Why Wellness Apps Fail – and How to Fix That, with Nicki Sprinz of ustwo

0:06Katy Cowan:Have you ever been awake at 3am googling symptoms and figuring out how to rewrite your life plan? Well, I know I have. This episode is for anyone who's trying to close the gap between intention and action, especially if you're a creative like me building your own path. Because here's the promise. By the end of this conversation, you'll understand how digital coaching done well can actually help habits stick, not through pressure or guilt or anything weird, but through thoughtful design. Hello there, I'm Katie Cowan, and this is a brand new season of the Creative Beam podcast. I am so happy to be back.

0:44Katy Cowan:Now, if you've been following my personal journey in recent years, then you'll know that I've had a few health challenges, to say the least. I've had to properly rebuild and design myself back up again, picking myself off the floor, literally. It's almost like I've become the project. Now, part of that recovery, I turned to AI. I found that it really helped me, whether it was helping me figure out what I was going to do with the content on Creative Booms, you know, ideas, brainstorming, that sort of thing, whether I just need a friend at 4am when I couldn't sleep because I was in lots of pain.

1:19Katy Cowan:Anyway, enough about me. Today we're talking about the digital coaching revolution, something super positive. The idea that AI combined with real human expertise can act as a bridge, a companion, and I guess a nudge in those in-between moments that are always really difficult to manage. Because if you work for yourself, you'll know how lonely that space can be. There's no boss checking in, no one reminding you to rest, no one keeping you accountable when motivation inevitably dips. My guest is Nikki Sprintz, Managing Director at Us Too, the studio behind Monument Valley and a range of behaviour-led digital products in health and wellness.

2:02Katy Cowan:Her brilliant team is working at the forefront of designing tools that help people change, but they're doing it thoughtfully and responsibly. We talk about why most wellness apps fail, how behavioral design can support real habit change, and what responsibility comes with building products that sit so close to our health and confidence. And believe you me, believe you me, it really is a responsibility. So if you've ever wanted support without surrendering control, this one's for you.

2:39Katy Cowan:This episode is brought to you by Adobe, and there's a genuinely good offer worth knowing about. Right now, new and existing free users in the UK can get three full months of Adobe Express Premium completely free. Just log into your Adobe account and it's applied automatically. The offer runs until the 26th of April, so don't sleep on it. More details at the link in the show notes.

3:07Katy Cowan:Well, you'll have to forgive me, Nicky, because I'm a little bit rusty after Christmas and doing a podcast again a second a 12th season is you know wow okay congratulations yeah it's um it's been really nice I've been on a bit of a journey with it really just figuring out which way it's gonna go the twists and turns I had a gut feeling of the theme that I wanted and I think it's kind of worked out so yeah I mean what else can you do I mean do you would you say that's been similar in your career path you just figure it out as you go along or are you a little bit more organized than me. No, not organized at all.

3:43It's been an absolute meandering. I mean, so meandering from early stage journalism to being a kind of digital producer and strategist to moving into more of the business client facing to then running studios. So meandering indeed. I have no good advice to anyone other than just, you know, do what you love and, you know, feel good about actually feel good about the decision you make at the time don't you feel like it's a

4:10Katy Cowan:bit like george's marvelous medicine you know you you're not going to remember all the ingredients that go into that cauldron you've just got to kind of crack on and do it yourself yeah i like that analogy i'm actually just reading that book with my youngest so um we're on uh the fourth medicine mix you never know what's going in just keep trying do you know i can't remember and i might read it again myself and i haven't even got any kids well speaking of like career development i think that's what we're going to talk about today, isn't it? We're going to be talking about like the digital coaching revolution, which is really fascinating to me because I have found AI to be very much a friend in the last couple of years, having been through a lot personally.

4:50Katy Cowan:And I just find it fascinating that this is something you wanted to talk about. Why did you want to talk about digital coaching? Well, we've, at us too, we've been experimenting with AI for quite some time we've had quite a good coaching background uh you know one of the products we worked on was joe wicks the body coaches um digital companion app and it was amazing working with him he had such a good business um but it was kind of all pdf and behind private links and he wanted to make that a digital business that was everything from building his team coming up with business model kind of going through transformation but also creating this digital partner that would enable you to have a very inclusive fitness journey so we love doing that and we learned loads about it and then obviously we sort of started to watch what was happening in AI and so the first step for us was to experiment ourselves and at the time I mean I don't think it's gone away but gut health was the zeitgeist everything was all about what are you eating what's going on with your microbiome are you eating enough plants and we knew that about 50 percent of health apps are deleted after first use so there's a real kind of engagement problem so we wanted to look at the space of adherence seeing can ai actually help simplify how people kind of think about their health think about coaching so sproutiful which is what we called it was very simple in fact other companies are now doing it this is a while ago you take a photo of your food and then it would automatically with the use of AI nudge you to let you know how many plant points were in that picture and then it would show you say over a week how you were progressing on grains how you were progressing on veg how you're progressing on fruit nuts etc you can imagine legumes obviously very important the underrated um good good beans for your gut um and it was very visually engaging but frictionless right you could if you wanted if you didn't take a photo and you forgot you could just type it in so it was multimodal and then we also built in this AI coach that would help you as a kind of reminder why you're trying to change your habits so it was both the sort of coaching companion but also the simplicity of AI and we found we did a small closed beta we found about 75 % of users thought more meaningfully and increased their plant usage over a period of one month which is great very very simple And so building on that, we did work with L 'Oreal around something called SpotScan Plus Coach.

7:28Watch me get my S's slurring there, which is for La Roche-Posay. They have fantastic dermatological acne products. But what often was happening is that customers would use the products. And then if you don't see immediate results, it would drop off. so we wanted to do something that enabled you to sort of coach you to come back and see what it was like if you use the recommended sort of months usage did you see improvements so they could take a picture of their face ai would nudge and help encourage them to use that and then we've also we're also working with a large u.s based health brand around smoking cessation so i guess i'm using examples of different points here from sort of smoking quitting smoking through to looking after your acne getting better skin through to looking after your body through to we also work with Sof's Plant Kitchen she's an amazing sort of wellness fitness Instagram influencer but also writer trainer and she's created a completely sort of vegan plant-based diet to help you get better in your fiber and protein intake and she's written a cookbook and we've done the digital companion for that.

8:39So all of these things really are about just living better lives. And I'm not a massive AI hyper. I think there are lots of things that are really important that we do using our own brains and critical thinking. It's never going to stop being important. But AI is a great kind of addition. It's part of the team. It's part of the toolbox. And I love hearing that AI has been really useful to you as a kind of coach and what you were going through.

9:05Katy Cowan:Yeah, gosh, I've used it for everything, how to how to dress better how to you know how to how to build a kind of gym routine but then you kind of think oh that would have been a stylist that would have been a coach but then I suppose it's a bit like the old you know if you were going to sort of rip off films from the television yeah you you wouldn't necessarily have bought that film anyway if you really love it you would buy it if you really wanted that human expertise you would do it and funny enough I have worked with a coach and I have worked with a stylist so you know it's all good but I think the thing I love about it is it's that little kind of extra layer it's that little assistant just to sort of nudge you along and I guess if you're working in the field of behavioral design a lot it will be recognizing how to sort of nudge people along to form better habits to form better patterns yeah yeah exactly um those little nudges those reminders um you know really understanding for example obviously January is the time of year we're all meant to be having resolutions I don't make any personally but you know work out more or choose better clothes or whatever it is that you're thinking about and actually there's always this really good intention but then activity kind of drops off because say gyms or other institutions and setups aren't actually thinking about your intrinsic motivation and how to kind of continue the intent whereas I think an AI coach can really help do that um to remind you um and think about as you say behavioral design um and what really helps people change their habits um but also look it's really important to look at your intrinsic motivation what someone really trying to achieve it's not easy to change right it's not easy to do different things differently absolutely not what do they say is it 30 days to form a new habit something like that yeah it's hard it's really tough did you ever were you ever addicted to anything where you had to like you know really kind of go cold turkey or or because for me I think in my I was a smoker yeah same in my early 20s I just went cold turkey for two weeks crawled the walls for about three months thereafter and then it just got easier and easier but that that was probably the hardest thing I've ever quit totally I had to at the time I remember reading quite a bit I actually had to pick up a new habit so I got into running um nice you know because I recognize I've got a personality who's quite sort of all in and it was really hard to just give something up that I'd loved and had a lot of fun with as I suppose some kids of the 80s and 90s did um you know and um so actually just getting into running um really helped yeah it's replacing it with something positive um and running's quite can be quite addictive can't it when you when you get good at it when you go past that horrible 10 minute what do they call it the 10 minute burn phase yeah when you're like oh it's amazing feel like they've got you know holes in them and you're just like oh my god I just can't do this and then one day it clicks and it's just incredible yeah I'm uh like most women in my 40s I'm now into strength training but there was but there was a period of my life that I was happily running half marathons and really I like the moment in your um that moment at about 15 20 minute mark where your brain switches off and you're just running and it's just the simplicity of your feet connecting with the road or the trails or whatever you're doing um i think it's incredibly freeing and it's um yeah it's a great healthy habit to adopt yeah totally i love how the breath you notice your breath as well you just feel at one and it's just yeah it just empties your mind and it's very um very mindful thing to do um so when you're talking about digital coaching what does that actually look like in real life so that's a great question um so in real life I mean I suppose it's it's about it's a companion experience so in the experience um if we are I say looking at health and fitness um it might be that you are getting your recipe and your meals from the digital app but then you're getting those reminders and nudges have you gone out for that run today do you want to do a live workout with us um let's from you're getting sort of motivational nudges um really good bespoke content regularly updated content and the ai enhancement might be that piece where you've been very open at the beginning i suppose in the example of sproutiful if you we would ask you why do you want to eat more plants a week and perhaps a classic answer might be i'm looking to be slightly healthier or Or I've been told by the doctor I've got to lower my blood pressure or something's going on.

13:44And by us creating this bespoke coaching model in partnership with a behavioral scientist, we were able to ask the kinds of questions that truly understood your motivation so that we could prompt you with bespoke. It was AI prompts, obviously, bespoke nudges to think about. Remember, it's about your blood. You know, going back to that core thing. remember it's about your blood pressure so try having more bananas for your potassium or and making sure that you're reducing your x intake obviously i'm not a medical practitioner so no one should be listening to any of what i'm saying with that in mind um but yeah but so basically just kind of continually nudging at the right level and giving you that very bespoke guidance um and i guess you know a long long time ago we made something about a decade ago called mood notes which we made in partnership with clinical psychologists.

14:39It wasn't with AI, but it was a very scientifically based CBT experience. But at the beginning, there was just a very simple gesture. You would open the app and you could move the mouth up or down in terms of your mood. And then if you wanted to, you could enter some journaling thoughts and then go deeper into kind of a CBT flow. But the idea was it's a companion in your pocket. And I remember at the time when we released there was a wired article that was like it's um are apps the new pills will that replace um what's happening say in the psychologist uh or the doctor's office and i'm a big believer that it's not about replacement it's in partnership in collaboration with um alongside um but actually how brilliant we've got this supercomputer in our pocket and how great to be using in a way that's actually beneficial for us as individuals on a daily basis.

15:34Katy Cowan:100%. I think it does a very clever thing, though, if you integrate it within the apps that you use, it bridges that gap. And it can be something that it bridges the gap with the human professionals you work with, too. So I have fit friends who are really into high rocks, and they're sort of really into all the kind of, you know, they're talking about gut health all the time. And it's like really kind of motivating. But the one thing my friend says that she finds difficult is when she's finished her session with her personal trainer it's just then you know like a sort of she's like a box on a shelf that's put back up and then she has to deal with all the other stuff on her own so the motivation sort of wanes off a little bit what she would love is if that coach was able to sort of keep an eye on her and send her nudges and I suppose that's where the the gap is filled yeah yeah I agree yeah I think it's bridging exactly as you say you have that really great session with your PT one-on-one feel really energized and then you go back to reality in your day-to-day really busy lives and having something that will remind you to say hey why don't you redo that challenge at home with your dumbbells or you know why don't you go out for that quick run or brisk walk or whatever it is that you're meant to be doing it's not just physical fitness right it also can be thinking about your finances you know how can AI smartly help you think about the fact you really want to save up for that summer holiday with friends or family and what are the things you're going to do on a monthly basis you know helping you think in a very simple way about maybe not spending on this this month you know adding topping up your savings giving you a goal to work towards so I think there are lots of ways that can be applied beyond just our kind of physicality it's like having a little jimmy cricket on your shoulder all the time.

17:22Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think they're probably, I mean, as I say, I, um, you know, I was skeptical or not skeptical. It's not the right word. I was, I suppose I was mildly skeptical at the beginning because I think the importance of critical thinking and AI not taking everything is taking over us is really important, but I am sure there is going to be a future state where we'll have our agents sorting out our travel, reminding us to do our exercise in the morning, reminding us that, you know, we need to buy some new white t-shirts for our kids at school or whatever it is and simplifying our life in an easy way.

17:54So, yeah.

17:55Katy Cowan:Yeah, it's going to change a lot in the next, well, even just the next couple of years. It's going to be quite interesting. I just updated my phone this morning and it now allows me to have ChatGPT integrated into Siri. It's not quite bridged the gap entirely. You know, Siri is still quite, you know, the frustrating older app that just doesn't quite know what you're asking. You know, you'll be shouting it half the time and getting frustrated with it. Whereas chat GPT is like the new shiny thing that is just, you know, a hundred billion times faster and has that intuition that you really want from an app if you're going to be talking about it because you've got a busy life.

18:35Katy Cowan:The thing you're talking about is having AI integrated into, you know, apps and tools and all the rest of it. But what about directly with LLMs? What's your thoughts on that? you know like because that's the thing I found really helpful during my back injury it was chatting to chat GPT like it was a friend in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep and getting it to help me with my fitness my my recovering from my injury my you know just talking to me in the middle of the night and telling me everything was going to be okay you know what are your thoughts on that yeah I mean I think chat GPT is great I mean just picking up on your previous point on on siri i was pleased to read last week that um apple's announced that they're going to integrate gemini into so it they're i think it was felt like quite a breakthrough moment for apple to say we're not progressing i mean obviously they didn't phrase it like this but essentially say we're not progressing as fast as we want with um our own ai development and and siri has always been a bugbear for anyone who uses apple um so knowing that gemini which is really caught up with ChatGPT in some ways is getting becoming quite sophisticated.

19:40So the Apple intelligence will continue ChatGPT, but then Siri specifically is going to become Gemini or be powered by Gemini. On the LLMs, I mean, obviously we experiment and work with and use Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini. And I think they've all, and obviously there are lots more anthropic um perplexity there there are different ones that have real real strengths um and they're good for different things like chat gpt i use it so regularly now that it very much knows my tone voice or what's important to me so if i put in a question and i don't use it as much personally i think based on what you've just said i might be inspired to do that more but um it knows if i say okay here's a summary of things that have been going on in the business um and can you do a skeleton of what my board update should be it will produce that and then kind of give me that first pass on how I can then do a board paper that month which is great it's really useful it's just it's sort of very simple it's not giving me the point of view I mean it could if I wanted I but I'm not at that level where I really want it to um start fashioning my points of views but it is a brilliant tool for kind of researching surmising um putting initial ideas together and doing it in a way you know it will say is this warm enough for you or do you want something sharper so it knows what tonally is important to me which i think is great i do i do have some concerns i've talked about this with um quite a few colleagues and i was recently interviewing for a new hire and discuss in interviews as well what's what's that future looking like for the next generation of the workforce um when we're in a world i think when you first start out in certain jobs there's so much that you do at the beginning that is research and learning you're physically understanding you know um how to read things how to process them how to think about them how to give a very early point of view how to summarize them chat gpt is doing all of that now yeah it's so true and so in this funny way it's sort of in the career ladder as it were even though we both just said talked about deviation and no plans um in the career ladder actually you're sort of now almost expected to be at the kind of midway to senior level in terms of your experience because companies can use these lmms and these tools to do that early stage work that you would have learned kind of in your first few jobs so i do think a lot about what does that mean and i think the most important thing at school is that you have to teach curiosity and critical thinking and those two things are going to be so important because it's that critical thinking because chat tpt can spit out something really interesting but you still have to have a point of view you still have to judge what they may have got wrong uh you still have to you know be able to assimilate your own thoughts and then come up with a point of view and i think it's really important that actually a curriculum that often in secondary school is designed to sort of learn stuff by rote so you do well on exams you can get to the next stage of career actually needs to be thinking much more about how do we encourage curiosity resilience and critical thinking resilience because the jobs are going to change all the time you don't know what's coming next so you need um the next generation to feel good about the fact that they might have 10 different career paths much quicker than we did and we were already changing directions faster than our parents did um so they need that resilience and flexibility they need curiosity because you've got to kind of keep wanting to learn about the world because things are changing and then as i've said that critical thinking the ability really to process and reflect and think for yourself um and i'm worried at the moment that although they're kind of adopting saying right we might start using these tools in school they're not actually thinking about the impact of those tools um so i think about that look obviously have no influence

23:31Katy Cowan:on that at all well we're kind of heading for a cliff edge aren't we if we're not recruiting at the junior level who's going to replace the mid and senior in future exactly exactly it's quite scary yeah I think it yeah no I do I think it is scary and obviously from a from an us two perspective um we very much are still continuing to recruit but very candidly it might mean that you just don't recruit the same scale or or if your business was growing in an ordinary world where maybe you'd hire five people you're gonna have three yeah that is that changed a lot then you're you're recruiting fewer people is that is that because of AI alone or is it a combination of other things like the economy and the changing?

24:10I mean, I would say that our recruitment practice in the last year have definitely been affected more by the economy than AI. I think it's been a tougher market. And then, you know, smaller businesses like ours were obviously affected by the national insurance increase that went up. I know that for a lot of companies, they then froze their hiring for a bit in order to kind of cover off the additional costs they were going to be having that year and ongoing. I think for us as to I'm imagining a sort of medium term future state as we're growing as a business that that could affect us in a way that we might just hire one or two roles less I don't think it's going to be dramatic because I think we really believe in investing creativity and young talent we had a designer who joined us and stayed with us for five six years and she described us to as someone that she came to glow up which I loved you know that was a really nice phrase yeah um so yeah i'm i'm hopeful that we won't be too dramatically impacted but i think it would be naive as you say cliff edge be naive of any of us um in our industry not to recognize the huge impact um the ai then i guess coupled with the economy is is having yeah successive

25:21Katy Cowan:governments and the the sort of slowness of the education uh sector is kind of a bit frustrating isn't it you just think gosh really these ongoing things that you're doing to the private sector when we're being faced with all of these technological advances and how that's impacting everything it's just um it's just it's just crazy is there anybody that is in government currently that ran a business I don't think there is is there no I know well I do remember thinking that I didn't feel that they had any small business advisors or small medium business advisors when they made that change. I think it's difficult, you know, it's really easy for us all to demand why isn't the economy more focused on growth.

26:02But obviously, I know, you know, they published that big innovation and growth investment plan. And there are things they're trying to do around technology and AI. But actually, we need some confidence, we need probably some slight relaxation of some regulation to enable people to feel that they can innovate and come up with new ideas so I'm going to remain hopeful have to um you know I'm an optimist by heart so things have got to get better but that doesn't mean it's not challenging for everyone out there at the moment uh it's not the 90s again is it no yeah oh maybe we should just go out raving yeah that would be good yeah yeah I think so building communities and raving it's a good place to be

26:47Katy Cowan:today's episode is sponsored by adobe express and daisy morris at the self hood knows better than most what it can actually do for your creative work adobe express has genuinely completely changed my workflow there's loads of templates in there that i can just apply my brand colors to my fonts to which actually gives me more time to be creative and think about the bigger picture it has saved me so much time as someone that is constantly on the move and managing lots of different projects it has been a game changer

27:22Katy Cowan:the other i think the other issue is um giving all this information to ai i sometimes freak out about because you know you've we've all done that thing um chat gpt can you tell me what you know about me and then it like basically reels off all of this stuff and you know you've given it that stuff. So you're not, you're like, why the hell am I surprised? And then you're like, can I trust this technology? You know, what are they going to use against me? It's bad enough that I'll be talking about garden sheds. And then Instagram starts advertising garden sheds to me, even though I've not searched for them on Instagram and Instagram has no, shouldn't have any idea.

27:57Katy Cowan:Not, you know, allegedly, you know, are our phones listening to us? What kind of things are we sharing? I mean, I'm sounding a little bit kind of naive here, but it's the head in sand, isn't it you're like oh these tools are so good let's not worry about all the other things I mean look when you're using something for free you're the product I would always think that you know I accept um you know we use uh Google Workspace at work and I have Gmail in my private life I accept that Google knows everything about me it knows which um galleries I like to go to if I'm in Paris, it knows, you know, that I take the bus.

28:35It knows probably all about my shopping habits, et cetera. So that's a trade-off that I think we as consumers make if we get free products. I think the same is with these tools. If you pay for the product, you can opt. You can tick the box basically that says, I don't want you to use my data to train the algorithm, which is we've got turned on with all our kind of work products. So I think I'm sort of semi accepting about it. I remember probably earlier on in my career, I was very, I never signed up, you know, any of those, um, sign up to my email and you'll get 10 % off first purchase or do this and you'll get that.

29:15I never gave my data to anyone. And I noticed the shift when I stopped caring about that less and suddenly my inbox was just filled with noise. What was the change? Well, it's just that I've traded my personal data in some way and it's you know I'm just constantly spammed and and called um by random numbers and random emails um and so I suppose I'm not I'm not as in control of that as I was and I've given something up by doing that um so I don't I don't think it's um naivety I think for me what I really care about is that people consciously know what they are saying yes to or they aren't so that used to be my shtick with facebook which i left years and years ago that i sometimes felt people didn't always know whenever they sent out a new terms and conditions um who was who was actually reading those many many pages about what they could do with your imageries once they've been published what they're what you're giving them access to and i

30:14Katy Cowan:just think it's really important if we had chat gpt we could have like copied and pasted them into it and said right what things do I need to look out for here exactly exactly so I think that whole thing about informed consent is really important and I think probably that's been taken advantage of and I am watching with interest this sort of rising groundswell of support for an under 16 social media ban in the UK following Australia's example yeah what do you think about that do you think that's a good good shout yeah I mean I I thought good for words I never thought I'd ask are good for kemi badenoff for being um the pioneer on that in the kind of uk um political landscape and obviously that's now put more pressure on the government and people are signing petitions i think there is something to say to wait to 16 um i think there are lots of things that we ask kids to wait until they're 16 and 18 for why should social media be any different and i think it's very difficult to ask your child to absent themselves from that world if everyone is doing their socializing and their planning on snapchat disappearing messages for example yeah you know if that's the world they're operating in whereas if you just strip that back then people go back to organizing it on a text message or whatever it was wouldn't it be lovely wouldn't it be nice it would be nice to see i'm you know i know i'm not my oldest does have a smartphone i'm not kind of part of the smart smartphone free childhood movement i think there are advantages to her being able to look something up if she's on the bus and wants to know what time she's going to be coming back.

31:48And, you know, I don't have an issue with that. But I do think it's going to be really interesting to see what happens with the under-16 movement. And I think the government's pushback or initial pushback when there were clamours post the Australian legislation around, well, that would just push people into kind of illegal areas. I felt that that was too easy of a get out. You know, there's illegality with everything, drugs, alcohol, etc. etc i think probably that's social media is probably an area that could benefit from better

32:15Katy Cowan:regulation i am not envious of this generation who've had these amazing incredible smartphones and social media because for us i'm a presumer of a similar age we we were just free we just we didn't have to worry about what we looked like or what we got up to um i'm very um grateful for that Very grateful. Me too. Me too. And I think for young women, I mean, I'm sure it affects young men as well, but as a woman and a mother of a girl as well as a boy, I think about the huge pressure that young girls go through anyway in terms of sense of self, self-image, self-awareness, perception of others. and social media, the filters people put on, the expectations, the commentary, the influences, young girls, styling.

33:05I just, I think it's too much. I think you need a bit of your childhood to be free, as you said, to be free from all of that.

33:12Katy Cowan:To be not worrying about what you look like or whether you're wearing the right clothes or, you know, it was bad enough in the nineties, but at least I got some red trainers and a naff-naff jacket. You know, I was lucky. I had a mum that would take me to crew market and get oh my god you are lucky yeah no i was still in dunlock green flash which ultimately became cool about 10 years after i was wearing them um but yeah no all of that all of that i mean i think we were awful to women in the 90s in a different way certainly the treatment of women in the media shaming and all that kind of jazz yeah exactly exactly heat magazine was it heat magazine magazine all sorts of things yeah all sorts of publications but it sold magazines and we all you know I didn't personally buy those but I definitely picked them up in the hairdressers and yeah we read them yeah hell yeah yeah oh my god have you seen wow she's got an amazing figure I mean who cares no well the red truck treatment of you know Britney Spears and just young women at that time so I guess I suppose what I'm slightly alluding to with that is you know there was a different kind of brutality to the 90s yeah that I think just doesn't exist at all today which is brilliant and liberating for for young women growing up um so i feel like sort of solving the social media problem would be would be just an added bonus 100 yeah and also like with if we're going back to ai um the thing that really concerns me personally as well because i've got my face on social media i'm like starting to put myself out there a lot more and um it's it's grok you know and how easy it is to turn images of anyone into something you know really out there and that is a concern and I saw something on Instagram the other day a reel popped up and somebody was just doing one of these box pops in the street how old were you when you first were asked to send a nude picture of yourself and I think the average age was 12 you know wow really these young girls yeah so they'll just have random men I presume message them and say send me a picture of yourself naked or whatever yeah it's horrible dark side that's too emotional for me to have a good response to yeah all that stuff is shocking and what's been happening with Grok and the sexualization and that Musk's first move was just to limit it to paying subscribers and that that then feeds into another narrative about the UK being bad for free speech, even though what we're really talking about is just the protection of women's bodies.

35:48Katy Cowan:Exactly. Exactly. What a strange world we're finding ourselves in at the moment. So much going on as well. And with that sort of pressure, there's the always on pressure as well. I worry that whilst these apps and tools and LLMs can be really kind of positive companions, they can also, like anything, they can have that sort of darker side. They can become something that makes us always feel on, I suppose. Yeah, I thought you were going to go somewhere even darker with this sort of suicidal moment. Oh, really? What did you think I was going to say? No, I was just thinking, obviously, there are concerns.

36:25And again, that's why I sort of said earlier, you know, I'm not a medical expert and nor is ChatGPT. And that's why I think they have to be a companion or in partnership, because some of these cases where people have perhaps been really depressed or seeking support and using Chatty PT in lieu of professional medical help and going into some quite, yes, human professional help have been going into some quite dark places. And I think that is really concerning. I mean, you're absolutely right. There are dark places around sort of addiction or porn or manipulative images. And I think sadly, that's, not sadly, that's just a reality of a world we live in.

37:10But I do think we need to look at what's the right regulation, what the right controls that you can put in place that a young person can't get kind of trapped in a five hour daily conversation on their own with chat CPT. And of course, the other, you know, the companion concern along with social media and the AI tools is, you know, if loneliness is as big a killer as as lung cancer or smoking whatever the right way of framing that is um then becoming so withdrawn that your only conversation your only human contact is with um your ai companion

37:45Katy Cowan:that is worrying definitely very worrying 100 um because we thrive off social connections yeah and it's interesting to see the sort of backlash of that that people especially post pandemic it's weird how it's all happened in the same sort of decade um people are now sort of gravitating to what's real um in real life authenticity all these kind of little words that people are sort of you know out in the green hills because they're realizing that we are very much now going deeper and deeper into this digital world um and actually maybe the thing that will keep the balance healthy is that as humans, we recognize that it's, you have to, you have to sort of just have a, it's a tight rope and you have to recognize.

38:38Katy Cowan:The problem is if you're not in a good frame of mind, or you don't recognize when an AI is taking you down a path that it doesn't, you cannot fully trust the AI. That's what I'm saying. So for an example, what am I trying to say if i talk to chat tpt and say what's this outfit looking like you know an innocent prompt i'll send a photo to to the app and it will sort of take me down a path that i don't agree with i'll say no i don't think you're right there because that doesn't work with that and it'll go oh yes you're so right so my issue with it is is if somebody's not mentally in a good place it kind of keeps going down this sort of path that then leads them to think about something doing something very dark to themselves you know and it's actually happened hasn't it allegedly in some parts of the world yeah i believe there was a both a um one a suicide a much younger person and then two a murder suicide where um that i think uh the son is suing chat gpt for the death of his father and his grandmother, if I'm correct, allegedly.

39:46He's going to put a big case, ChatGPT, Microsoft, whoever else is involved. So I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think definitely some work needs to be done. And obviously then the individual responsibility, I think as parents, friends, family, we need to do, as you're saying, encouraging people to be more out there in the physical world in real life. Like I love reading about the rise of running groups that more and more people are sort of running together on the weekends. And I'm sure, as you say, that there is some correlation between us sort of doing more of these community-minded events because we're spending so much more of our time on screens in our daily lives, our learning lives, our professional lives.