“I'm a super optimist. I'm generally pretty buoyant. I see the silver lining in just about everything. Throughout life, as things have come up, I've always viewed it as, how is this a good thing versus how is this a setback?” – Jack Swain

Jack Swain is Head of Clinical Operations at Mindbloom, a mental health and wellbeing company focused on psychedelic therapy. Before joining Mindbloom, Jack Swain was a healthcare consultant at The Chartis Group, where he worked with the Cleveland Clinic and Michigan Medicine.

Chapters

  • Jack’s daily habits for mental health
  • OneNote and Getting Things Done
  • Jack’s superpowers and struggles

Book Recommendations

Transcript

Daniel Scrivner:

Jack's Swain, thank you so much for a little bit of extra time so I can ask you some of these bonus questions we ask every guest.

 

Jack Swain:

Great.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

The first question we always start with is some sort of connecting question. And since so much of what we were talking with revolves around mental health, I was curious just to ask if you have any practices that are important to you or that you try to do daily that are kind of centered around mental health?

 

Jack Swain:

The first few things are pretty standard. In priority orders, sleep, exercise, and diet. If I don't get seven hours of sleep, if I go a few days without exercising, I have a pretty high fat protein, low-carb diet. And those things are all really important to me for maintaining my energy levels like low stress. And I can definitely feel my mood and cognitive function just get really quickly out of whack if I'm not tending to those things.

 

Jack Swain:

I'm a periodic meditator. I don't have a daily practice, but it's something that I do as needed when I just feel that I need kind of a dose of mindfulness if I'm in a particularly stressful time or feel like I'm starting to lose that ability to kind of zoom out and have perspective on how I'm feeling.

 

Jack Swain:

And then what has been really helpful for me over the past two years is my ketamine therapy sessions. And so as, I mentioned in our last interview, I'm a Mindbloom client myself and my monthly sessions are just such a powerful reset and a great tool just in times of acute anxiety as they pop up as well, which has been more frequent during the past year during COVID than they've been in the past. So it's been a great tool to have in my disposal.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. Unsurprising that stress levels have been higher for multiple reasons.

 

Jack Swain:

COVID Plus startup are a great recipe for unique levels of stress.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. Turn that knob up to like 12 out of 10. So we always ask everyone on the show, this is a little bit of a repeat or an extension, but just to kind of broaden out. The question is around habits and routines. And you can take this question any way you want. It can be, I don't have habits and routines. It can be, I have them, or I've tried them, or here's what I'm doing now or here's what hasn't worked. I'm curious, are there things you do daily, weekly, monthly, that help you show up as your best self that you can share with everyone listening?

 

Jack Swain:

Yeah. The most powerful are the three I mentioned before; diet, exercise, sleep. Another thing that's a little weird is I'm very regimented in my caffeine intake. I find it just fascinating how many coffee drinkers don't have awareness of how much caffeine they're consuming. Grande's Starbucks is 300-plus milligrams of caffeine, which is a lot. And so in my early work years, I'd have these big morning spikes, afternoon spikes. And so I now take a hundred milligrams of caffeine at 6:00, 9:00, 12:00, and 3:00 PM. And so that-

 

Daniel Scrivner:

[crosstalk 00:56:04] the drink or is that a pill?

 

Jack Swain:

Could be either, but typically a pill. And so that's just how I kind of maintain this level of caffeination throughout the day. And that's, with experimentation over time, been just the right level.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

I'm blinking, too, but I've looked at some of those supplements and they not only typically have caffeine, but they also have something else.

 

Jack Swain:

[crosstalk 00:56:25]?

 

Daniel Scrivner:

Yes. That helps kind of regulate that. So is that what you take? It's a pill that has both of those?

 

Jack Swain:

I do take [inaudible 00:56:30] as well.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

That's fascinating. So talking about tools then, are there physical, digital tools that you love using? And these can be things in your personal life, things in your work life.

 

Jack Swain:

Okay. I'm obsessed with OneNote. So whatever your note-taking app. They seem to be pretty interchangeable, but I learned long ago that anything I don't write down, I will forget. And so I've been just religious about using my note app. And this kind of all crystallized. I read Getting Things Done, which is a widely applauded productivity and personal organization book. And that really helped to crystallize taking an approach that I thought worked pretty well. And then seeing like the best-in-class approach to personal organization. So email management, getting through your inbox, prioritizing your tasks, how you follow up with people, how you record agendas. And so kind of OneNote, and then applying the Getting Things Done methodology to that has gotten me to, I think my peak level of personal organization and productivity.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

That's great. I'm so glad you brought up getting things done. My experience when I read that book is I feel like I walked away being like, "Man, I must be the most unproductive person in the world." Because I wasn't doing anything in that book. It kind of lets you know where the bar is. And the bar is much higher than what most people think is.

 

Jack Swain:

Yeah. It's so nice, too, because it's one of those things we all come up with our own strategies for productivity. And so when someone's like, "Oh, hey, would you like to read the best one?" "Yeah, for sure." Again, now I don't even ask to think about it and I just know what the best method is and try my best to implement it.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

I've similarly had conversations with friends who have tried getting things done, tried other methodologies and ended up coming back. It's interesting, too, that it is... In the same way that you're trying to come up with the best approach to psychedelic therapy, getting things done is the best approach or the best system for kind of productivity. We ask one question of every guest that comes on, which I love. And you can again take this any way you like, but what do you think your super powers are? And where do they show up in your life?

 

Jack Swain:

I think my superpower is positivity. I'm a super optimist. I'm generally pretty buoyant. I see the silver lining in just about everything. And so I think just throughout life, as things have come up, I've always viewed like, how is this a good thing versus how is this a setback? And so I think that's a characteristic that I certainly hope that I can hold on to as I continue this journey in life.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

That's one of my favorite super powers. And no one has said that so far. So-

 

Jack Swain:

Oh, right on.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

... pus one for originality. So kind of the flip side of that coin, what do you struggle with? When I know, speaking for myself, there's kind of these themes in my life of things that have butted my head up against it that's taken me, unfortunately, 30-plus years figure and start moving the needle on. So the question is, what do you struggle with and how have you worked on those things over time?

 

Jack Swain:

One thing that's been a recent, past year or two, focus of mine is being present, working for a startup that you pour so much of your mental energy and time into. It can be really hard to turn that off. And so when you want to really show up for your partner, your family, stay in touch with people you really care about, that's something that I'm constantly focusing on.

 

Jack Swain:

And so ways that I've tried to improve there are like meditation, kind of trying to control the radio station that's playing in your brain. Sometimes I forget that that's something that I have control over. And so being mindful about what station is playing in my brain and consciously trying to change it has been helpful. And then just protecting time for the people I love, which I know you have a couple of young kids. So I'm sure that's something that you're working on, too.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

It's super important. And yeah, the only thing I would add there that I've kind of noticed over time is I think that the people who find the most energy, and meaning, and excitement in their professional lives. And that's not to say everyone, if you're a well-rounded individual, you should have that in all areas of your life, not just in your work. But if you have that, it feels especially important to find ways to shut that off. It really is kind of an on-off system. And I know a lot of people that can be things like turning off your phone when you get home, closing your laptop, not even bringing it into the house. Those are some things I've tried, but to be super honest, that's still something I'm struggling with.

 

Jack Swain:

Yeah. And working from home.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

Yes. That doesn't help.

 

Jack Swain:

You can't not bring your laptop into your house when that's your office, too.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

It's true.

 

Jack Swain:

But you brought up some good ways to kind of hack that.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

My hope is that the work-from-home movement helps people... Well, I think maybe better said, forces people to grapple with that and figure out a solution that works for them, because-

 

Jack Swain:

We'll have to. Or if this mental health epidemic isn't going to get any better if working from home just pauses deeper into the things that stress a lot of people.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

So we asked this question of everyone that comes on the show as well. Do you have any favorite books? And these can be books, these can be articles, but I think what we're really searching for is things that have had a profound impact on you that you can continue to kind of bubble up in your mind.

 

Jack Swain:

One is Freakonomics. I've read Freakonomics, I think in my senior year of high school, and that book just very much influenced both the way that I thought and my career path as well. The book is just such an incredible manifesto on incentives and how they can influence behavior, often in ways that you wouldn't expect, and always being cognizant of causation versus correlation. So Dubner and Levitt just do such a great job of laying out these concepts. And I had gone into college thinking I would major in political science and be a lawyer. And I switched to economics. And I think that a lot of the reason was reading that book when I did. So that's something that I think has potentially very profoundly shifted my career path in addition to the way I think.

 

Jack Swain:

Another, I won't talk anymore about this, but as we talked before, How to Change Your Mind. And the reason that I put that at the top is that was really foundational for my kind of understanding of how potentially profound psychedelics could be in the mental healthcare space. And it really kind of propelled me to jump at the opportunity to join Mindbloom when Dylan approached me. So again, without having that foundation, I still think I'd be here, but I'm not as confident as I am without that perspective going in.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. You might not be here here, meaning in this role, at this company.

 

Jack Swain:

That's exactly what I meant. And then third... So one that's been really powerful as we've built out our culture at Mindbloom is No Rules Rules, which is the Netflix culture book. And it's awesome. It lays out how Netflix builds this culture of freedom and responsibility, and emphasizes the importance of candid feedback. The radical candor framework of challenge directly, care personally.

 

Jack Swain:

And then also that once you have that in place, it makes it really easy to remove policies and procedures because you have this self-governing organization and when you can remove policies and procedures and allow people to do what they think is best for the company and everybody has the experience of bureaucracy holding up, making progress on a project or getting your driver's license or whatever it might be.

 

Jack Swain:

So at Mindbloom we've really, really resisted developing policies and procedures and emphasizing this culture of candor. I think it's helped us all to be really comfortable providing and receiving constructive feedback, which is so important to growing and building an organization, and letting people just really thrive without too many restrictions and controls.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. It's huge. I always find... I mean, just one comment on No Rules Rules. So I got that correct. I have to look at my notes to make sure I got that right.

 

Jack Swain:

It's tongue twister.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, exactly. But just the one comment I was going to make on that is I have never met anyone at a hyper-fast growing company, so you could think of like a startup, that doesn't think they have an incredibly high bar for hiring. So this kind of commonality is everyone's like, we hire the best talent. But what's fascinating to me is if you then follow that through and see how they treat candidates once they join the vast majority of people say they hire the best people then they come in and they babysit them and they micromanage them. And it's always felt like a profound disconnect to me.

 

Jack Swain:

Totally.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

If you're hiring the best people, shouldn't you have an environment that allows them to thrive? So I love that books like that are being written. That's changing.

 

Jack Swain:

Netflix uses the concept of, I think it's called the informed captain. And so on any given project, the informed captain is the person who's ultimately making the decision. So it's not the person's manager who almost certainly doesn't have as much context about the project that their direct report has been pouring all of their time and energy into. And so if you truly believe, as you said, that you're hiring the best people, you should free them to make decisions, understanding that they have the most applicable information. And so it's like context over control as well.

 

Jack Swain:

And Dylan's great at that at constantly distributing how he's thinking about things and what our top priorities are throughout the organization. Then we cascade those down to our respective departments. And that's actually not even true. Cascading is a concept that we are very transparent at making things visible to the whole organization so that we can prevent the need for cascading, which you never want to play telephone.

 

Jack Swain:

I think Elon Musk had, there was... I think the Business Insider pointed out that he had a letter to his department where he said anyone who controls the flow of communication should find somewhere else to work more or less. And like the best path for communication is the shortest path. So if you need to tell someone, don't tell their boss, tell them directly.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

Absolutely agree.

 

Jack Swain:

So we really try to embody a lot of those principles of transparency and autonomy at Mindbloom.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

That's amazing. So we always have same two closing questions. And the first one is one of my favorites, which is if you can share a favorite failure.

 

Jack Swain:

I'll give one that's a throwback. So growing up, I was obsessed with baseball. And I had delusions one day being a professional baseball player. And then high school rolled around and everybody grew except me. I was very late to hit my growth spurt. And found myself as like one of three people cut from the sophomore team. And so on high school, you're in this so much of your identity and how you yourself socially is wrapped up in how you view yourself.

 

Jack Swain:

And so that was... I had to very quickly grapple with the death of my view of myself as a serious athlete. But then was able to kind of refocus that time in school and extracurriculars, which it turned out I was relatively much better at anyway. And so I think kind of that early setback and just jumping to being buoyant and kind of an optimist and, as I said before, I think my super power is positivity.

 

Jack Swain:

So I think that's kind of crafted the way that I think about my career, which is like opportunistically taking the most promising path and not getting too caught up in where I thought I would be, or being too focused on a path that I thought was important years ago. And I think that kind of path is also what led me to Chartis, and healthcare consulting, and then to Mindbloom.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

I love that perspective. And I love that point of view because it's so true. I mean, we all have those moments in our lives where it's like we think that our life is a book and we have the pen and we're writing the story ourselves. It's like that's so not true. You live in a world where there's so many other forces at play. And I think your point there that if you can detach a little bit from what you want and just be open and explore and accept whatever is most exciting that comes your way feels like a really great place to be in.

 

Jack Swain:

I love biographies. I'm reading the George Washington biography right now. And it's like how many things had to go right for him to be in the position he was. How many of his relatives had to tragically die for him to be in a financial situation. To go like lead the Continental Army.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

Wow.

 

Jack Swain:

It's just crazy. And so you think of somebody who's arguably the greatest figure in U.S. history and how many things had to go right for him to be in that position. And I think anytime you read a biography, there's our rare person who's just truly knocked down every wall to get to where they want it to be. But so many times, there's a lot of luck involved. And a lot of things have to go right in order for you to end up in the right place. And you certainly can't predict that upfront. So being opportunistic and rolling with the punches and just making the best of the situation is just like crucial to staying same, being happy.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

It seems like a timeless skill, given that biography. I'll find that and link to it. That sounds super fascinating. So the last question is, what is your definition of success?

 

Jack Swain:

My definition of success is what would need to be true in order for me to look back on my life in my later years and be proud of what I accomplished. And so knowing that I'm on that path or thinking that I'm putting myself in a path to accomplish those things is how I view whether or not I think I'm successful at any given time.

 

Jack Swain:

I think the three things that will have to be true in order for me to feel that way are, one, developing really strong relationships with the people around me, really mutually beneficial relationships. Two is making an impact in the world, like leaving the world a better place than I found it. And three is just often experiencing joy.

 

Jack Swain:

I'm trying to blank on his name, but there's a Harvard professor who writes about happiness. And he talks about how happiness is more a function of the frequency of how often you're happy, not the peaks of happiness. And so just spending a lot of time in that state. And so I think I have shied away from kind of pursuing paths that would be really hard, rough, long-term investments for some peak joy down the road and really focusing on making sure that at any given time I'm happy, enjoying what I'm doing.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

That seems like a huge plus one for what's about the journey and not necessarily the destination, because you need to be excited and happy all along the way.

 

Jack Swain:

Totally.

 

Daniel Scrivner:

This has been an incredible interview. So thank you so much for your time, Jack. I really appreciate it.

 

Jack Swain:

Yeah. This has been a blast. Thanks so much for having me.