Hello, this is Richard Jacobs, I am the host of the Finding Genius podcast, I’m also the executive director of the Finding Genius Foundation, a 501C3 registered charity with the IRS. I am sending you this message because I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people asking why are you doing this project, this codex on anxiety and depression. So, I’m going to tell you a little bit of some of the events that came together over a period of years to encourage me to do this project and to see the need for it. So, about 4 years ago, I was driving on the highway, coming home late at night from a coffee shop, I shouldn’t have been drinking coffee at 1:00 in the morning but back then, I did. All of a sudden, I can’t see the highway, later on, I figured out what happened which I’ll describe shortly but I was knocked out and I kind of came to partially and I realized that my car was going off the highway. Luckily it was onto a grassy area and I spun out and came to a rest.

When I came to a rest, I knew that the car really was in bad shape and my head was hurting and I felt around in my mouth and I thought oh no, there’s a bunch of objects in my mouth, what is that? I didn’t know what I thought and I was hurting, my glasses were knocked off. I got out of the car, I was in a lot of pain, I felt my head because it was wet and there was blood all over the place coming out of my head. I thought oh no, I got into an accident and I don’t know if my head was blown open or if my brain was hanging out. I don’t know what happened. I went to the back of the car, I couldn’t really see too well but I found a pair of pants and I put it against my head to stem the bleeding and I spit into my hand because I didn’t know what was in my mouth, I thought my teeth were broken and I looked closely and I saw it was broken glass that was in my mouth, shattered bits of glass. It was a really bad accident.

What I found out later was a kid that was about 21, he was a bartender, he was coming home and somehow he didn’t see me and I was on the highway going at 65, he was probably going on 100 because the whole back of my trunk was gone, smashed, the whole back seat was smashed to a pulp, thank God I was alone in the car but literally half the car was gone, crunched. So, he must have been going really fast when he hit me. I go to the hospital, let me fast forward a little bit quicker here, they do CT scans etc. and they tell me I have nodules in my thyroid. I didn’t know what this means, I come to find out that I have thyroid cancer when I went to the doctor and hearing that; God forbid if someone that is listening has cancer or knows someone, it kind of makes your insides melt when you hear that.

So, I went through the process. I had to have a biopsy in my neck and here is really the one thing that struck me. When I had the biopsy, it’s invasive, it’s painful, I thought to myself, even if I had millions of dollars, I wouldn’t have 2 or 3 biopsies just to make sure it was done right. So, that’s one thought that crossed my mind, another one was you are in an imminent fear of dying right away or at least I was when I had this cancer, even though it’s a pretty good cancer to get that is highly curable, that’s what I mean. I went to a specialist and then I went to some other specialist but they were like 4 to 6 months away because they were so busy and I thought that there is no time for that and I need to get help now, I need to research this now otherwise I’m going to die. Again, I wasn’t thinking straight but when someone tells you that you have cancer, very few people are thinking straight, they are stressed out of their minds.

They are depressed, they are anxious, all that stuff. So, fast forward a number of years, I’m doing the podcast and I’m asking these questions of people and I’m getting a lot of I don’t know, that’s not my area, I don’t know. I asked the same question from 4, 5, 6 or 7 people and after a while, what I noticed is I’ll get someone on the podcast that says oh yeah, I know about that. Here is an example of it and he’ll tell you like it’s no big deal. So, over time, I realized that all these practitioners and researchers don’t really talk to each other as much as they should. I know they are busy, they’ve got to run their labs, their businesses and all that but there is not enough communication there. So, if you add in the biopsy, I didn’t want to have multiple, the experts, which I had to wait for and I felt like I had no time for and the fact that researchers don’t talk to each other enough, a plan started formulating in my head.

So, what I realized is this, I hope this summarizes it. If any practitioner you go to for anxiety or depression or if you know someone that goes to them, they’ll probably know about 1% of all the possible treatments out there. What if I and a team of talented researchers can assemble 21% of everything that is out there about anxiety and depression. It’s going to be a game changer, unbelievable game changer, that’s the whole goal of the depression and anxiety codex. The whole goal is to note every possible treatment that is out there for anxiety and depression, drugs, alternative medicine, meditation, religion, you name it, I’m holding nothing back. I’m not going to include only traditional medicine, I’m not going to include only alternative medicine, I want to include everything I can find because I want to try to grow the available knowledge from 1% to 21%.

I’m not expecting 100%, I know it’s impossible. So, the end product of this is going to be a quiz. People will take the quiz if they are suffering or if someone they know is suffering, then the results will be shown to the person in terms of match percentage. So, it will give you suggestions on what you can do to help yourself or help a love one or someone you know about that has this problem. If I can do this right, with my team’s help and I think we will, this is going to be the world’s number one resource on how to help yourself or help someone else with anxiety and depression. That’s the goal here. I see the anxiety and depression going around as a follow-on pandemic to the original one which you all know what that is. I just see misery and anger and fear and who knows what else everywhere. I see this all over the world, not just here. That’s why this project is so important.

Now, we’ve got our board of directors, we are now starting the fundraising. Regardless, I’m going to be funding this project, at least with a skeleton crew until fundraising picks up.