're so wired to do this that we can do it. But when we talk about taking care of ourselves longitudinally, we're not as wired.
Jiani (07:05)
So one way to heal is to heal others or assume responsibility or be a caretaker or caregiver.
Ryan Douglas (07:20)
Well, it's one of the ways that we are wired to work. And they do say like the one of the best ways to learn is to teach. But I think more than that, what I'm saying is that when we use these media and these neurological hooks that come as a net result of media, they get us to do things that we otherwise wouldn't be motivated to do ourselves. So when we can focus that on health, which is not easy, but when we find that strong intersection between play,
and medicine, we have something there that can help us longitudinally find the motivation to do the things we need to do to get ourselves in a healthier space. And when we talk about mental health, that's really important because we can start changing how we think about ourselves. And if we learn that in gameplay, it becomes very limbic. The response is not, I've had this scenario. So let me give you a scenario that I give often, right? Whereas you are someone who don't like crowds. And so you walk into that crowd. You don't feel comfortable.
And the first thing from the crowd that stimulus the neurological response you get or the record you play in your head is, I suck at this. I suck. I suck because I can't be in this crowd. And you know, then maybe if you've had some talk therapy, what might come into your head after that is, okay, well, maybe if I think about it more, you know, I can probably handle this and, you know, I shouldn't be so hard on myself. So that's kind of one path. Now think about it more if you were to learn it more limbically.
So where it's more subconsciously access, you walk into that crowd, still don't like the crowd. That doesn't change. But instead of that first thing that when you get into the crowd of, I suck, you're like, this sucks. I don't like this. And at the same time, let's say you've been wired to kind of calm yourself in that moment. You're taking a couple of breaths or something like that. Then the next kind of conversations are, okay, this sucks. I don't suck. I can do this.
And you start moving and you have a different self perception. And from that moment forward, it's a different conversation about you slightly modified, but it's not like you had to think your way through it. It just pops up because it's something that has been crafted or something that has been changed about you behaviorally or the way you think about yourself in a time when you were, you know, in this heavily double -managed state. If you learn this while you were playing, if you learned how to manage this, you'd have a very different response.
we have pre -wired ourselves now for some calming mechanisms, that's exactly the point. You can start to use your brain in a way that you're like, okay, what can I like about this? But if your immediate reaction is I'm the problem, and then you're getting low on yourself, then you almost, you know that feeling where your brain gets locked. Like you, you're so focused on how you're the problem. You don't have a solution.
Right. And so, I mean, we definitely can see these sort of different behaviors when we tie media into medicine, it gets you thinking differently and gets you connecting differently to stimuli. And that, that I've seen that in games in ways that I really haven't seen that in other therapies. And that's what the data was bearing out. That's kind of like why deep well on the biggest levels. I wasn't really looking to do another thing, but there were hundreds, I mean, probably close to a thousand studies that I pulled through. I actually,
had, it was in the process of selling it, it had sold next turn at that time. So I was working on it mostly just with my family, my own kids, I'm neurodivergent, my kids are neurodivergent, and we just love to go deep on things. So we divided up all these studies and we looked at this, and a lot of the things that we had heard, how bad media was for you, how these games were addictive, how there was no redeeming quality, and a lot of this was just a waste of time.
A lot of the study going almost back 20 years was showing that to not be the case. And many times those studies have been sponsored by people that were kind of hoping they were going to find the games were not good for you, that screen time was bad for you, that all of these, you know, maybe helped to propagate some of their own theories about what was going on wrong with society or to deflect blame. So, I mean, a great example of that would be guns, right? The gun lobby would really like you to think that guns don't kill people, video games do. But it turns out...
That's not the answer. It's just completely the opposite when you get into the data. So as we dug in further, not only did we see these things that were super compelling and people, I mean, it's not like in medical advice, we talk about being compliant. Will you be compliant to the therapy? This is are you compelled into the therapy? So we saw this very compelling nature, but we also noticed that there really was very little way to harm somebody with play. So there was a lot of things we could try.
A lot of things that we could work on that makes you more neuroplastic, you're learning faster, you're learning on what looks like more subconscious level. All these things were amazing for positive behavioral change. And you know, what we thought was standing in the way was how bad media and games were for you. And it just wasn't so. It was what the data looked like.
Jiani (12:10)
And I think going back to that kind of media is the medicine. I think we kind of explored how potentially we can leverage media as a way to build an environment, a digital environment, where in that particular situation, they have different stimuli coming, you know, created by those media technologies and those stimuli are
Ryan Douglas (12:29)
Thank you.
Jiani (12:38)
being able to kind of help us to trigger the healing, help us to detach from the ego self and move out of the body or move out the small world of ourselves and see the bigger picture and be able to detach and heal. I'm very curious, like, it seems like a very intimate, like a highly personalized,
in digital environment, immersive digital environment through the medium of media. What role does culture play? Because different people have different diverse culture background. They could come from different country, different culture, or they may come from different regions. They may have different microcultures that needs to be considered. Is culture a big thing when you are designing the environment?
Ryan Douglas (13:32)
Well, if we back this all the way up to mental health in general and the idea of treating mental health, culture is always a big thing. Like, let's think about talk therapy for a moment. If you're lucky enough to be able to get yourself a talk therapist and you sit down with them to work with them, if you don't feel culturally aligned with the person in that room, right, or if the therapist doesn't feel it with you, you've got these two people and that interplay between those two people is a big part of whether or not that therapy is going to be successful. So, I mean, when you get into a digital environment,
What's really interesting about that is people can start to assign their own meaning to. So sometimes we can design the game without a lot of story, you know, something like a Beat Saber. Beat Saber doesn't have a story unless you give it a story. And then you can culturally appropriate it any way that's comfortable for you. So in some cases, you almost give people a blank slate and they make it fit for themselves. In other cases, depending on what it is that you're dealing with from a mental health perspective, that's the other beautiful thing about media. There's so much of it. There's a story for you that matches.
So if you're dealing with grief or loss of agency, or somebody even gaslit and over controlled, you can get into environments that look a lot like the one you were in and you can start to take control. Or you can complete something. That's a big thing for us as humans. It's really hard to finish a thing in this world. Oftentimes you get an idea and you want to complete it and you need a partner to agree, or you need a government agency to approve, or you need, there's always a...
you know, a thing in the way and in a game you can get right in there, get into a very similar scenario, complete it on your own terms. And that again, if done in a very dopaminergic state, that becomes really, really a great way to better understand yourself and that environment and then apply it out, if you will, kind of into the real world.
Jiani (15:16)
Yeah, and that gets me interested. So it feels like the cultural perspective can be adapted. And then I'm curious, like in terms of like measuring the impact, because I know you recently are launching your first product and you are working with FDA. And when I hear FDA is like a lot of like testing and data and metrics. So can you share with us like what kind of...
Ryan Douglas (15:33)
Thank you.
That's right.
Jiani (15:45)
How do you measure the impact that...
Ryan Douglas (15:47)
So there's a lot of different ways to do it. And you can see it done in a lot of different ways and studies, but traditionally when you're talking about mental health, there are these instruments we use that are essentially surveys. Mostly to know what's in your mind, we have to ask you what you're thinking in any given time. So there's a lot of these instruments that have been calibrated, some of them to like millions of uses, where you have this sense of how you're answering this thing helps us understand, are you anxious, stressed, depressed? But there's a lot of other things more recently we've been able to do as well.
A couple of the people on our team, Dr. Sam Browd, our chief medical officer, Dr. Lee Zinmarin, our head of medical advisory, these folks are very well known for their work in something called functional MRI. So that's when we look at your brain and we'll compare a scan of you doing something that we understand to something you don't understand. And we say, look, if your brain is activating in the same way we think there's similarities here, we see some correlation. We can take a look at hormone levels. So we can take a saliva swab.
we can look at EEG and see what's happening as a net result of this. So there's a lot of different ways, but still the most reliable way when it comes to people's minds is to ask them how they feel before and after and do that in a standardized way.
We also really like comparing our devices. So I don't encourage people to do a lot of additional clinical trials until they've gone and seen the ones that were already done. It's really important. There is a lot of work already done. And if you can draw parallels between the work that has been completed and the work you're doing now, you can work in a comparative space. That's a very comfortable place for folks like the FDA. They will want to see you substantially equivalent to something they already understand. That's a very important path forward as well.
versus in a lot of scientists like to start over from scratch and start over from scratch again, but building on a body of data can be much more powerful way to show somebody that you are equivalent and what you're doing here is not that different from something else that's already been done and shown to be.
Jiani (17:44)
This is amazing. So that gets me interested like with this movement and moving forward into the 21st, 22nd century and integrating medical device with gameplay to serve the purpose of greater healing for humanity.
Ryan Douglas (17:44)
Sorry.
Jiani (18:10)
How do you see this industry evolving or progressing with all the advanced technologies in the medical device space and gaming space?
Ryan Douglas (18:22)
So first of all, I mean, there's been a lot of digital therapeutics created in the last few years. There was a regulatory holiday where that shouldn't call it a holiday, but it kind of got treated like that by folks where the emergency order for COVID allowed a lot of behavioral therapy, digital therapies to get onto the market where you were supposed to do all the same things you would have done if you were submitting to the FDA, but not everybody did. And so a lot of these things got out. And I think what we saw is that sort of hype curve.
on digital therapeutics, as well as the height curve on gamification both of those have kind of landed at the trough of despair where it's like, okay, did this really work? And I think the truth is, it's going to work very, very, very well, but we're going to have to understand what it is that really motivates people. All right. And those motivational aspects are going to have to be put into these digital therapeutics just to take a therapy that people didn't want to do. And if you put it into digital environment, that doesn't mean they're going to want to do it.
I mean, I see that mistake a lot with things that are put into VR. It's like, we made this immersive. Did you? You put it in an immersive environment that could have allowed you to make it immersive. But if you didn't actually design it as an immersive situation, all you did is make something hard, harder. And then the adherence will actually go down. So what I think we're gonna see, we're gonna come to find is with these digital therapeutics, there's only gonna be two scenarios that really make sense. One is,
The digital therapeutic is so powerful that in the moment people get an instant sense of relief. So there's some things out there that immediately they can help you block pain, right? Or they can help you calm it, calm yourself down. If those work right in the moment without a lot of instructional work, then the incentive for the person is to use it because I was in pain, now I'm not. For the rest of them and for the vast majority of them, they are essentially pattern building mechanisms. And if they do not,
find a way to wield media, the thing that digitally is most powerful for us. If they don't find a way to really detach to story, then you're not going to see a wide adoption. However, that's the thing about digital media that's amazing is that, you know, in the end, nothing has ever moved humanity like story. We're wired for it. Our brains change instantly when we hear a story, when we're connected to a story. And, you know,
It'll build a country. It'll build a community. It starts a war. It builds a currency and nothing amplifies story like media. So we shouldn't be surprised at just exactly how powerful it is. We've seen it on the negative side of things where the social media, you know, having some great impacts on even who our president was and potentially the UK separating from the EU. This was all based on story told through digital platforms that were designed to neurologically hook us in and get us.
You know, and we shouldn't be confused with that social media or TikTok. Those are games. Those are games we're playing at that moment. They're in their neurologically hooking and stuff just like that. So in the same way, we can wire this for positivity and we can set this up in a way that it can be effective. So what I think you're going to see happen is this great understanding of the wielding of media as part of medicine. And when that happens at that intersection, we see all sorts of possibilities where traditional therapies today become more powerful or
we can actually see pharmaceutical doses going down. So in some cases, if we can get you calmed down in what I call a pre -hab sort of environment, you're more actually receptive to a biological agent. And as a therapy designer, that means I can drop your dose. And a lot of these new pharmaceuticals we see coming out of the moment, like in the immunological space, things like Jack inhibitors, they're very powerful. They're also slightly carcinogenic.
So if we can do this kind of thing where we get you involved in play, we have these combo devices where you're playing, you're ready to receive the medication, we can drop the dose, get that same otherwise physiological effect, and now you've got some really interesting things going on as far as the intersection between media and medicine. So I think this is what we're going to see coming. I really don't think that you're going to see a lot of digital therapeutics that are highly successful that haven't also figured out how to wield media.
Jiani (22:04)
Hmm.
Ryan Douglas (22:33)
it's top level.
Jiani (22:34)
It's a beautiful future that we wanted to step in together.
Ryan Douglas (22:40)
It really is because I mean, the one thing about that is as someone who's put a lot of the medical devices in the field and we were seen as very successful doing that. I mean, 27 is a lot in 17 years and, and, you know, they were successful devices, but successful meant reaching hundreds of thousands of people with the light therapy devices. It meant small millions of people, which was a big reach. It was 3 billion people on gaming platforms. There's almost 3 billion. Everybody's got one of these.
Jiani (23:05)
3 billion? 3 million? 3 billion.
Ryan Douglas (23:10)
Right. And so if we can tap into, and when I say everybody, I recognize that as an economic threshold. And there's a lot of people that don't have one of those. But if we think of that threshold, everybody that's walking around with a phone, a lot of these things that we can do through mobile brings us amazing accessibility and affordability to care if it's done right. Right. If it's available to you to use on your phone, if it's not something where you have to buy a special piece of equipment or a certain attachment, or you have to get a prescription and find yourself a doctor and
and get your insurance to reimburse it. We got to start where the beginning is for digital therapies, which is the accessibility is the mobile platforms, the gaming platforms. There's a lot of these machines in people's hands. If we can use these, we can start to have a large impact and make a lot of change quickly.
Jiani (23:58)
Beautiful. Are there any potential risks that we need to be aware of?
Ryan Douglas (24:03)
Sure. Yeah, I mean, there's a risk of everything from, I think I've seen some risks already. There are risks that people have really tried to corner the gamification, the digital therapeutics marketplace for one instance. So the risk we see whenever something new comes up is there's usually a group of people that they want to monopolize it and own it. And that's a real risk for this because what it makes media so powerful.
is that it's ubiquitous. There is so much of it that you're going to find something that you intersect with to use. So that's a risk when people try to say, well, here's the one game. The other thing is from what we can tell, this works because you're really engaged. You're really built from an urgent. So if you have a favorite game, that game is going to be most effective at doing this kind of work for you. But your favorite game will not be your favorite game forever. You cannot play the same thing over and over and over again. So one of the risks we've seen is when people try to corner this market, they really.
actually isolate us from the thing that could be most effective. Another big risk we've seen is this hubris or this idea that folks have moved into either medicine because they had sort of a media or tech background, or they've moved into gaming with more of a science background, neither of which have taken the time to get to know the entirety of what the other is capable of doing. And we see these, you know, we see a lot of things that are in the market right now that don't actually work. And the risk there is that.
People say, well, we didn't hurt anybody. It's like, well, you might well have because you deterred them from other care. At the very least you've delayed care and with mental health sometimes that can be a problem. On the other hand, we see the risks of someone coming in and saying, look, I'm going to just gamify this therapy and it's putting the market off or pushing people away from what could be a really ubiquitous solution. So I think those have been a lot of risks. Then in any particular treatment, whenever you're in an emergency, and I think it's important for us to understand that, you've got a 50 year old health emergency.
We're coming out of COVID, but we're not coming out of the health emergency. It's still accelerating. It's getting worse. Loneliness is an epidemic alone, and these things are having a great impact on our health. We risk that we can't reach everybody, or we can't treat everybody, or are getting some of it wrong. But it's a lot like what we did with building vaccines during COVID. It was such an emergency that the FDA and all of the agencies around the world agreed.
that these pharmaceutical companies that usually should take three to five years of very, very serious testing to build something that we would put in everybody, did it in one year and we put it in everybody's arms. I took my kids into those centers and I had those years. I was like, okay, here we go. You know, and we're, you know, we're, you know, we're people that have immunological concerns and stuff like that, but what were we going to do? It was a pandemic. This is also a health pandemic. And so there are risks and you know, whenever you change from.
Ryan Douglas (26:47)
you know, more of this controlled level of care where, you know, the doctor's making other decisions for you and you start making some more decisions for yourself, are there risks we'll make mistakes? There are. But it's important that we understand the real climate we're in. First of all, over 70 % of people who will choose to take their own life will never consult anybody before they do it. They don't have access to care or they don't choose to get care for any one reason. Also, six out of seven people who will attempt suicide once,
Well, it's actually self -correcting. If you're not, if it doesn't work out and you don't die, then it does actually often work out for a lot of people that are like, okay, enough is enough. They have that actual, I mean, that's a big neurological warning moment too. And so though we think of this as risky and what happens if these people become suicidal? And what happens if we reach out to these folks on this level and we're wrong? It's nowhere near the risk of doing nothing or staying with the status quo. Cause we're already seeing.
you know, over 50 % of the population and in young and in kids, it's rising really, really quickly too, are dealing with stress, anxiety, depression. Some numbers put that at 80 or 90 % in the USA, right? And you can get to 90 % of people. And you get to 90, right? And I think that's the thing about mental health. We say that we're a lot more honest about it, but I don't know if we are yet. I don't know. I mean, I think if everybody just told one story about how they feel about themselves sometimes,
Jiani (27:54)
80 to 90 % 90 %
Ryan Douglas (28:11)
we'd start to find that there's a lot of anxiety. There's a lot of depression. There's a lot of misconceptions out there about what it means to be happy. I believe that on the low level, like the mild to moderate level of anxiety and depression is probably not even a diagnosable condition. It's probably the human condition. We all go through these thoughts. There's stuff as much as nine. Right. It's we're thinking human beings. We have the ability to contemplate our entirety of our being.
Jiani (28:29)
Yeah, it's a constant battle.
Ryan Douglas (28:39)
And we have our lives in our own hands in ways that other entities on this planet don't think of like that. So it's not necessarily surprising. Some numbers say as much as 90 % of people have contemplated suicide, that doesn't mean they were going to do it. They just thought about, well, that was really hard today. What if I wasn't here anymore? So I think that we have a lot of risk in action. That is our greatest level of risk. And the biggest other risk is that we just aren't being truthful with one another, even now, with how really we're feeling.
and how much despair and isolation is floating around out there at the moment. And I think what we'll really see in the end is that there's only a small percentage of people that aren't feeling this way, some of which are the reasons we are feeling this way. And that what we call normal, what people want us to be is normal. I mean, the other thing I think is that I think a lot of us are neurodivergent more than we talk about. And we all try to get to normal as quick as possible to be like a small percentage of people.
And that control mechanism is part of the things that hurts our heart. We just want to be us. And we want to be accepted for the people we are. And then there's these standards that suggest you're supposed to be the certain thing, do the certain thing, look a certain way, talk a certain way. And then this idea that potentially there's, you know, that if you do those things, then you fit. And then when you do all those things, you find out it still isn't really fair, that you're not really always getting the right shake.
You know, if I behave like that person over there, or if we look at some of those political figures at the moment that looks to me like they should be in jail, if I did what they're doing, wouldn't I be in jail? This isn't, I mean, you know, there's, there's all of these things telling us that things aren't quite right. And that, and the fact that we don't talk enough about it, that's a huge.
Jiani (30:22)
Yeah, and I think just the way that we evaluate something through the usage of average. I feel like the whole society is wanting you to be average. And average is normal, average is good. Where average is like made up concept, everybody just so different. There's no average.
Ryan Douglas (30:23)
Nice.
That's right. That's right. We're so different and it's only, we're also built to be a community. We're not built to be alone. Right? So what happens is we're all great at some things and terrible at others. And, you know, our, the CEO of Deepwell, not Gerber talks about flawed diamonds. We're all diamonds and we're all flawed, but it's only when you stick us all together that you get this perfect thing. And I think that that is really important as well. If we all try to be the same,
We're just the same and we're not celebrating some of those big differences, I think society needs, right? And it gets us to think differently, act differently, be different. And that's what society needs right now. We can tell we gotta be different. So I think that this is really important. And whether it's like building a culture for a company or whether it's building a society or a community, there's...
this new conversation that has to be had out there about what it really means to accept one another and what kind of damage we do to ourselves as a society when we put certain pressures in certain places or when we use politics to divide us and these kind of things that seem to more benefit some specific politicians than the rest of us.
Jiani (31:55)
Yeah, so beautifully elaborated on. So as we move forward to the magic part of this conversation, we talked about just, yeah, I was just gonna help our audience to recap a little bit. So we talked about the story behind Ryan and the story behind Deepwell and how, you know, particular case studies of how...
Ryan Douglas (32:03)
Yes. Yeah, yeah. Bring on the magic.
you're doing.
Jiani (32:21)
games can be therapeutical, how media can be the medicine. And we also talk about some potential futures where medical devices and games can be integrated and to make human being more healed as a general species on this planet Earth. And we also explore some potential risks and challenges in the space. So question for you next is Ryan So when you were...
Ryan Douglas (32:26)
Hmm.
Jiani (32:50)
11 years old, what did you enjoy creating or doing that time disappeared?
Ryan Douglas (32:57)
well first of all, right around 11, I got my first computer and writing software. I mean, I disappeared in code. I mean, 12 hours at a time kind of thing. But anything that allowed me to extend thoughts into things was always before that it was there was nothing safe in my house that was electronic. I would take it apart, stick things back together, make other things. I just making of a thing.
and converting an idea into something real, bringing something through that veil of potentiality from concept to reality has always been the thing that just excited me. And people, I always wanted to do it with somebody. I never wanted to be a solo act. I learned to play music so I could be in a band. I built go -karts so the kids around the neighborhood could all go down the hill together. I was always really motivated to be.
not necessarily like popular or this big crowd, but I love the feeling of a tight band of friends. I always loved that, you know, from early days.
Jiani (34:03)
It's like family, like a healthy family. Yeah, where you feel like you belong.
Ryan Douglas (34:09)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I didn't really have that, you'd call it traditional family. So I think I would start very early on building it. And it's interesting. Some of those friends I had, they went out and they also did like pretty amazing, amazing things. A lot of us just kind of became builders of things because we started there so early together.
Jiani (34:28)
That's beautiful. And were there any particular challenge that you have to go through that makes you who you are?
Ryan Douglas (34:36)
yeah, I mean, I was a weirdo, still am a weirdo. And I was a weirdo in a time, I was neurodivergent in the time that people thought of that as being deviant. And so in my mind, I wanted to be heavily connected and I was often trying really hard to please people while I was often pissing them off. And that I soon took on the persona of a bad kid because it was easier in my heart to be the bad kid than the kid who was trying.
to be the good kid that people didn't like. So, well, it wasn't authentic. It was the opposite of authentic, but what it was is it protected my heart, right? It was like, yeah, I'm just a bad boy. And that's why people don't like it, but it wasn't a bad boy. So I think there was that. Also, there was a considerable amount of bullying in my life. I was not early on a very violent kid or a kid that wanted to fight and things like that. So there was, you know, there was, I was.
Jiani (35:08)
At least it's more authentic in a way.
Ryan Douglas (35:34)
I put into school the year younger, so I was always a little bit smaller. The bullying aspect, I mean, it was, and it still kind of raises its head today. There's now I push back very hard against people that I perceive as bullies or those folks that they take on that narcissistic personality stuff. I just do not have a lot of time or space for that anymore. And I think we got to recognize in the society again, it's another thing that goes on. Bullying.
When I was a kid, bullying was almost kind of like a rite of passage. It was like, that's kids being kids, that's boys being boys. But if you look, it is translated, it's boys and girls, and it's translated to men and women. It happens on all levels. It happens to people in their workplace. It happens to people in their families. And it was something that I very much had to overcome and find ways to draw lines. And it really came down to who you choose to put your time and energy with and around. And knowing when to say enough is enough.
and being brave sometimes, they walk in and go, this isn't gonna be like this, we're gonna change this narrative right now.
Jiani (36:39)
Just like what you're doing like set something on a particular intention like a game people can sing game can be bad but
Ryan Douglas (36:45)
well, let me be really clear when I do it. I'm scared as hell. Scared. It's scary. Right. I mean, the things that scared us more or little, they scare us right now and we shouldn't, you know, people tell this story. That's that 5 % of story of macho, bravado, you know, big venture capitalist based, you know, professional who does this and that. Most of it's scary and it's okay. You know, it's what you do. I actually think that's where bravery is, is where you're like,
Damn, that's scary. I didn't go for it anyways.
Jiani (37:16)
I'm gonna go anyway, I'm so scared, so what do you think is your magic?
Ryan Douglas (37:23)
So I have this, the first thing I think is my magic is that I can attract a certain kind of person. I mean, these builders, these people that want to make things, they want to make things better, they tend to come near and be around me. And that is, that is magic. It feels magic to be in the middle of it. And then the way my brain works. So I'm sort of a big generalist. I have this brain that takes in all of these feeds from all these different levels and then...
It does something some people call it symphonic thinking, but it kind of sticks all this stuff together and pops out solutions or ideas. So it's really great for working at the intersection of different disciplines. You know, and that's really, I think how I ended up making medical devices is because there was always all, you know, you had your doctors and you had your engineers, you had your patient advocates and your clinicians and, you know, and your payers and your, and all this kind of stuff. And I kind of can sit there.
and hear a little piece of all of it and stick it together in various ways. So I think that is maybe the superpower, but the greatest gift is the people that tend to show up around me. That's kind of why I can't stop working. It's not only that I feel like there's some things that have to be done, but I can't stand not being around the people that get drawn in when we have a big common purpose and we're after and chasing something. It's hard. That's...
It's hard not to want to do that. That's, that's addicting.
Jiani (38:49)
That feels like the kind of the ideal life that everybody secretly desires and need courage yet to need courage to kind of really pursue that.
Ryan Douglas (39:02)
Yeah, it's I wouldn't. I mean, I wouldn't say it's ideal because there's always this when you've got the means to retire, there's often the question of the choices you're making. If I've given my family enough time, if I've given my personal health enough time, why am I still drawn to doing more? What is that motivation? And, you know, it's scary. It's I mean, I went out when I retired. I was at the top of my game. I mean, everything had gone as right as he could go as far as and then to go back in and to take on something like this. I mean,
is to, I mean, the highest likelihood is failure when you move into these situations. And failure surrounded, if you think of who I like to work with, I like to work with the people I love, and failure surrounded by the people that you care for the most. That's a keep you up at night kind of proposition. So I don't know if it's ideal. I just don't know what else I would do.
Jiani (39:45)
you
And I think it's all about the journey, the process. Fail forward, I think.
Ryan Douglas (39:55)
Yeah. And that has been a big thing. I love that you said that because I have really spent a lot of time. I lived a lot for the completion only to find that at the end of the completion was just another journey and another cycle. And if you're disappointed by that, you're literally disappointed by the fact you're still alive, right? Cause there is never going to be an end to the something, right? Hello to every farm you're supposed to do everything perfectly the way you're supposed to do it. And tomorrow there'll be more. And probably if you look closely, you missed one or two things along.
So, I mean, it really is journey based. And I think that's part of, again, why I get so excited about who comes near me. Because it's not, you know, we're kind of done. I'm done with the hero's journey. I've told that story. What I'm on right now is something that my friend Dave Zaboski, he's a former Disney animator and an amazing human being, someone who should be on here. He talks about the kindred quest. This next thing, after the hero's journey, where are you next? Well, you collect up your super friends.
Jiani (40:49)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Ryan Douglas (40:53)
and you go forward together to try to do the next big thing. And that one, that just, my God, that is, that's what I've wanted since I was 11 years old. So, you know, band of ragtag kind of messed up, you know, broken toys off to change the world. And I love that feeling. I love it a lot.
Jiani (41:09)
Love it. I love it. It's like watching like a Marvel's movie in real action.
Ryan Douglas (41:16)
or like the Rugrats maybe. It was Marvel much more like, hey, who brought the sandwiches? But it's still that idea.
Jiani (41:25)
Love it. Everybody can be their own heroes. It's all about where they are, what they're doing, with whom and when.
Ryan Douglas (41:29)
Yeah, I mean.
I think we need to reframe what it looks like too. I mean, I'm seeing that in society right now. I'm seeing people, you know, I would love to see trading cards filled with, you know, top scientists, top contributors, you know, how much are you worth or how far can you hit a ball? All of those things are impressive and people have worked hard for them, but they are an emphasis, maybe, not maybe, they're an emphasis on the wrong thing, right? And there's a chance here to do right thing, all of which again, this all ties back to story and story can all be propagated through media. So that's...
And I think we're seeing that's that really interesting. Yeah. And that's a really interesting thing about bringing medicine, which is really purpose driven, but often quite quiet about its purpose to media. That's often not purpose driven, but very loud about the purpose. And, you know, and, but that doesn't mean that's actually the case. I mean, we've found a lot of people, people in media who've been very successful, who are now like all I want is purpose. And clearly there's a lot of people working in medicine and med device that they talk the game, but they're not really playing for real.
Jiani (42:03)
Full circle.
Ryan Douglas (42:32)
But what's really cool about immersive medicine, what we're doing right now, is it seems to be attracting this group of people that are doing it for the right reasons. Probably because it's not very lucrative yet, so you've got to want to do it.
Jiani (42:44)
heart driven.
Ryan Douglas (42:46)
definitely a little bit of that.
Jiani (42:47)
That's good. That's a good starting point. And it doesn't hurt when it becomes lucrative and everybody got rewarded. And it's going to only add to the dopamine and kind of fuel the continued exploration.
Ryan Douglas (43:00)
It's the best part of the story. I mean, if you never, and that's actually what's amazing is working with people at Deepwell across the board. Nobody's counting their stock or saying, when do we get richer? Even discussing an IPO matter of fact, everybody's like, no, thank you. They're, they're just out to do a thing. And this is the journey I did go on before the Kindred Quest I went on with next turn. And we weren't sitting there counting our dollars. We were counting the ability for us to be as.
and reach as many people as possible, accessibility and care. And yeah, the impact. And then when the money shows up, well, that's a very, very sweet part of the story. And it feels like you earned it.
Jiani (43:29)
the impact.
beautiful.
Let's kind of conclude that here. I think it's a beautiful ending right here. And I think that's an ending and also a beginning too. So, well, you know, maybe the kinder spirits will hop on a next adventure. It's about how many people they benefit. Life is going to be long for a lot of us. Yeah, always. Healthy. Happy.
Ryan Douglas (43:54)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.
I mean, that's what we're hoping for, right? That's where we're playing for long, you know, long and, and, and happy.
Jiani (44:09)
fulfilled.
Ryan Douglas (44:10)
Yeah, I mean, getting up every day and just starting with the idea that you're like, I'm glad I have today, you know, and I've had a lot of time in my life where I woke up not so glad to have today and I'm glad to have.
Jiani (44:24)
Beautiful. So we're glad to have you. That makes our day beautiful. So thank you so much, Ryan. And if anybody who wants to know more about Ryan and Deepwell, his information and social links will be attached in the show notes. So feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn and.
Ryan Douglas (44:29)
I'm glad to be had. Thank you for that.
Jiani (44:46)
and check out his company and stay tuned to his next development launch with the product. So thank you so much for listening. And Ryan, thank you so much for coming to our podcast. It's a pleasure and honor to have you. I'm sending best blessings to you and your kindred spirited team. And look forward to actually play one of the games.
Ryan Douglas (45:09)
Thank you. I want to thank you for doing this. And also the amount of organization and planning that you put into doing this. I really appreciate it. You've put a lot of energy into meeting folks, preparing. We met a couple of times. Not everybody puts this kind of energy into their podcast. Thank you for that very much.
Jiani (45:30)
Thank you. I think that's kind of my mission is to connect people, share their story with the world and create a space, create a space for everyone.
Ryan Douglas (45:42)
Yeah, yeah, so keep doing that.
Jiani (45:45)
Thank you! So I think talking to people like you helped me to validate that I'm on the right path and that gives me the dopamine that I need to keep going. So thank you.
Ryan Douglas (45:58)
Yeah, I mean, I know you had Caitlin Carlson, I mean, that's another example of just a wonderful human out to do wonderful things.
Jiani (46:06)
Yes, yes, I am.
Ryan Douglas (46:08)
She is one of the super friends at Deepwell. She's in the background helping out all the time.
Jiani (46:13)
Such a great talk. So I will be pausing right here.
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The content shared is to highlight the passion and wonder of our guests. It is not professional advice. Please read our evidence-based research to help you develop your unique understanding.
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