BONUS: Can AI Actually Be Your Therapist? We Ask the CEO Building One

35:22I mean, obviously you take privacy into account so that the exact chat logs are not recorded in this sense, but I mean, everything it says, you have a record of it. Yes. In terms of the kind of checks that you can do online like while the conversation is going on in terms of even a subset for us of the data where people do opt-in for training we can use that for research purposes we can use that to understand the impact we've already been able to demonstrate I mean some of the things that were most interesting to me in some of our research so far is that in terms of the iatrogenic effects of mental health so we can measure basically on a population that uses ash compared to an equivalent population that didn't how many of them got worse in the kind of ways that can be caused by the intervention.

36:05So people don't really think of therapy as potentially iatrogenic, which is to say like harm coming from the healer, harm coming from the practitioner, but that can happen. And we've actually found that degradation in symptoms, so people like getting worse over time happens a lot less when they're interacting with ASH. We found that the kind of negative effects that are happening from ASH, it's not zero in terms of people who might see a message and interpret it in a certain way, but it's actually significantly lower than equivalent people that are going to experts. And I think that's like the other flip side here is in terms of raising the bar on our expectations for, you know, how we offer care to everyone.

36:43Yeah. Do you feel like something I feel like about this as as a person who's greatly benefited from therapy over the years? it was not always easy it was not always easy to get in with a doctor to find someone who'd take your insurance if your insurance would pay it was not always easy to to get that help when you needed it especially to have quick access in a moment where you're needing and and even not thinking of it as therapy but just thinking of it as something that will listen while i talk and come back with something constructive like not everybody has a family not everybody has close friends or people they feel like they can talk to about deeply personal things.

37:26I really feel like this is an opportunity to, if done right, and, you know, given time to grow. There will absolutely be growing pains, I'm sure, but I feel like it could really help with, like, widespread access to some type of mental health assistance. Yeah, I mean, you have to at least see this as just the matter of raising the bar. Like, we know that of those with a diagnosable mental health illness, the majority have literally no care whatsoever. They literally have no one they can go to for help. And to just get access to those people to something, I think, raises expectations. And I think as well for our system, I think a lot of people are looking for support that, like, in terms of our actual massive shortage of mental health providers, there is a part of that, which is that we don't have kind of like lower levels of care that you get.

38:21And I think part of that for me is like the space of spirituality, right? The space of where you might previously have gone to a religious leader. Yes, that's a good example. And I think like that's kind of when I think about helping relationships or if you think about AA as an example of the kind of intervention that, you know, you're typically going to at a church or something like that. These things help people and it's mostly people helping each other. And we're not necessarily talking about clinical interventions. In a lot of these cases, we're not talking about clinical issues, but we have as a society lost some of those social structures that give people someone to talk to.

38:53And so we filled the gap by medicalizing it, by treating your problem as medical all the time. And if your problem's not medical, I mean, even if your problem is medical, the solution isn't always to seek medical intervention. Sometimes it is, and we should have those resources available. But a lot of the time, you know, where you previously would have gone to a religious leader, perhaps there are other kinds of support that you would need. And so I think the thing, like I was saying, I find most promising from ash and our impact is about the ways it builds social structures the way in which when people talk to ash they have a chance to share something out loud for the first time that they haven't ever perhaps and now they can think about who else i can talk to about this and they're able to go to real humans and build those strong social connections that can be really beneficial okay um related to this so someone in the chat just asked how are you able to offer this for free the development training and maintenance costs alone alone are huge looking out for your business there i appreciate looking out for my business um we are going to start monetizing very soon um we have been able to keep it free and it's mostly as we focused on development i can share very fortunately for us for the last six months we uh which is roughly the time since we yeah we launched about six months ago we have steadily increased on literally every metric basically linearly in terms of our ability to improve the model.

40:13Because we are a modeling company, like we just see improvements in the model lead to improvements in user experience, improvements in impact, and that's gone up so steadily. So that's basically been our motivation, kind of like any venture-backed startup. We were able to use money that we raised from investors to subsidize usage so that we can improve the product over time. And now we're getting to a place where we're comfortable, where we're ready. And the flip side there is we haven't been able to scale. We haven't been able to try to pursue more users. We've had about 200 ,000 users, but we have not tried to increase that because of the costs naturally.

40:46So now that we're kind of ready to go big with our current product, we will have to start monetizing very soon. I'd say one other piece that's fascinating about mental health is just, there are huge numbers of organizations that have responsibilities for lives that want to create more access to mental health support. So we're in a fortunate place where just a lot of people want to pay for this. In mental health, people are used to paying out of pocket. That's the reality of it. The average therapist in the U.S. I think last year was$174 out of pocket. BetterHelp is$360 a month per visit. BetterHelp, though, I mean, is huge.

41:22They're$360 a month. It's expensive. Even that? You're really not saving any money with the apps. You're gaining convenience is, uh, uh, has been my experience with, and I don't necessarily mean Ash, but I'm meaning with like better help versus going in. Yes. Although I think even all of these apps have increased access in so far, they've been able to create like more, more liquidity, you know, have therapists be able to take more sessions so that more people can have sessions. But there's also like that flip side, which is like, how many sessions do you really want to have? If you're a therapist, like these things are intense.

41:57You don't want to have, you know, 12 sessions in a day like that's not a sustainable way to live your life and offer the best service um anyway for us yeah go for it no no no i was gonna change topics lately no go for it oh because i was gonna ask will you always have a free tier even as you're monetizing like will you always like have at least some some sort of offering in that area we would very much like to and we plan to currently have an always free tier um i think it's potentially hard it's potentially hard because we do use a lot of compute and the direction with ai i think the question that we'll probably have to ask i don't want to like make predictions far ahead just to say i have no idea if we'll use language models in 10 years i don't know if transformers will be a thing we do expect that ai will be able to help people with their mental health but definitely new options yeah yeah i mean the main thing is i don't want to ever be in a position where we offer a degraded service and so i think if you think back to like early chat gpt when they had like the free tier with GPT 3.5 and a paid tier of GPT 4.

42:56Like, I would never want to be in a position of saying if you can't afford support, we'll give you low quality support and if you can't afford you high quality. There is less good mental health support. Yeah. Exactly. I'd be much more inclined to offer something along the lines of like, if you don't get the value, we'll give you your money back. If you can't afford it, we'll have like a fund or a charity or something that can just fund it so that we can just give access to most people. But I think the truth is most people are willing to pay for this, like would want to pay for this like we you know when we meet people who get value this is not the sort of thing where you know you're trying to take advantage like people do see the benefit that they're getting yeah i agree um i have another so there's a couple other questions that are related that i want to group together um and i think this one was from joel bitson do you have any concern that this technology might take therapist jobs and if not what do you think humans can offer that ash can't another question was from m height who said should ash replace traditional psychotherapy or be an adjunct to psychotherapy um i'm curious what your thoughts are on both of those i want to say honestly it's really hard to predict the future um yeah i personally so i have a right now i have an executive coach i've had therapists in the past but I continue to have an executive pitch and I find him incredibly valuable.

44:15So I think there are a lot of pieces that are really valuable. I think one thing to say is in-person therapy or any kind of in-person experience goes a long way. I mentioned this before, but I think just the impact on your body when you're in like a state of alert of having someone else in front of you who can speak calmly with a quiet voice. There's a lot that actually makes a big difference from just having a person biologically. I think the piece that I wonder is basically about the expertise, if that makes sense, which is like, and I think this is true in any kind of profession, like if you're talking to a doctor, will they be medical professionals?

44:54Definitely, but will I want to go to a doctor and have them be the one diagnosing me, or would I rather that be an AI? I think that's kind of gonna be the hard distinction, which is like, my expectation is that we'll have more and more humans that fit into the increasingly human side of the role, and I think there will be a piece that can be done by an AI. And if it can be done by an AI, it probably should for more people. And I think this will also be a matter of progression because AI will start by being able to take on kind of the easiest cases. And I think it gets, we get further and further in the kinds of situations that it can take on.

45:24Could therapists today be able to use ASH in some sort of partnership way? How are you thinking about working with them? Yeah. Well, I would say first, a lot of our users are therapists. Definitely disproportionately. We have a huge number of therapists that engage deeply with our product that give us feedback, that are helpful design partners. You know, if you are a therapist listening to this, you can go in and just ask for advice on a patient. It won't tell you what to do with them. That's not how it operates. But I think just giving that kind of like alternative perspective, a lot of the time people are like, I was in that session and I felt triggered.

45:54I don't know how to deal with this. And if you're a therapist, I mean, you have a lot to deal with and you definitely cannot step out and get support constantly. I think early in your career, people get supervision and they really value it and somewhat having that sense of supervision and someone you can talk to about your hard cases, you're not handing off the authority to figure things out, but you have someone to talk to. So that's definitely been a big use case. The other one is we are looking to do more. So something that I've found valuable is to share my notes from my sessions, my co-founder does the same thing with Ash when I talk to a human.

46:29And it definitely makes Ash a lot better. So there's definitely this piece of like bringing in the insight. So I think that's a piece we'd love to do in the future, which is just make therapy more valuable by connecting with therapy. So give notes before you enter the session, give notes after the session, you know, how are you feeling? And then connecting the dots, which is basically like three days later, a week later, like having you be able to reflect on that experience to have, it's not just a matter of like doing the homework. It's also just like when you're feeling really stressed three days later, the AI now, instead of just coming up with a hypothesis is like, you know, it's interesting because I remember you told me that in therapy they told you that you feel this way when blah blah blah is it possible that's what's going on right now wow well here's a question um ai isn't in any avenue right now perfect there are absolutely hallucinations there are a variety of other things that can go wrong there are even unexpected usage patterns among certain people.

47:35Like I know with some of the lawsuits that have occurred, some of these are people, if you read through the logs that have been made available, are very persistent and like it's been an ongoing conversation. And how do you prepare for the fact that perfection is probably not realistic? Yes. it's a good question so one thing we do right now is like i mentioned we try to uh encourage people to access other resources if they have psychiatric conditions yeah and we don't allow children and the reason why we do those two is not because we couldn't otherwise give help to them but because we want to make sure that people using the product today are competent are able to use reasonable judgment so that in those moments when things go wrong they can act accordingly and i think yeah it means that we can trust our users.

48:26We're not, I think there's this false perception, this paternalism that sometimes comes up, I think, in mental health or in medicine more generally, the paternalism of saying like, you know, if you want to know how the patient's doing, you ask the doctor. And the truth in mental health is if you want to know how therapy is going, you go to the patient, like by far the evidence suggests that the patient knows how it's going. If they say they're working on the right things in the right way, that they're collaborative, collaborating the cycles um that indicates that it's going the right way so i think the way that we think of it is like you do need to trust the user we don't want to be overly paternalistic we don't want to assume that we or ash knows best what the user needs what the user wants we want to listen to their direction at this stage doesn't mean that we don't push back ash push pushes back all the time it definitely frustrates people when they're like you know why is ash challenging me right here but you still want to be able to challenge while being respectful challenge while knowing that your challenge could be wrong um it's a very hard balance i think there are cases where ash has made mistakes where it calls someone by the wrong name uh for example or confuses two people in their lives very embarrassing you confuse like your wife and your ex-girlfriend or something like that oh it's definitely painful and i think those are probably like the absolute worst product experiences we can give because it you feel something um yeah i think still you can compare it to a human which is like i do think ash has far better memory than a human does and that's like a huge improvement and there's still that sort of like your therapist might make the same mistake or you know your friends might make the same mistake yeah maybe not the same ones i mean some of them are more embarrassing from an ai or they're like different in kind um we do try to catch it one thing we've done is if ash makes a mistake um and we detect it which we sometimes do we'll have a pop-up we thought about this we were like should we try to cover for the mistake or not and i think we've made a deliberate decision to say don't cover for the mistake we have a pop-up and we say it looks like ash might have made a mistake ash does sometimes make mistakes and in some ways it builds more trust with the user which is kind of like i'm still here i'm still in control and like i can still use my common sense and i think that actually is important ultimately we think about building when you're talking to an ai in general you can worry about the way in which you hand off autonomy the way in which you can have ai make decisions for you you can worry about competency which is just like if you talk to an ai that's infinitely smart like does it just make you feel dumb does it make you come and say like what do you think that my wife is thinking right now.

50:46And then, you know, you don't bother to think about it for yourself, or you feel like this thing is an emotional genius, and I'm going to be it. And you can substitute relationships. You can think this thing is a person. Those are kind of, I think, the three big risks that we think about ethically. And I think that there are steps that you take here that are really valuable. Honestly, those mistake moments build that autonomy to some extent, which is like, you are still in charge. You are still making the decision. I'm not sure if that answered the question. I think so. We have another question in the chat here I want to mention because that feeds into it really, really well.

51:16Actually, there are a couple of them. Like what have been some lessons learned as you've gone along through here? Like, is there anything that you initially didn't get right? And how do you maybe think you might answer that question a year from now? Great question. Oh, I'll take on the second part too. But the first part, definitely the mistake we made was, well, I mean, I used the word therapy. I was asked about this. I think we were a little bit too skeuomorphic. That was one thing. So we had a bit too much of an assumption on like the model of a human-human relationship. And it's become evident to us quite a bit over time that the relationship between an AI and a human is different.

51:58And though you kind of have to start with the human-human model, you need to move really far away from it. You need to notice those ways in which the relationship is quite different. So I think our assumption up front in the very beginning, literally when Neil and I took a walk around union square we were like do we think ai can do therapy and the first thing we said was well therapy is usually done on zoom these days at some point you know if you're having if it's on zoom i mean we will reach the point of what you know zoom agi where you are you know you're talking to me you've never met me in person maybe i'm an ai we will reach that point and we're not that that far away and so if that's true then surely ai can do therapy as long as it's on zoom and so that was kind of like our initial mental picture on day zero before we got started we were like, okay, 45 minute sessions once a week or whatever.

52:42And that's not how it is at all. Our usage is mostly between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. That I think was like one big surprise. People use it when they don't have access to humans. People don't use it. People don't want it. I mean, another big one was we thought people would want more of a hybrid model early on. People would want humans in the loop. They don't. Humans want to treat this thing differently. They want to know that it's an AI. People open up much more often, much more quickly to the AI because they know it won't judge them. And so a lot of the benefits of no judgment show up immediately in a way that they can't with a human um so much more i can say um yeah i can go on for a while what will we have feel free that's really interesting i mean it's been fascinating to learn this um one thing i'd say about our company is um i'm quoting carl rogers too much but he writes this line facts are friendly in his right like he was someone who did a lot of empirical research about therapy and he was like what's really scary when you do research is you might be wrong and then you think facts are scary and you try to stay away from them and that was historically true that there were you know freud was not chasing facts to be all right controversial but i mean you can still respect him but he was not looking to be disproven per se anyway maybe that's not true um we're wrong so often and i think that's been a core part of how we've had to build uh we talk about sun shining our mistakes we have like our weekly all hands as a company and the main thing we do is we talk about what have we learned what did we assume where we were wrong we do make assumptions and we are wrong on those assumptions a lot.

54:08Another one was that we thought therapy was a good mental model, like that people wanted to talk about therapy and I think in some ways we've learned that therapy is like this secular practice that exists today that also fits where maybe like a chaplain could also exist and there are other kinds of models that we've started to introduce to think about where this might fit into someone's life and I think fundamentally the truth is it's not parallel to any human-human relationship. It fits into some completely new paradigm and our users know that i think our users are the ones who tell us that they're like why would you think this replaces my therapist like do you think that my dog replaces my friends

54:44wow that came up actually in our new york times article by the way reporter yeah our new york times reporter actually interviewed a bunch of our users and one of the quotes he pulled out was from a user who took a picture with his dog and said like this is my dog like you're asking me how this compares to humans it's a it's a different thing yeah yeah that's funny less is a year from now um i mean i imagine it'll be further in this direction i think a lot of the assumptions i'm making now perhaps a lot of what i'm saying right now i'll change my mind on and i will have been wrong on and i'm very hopeful we'll have evidence and data and facts that will show us why that's the case um i think that we're still probably too skeuomorphic i think we would love to have a model of what human ai relationships look like and we don't because they don't exist yet.

55:24I think that the nature of, like there are things that I'm still trying to figure out, like do people see Ash as like this one AI that everyone talks to or will it be different? If we want to help someone in rural India that has a completely different cultural background, will it be a matter of just changing the AI? Will we need a completely different app? Will we need it to be built by someone local, someone with more cultural understanding who can create something for that person's needs? yeah um you know how much of it is just the ai versus the overall experience how opinionated should it be versus personalized um these are some of the things i hope we'll have learned a year from now yeah i have one kind of like uh i guess like jumble of questions i want to just throw out here before we wrap up um because i know you're you gotta go on the hour um one you you created your own model to like ash is your own model that you've created so you know how how is that going are you going to potentially make a new version of it um you know what what what do you see as your path there and from a broader sense what does the world look like three to five years from now if you get this right like what do you really want the relationship to be Like, I know you're sort of saying that we're creating it in real time.

56:42I mean, and you might be wrong, but what's your ideal version, you know? Well, on the first point, on the modeling side, I mean, I got into AI in 2015, and I thought I was too late because I thought the singularity would happen before I'd finish, you know, learning how to train models. So I've been wrong a lot. I also thought Bitcoin would fall in, like, 2019. I was completely certain of it. I was definitely wrong. I think when it comes to the modeling side, I don't want to make any predictions. I don't know where frontier models will continue to progress. I don't know where we'll, like, I think what's important to us is delivering the right user experience.

57:18We've already, I think, developed a lot outside of just the core model. I've talked mostly about core model, but much of what we've built is actually the scaffolding around it, what happens before sessions, after conversations, what happens in the background. We have, you know, parallel agents that run, that do thinking. We have systems to understand what you're talking about. you know we have our memory system that's uh quite unique i think we have potentially like one of the best memory systems out there for this kind of thing um that's awesome so there's there's a lot else there and i don't want to predict what the modeling world will look like in the future i don't even know again if transformers will be there on the three to five year time horizon though i mean i think that we want this to be available to everyone i think that's that's the big thing i think um i am hopeful that our so hard for me to talk three to five years out um i do think that the world will change tremendously in the next three to five years i think that today we especially americans define our identity so much in terms of work and yeah that's going to mess with our minds like i think that the way that we think about our sense of meaning and value in the world is going to be ripped apart and i think that the biggest thing i'm hoping for and watching for in the next three to five years is i think that we need something scalable something that can actually help people transition and think about their values, think about their place in the world.

58:33If we're successful, I think that we will be on this transition. We will be a core part of this transition for the world towards learning how to live in an AI world. And I don't know exactly, again, what that relationship looks like, but I see it as a certain kind of expert, a certain kind of companion that you're able to talk to that helps you make this transition. and ultimately one that helps people have stronger real-world relationships, stronger autonomy and competency, and not something that takes away. Love it. That's great. Same. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, sorry, Grant, go ahead.

59:10No, you're good. You're good. Go for it. I don't have the visual cue of your face moving, and it's throwing me off. Yeah, that's fair. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. Maybe we'll have a visual cue for Ash. Maybe we will create an avatar by then. There we go. There we go. Oh, that's a, I mean, yeah, that's an interesting idea. I wonder if people will like it or not. That'd be a fun experiment. I keep thinking, wouldn't it be cool if you could... I think you could try it, but I wouldn't have it be the default setting because it might go to Uncanny Valley for people. That's my gut feeling.

59:43But maybe I'm judging that off of the models today and not where they'll be in six months from now. What if it was based on your disk profile? if uh if you did a disc profile and and not just that but what if it could spin up the right tone for addressing you and the way you are open to learning and the way you were doing that but from that i mentioned the disc profile i always always kind of laugh it off a little bit but but the truth of it is it is fairly effective at what it gathers uh and uh that's absolutely uncertain an amount of an amount of personal privacy most people wouldn't give up but i would sure love to see what it would happen if it was like okay this is this is the way you need to be approached this is the way you're motivated this is the way you are excited and approaching things this way absolutely turns you off maybe uh seems like a really cool thing that could be done in the future.

1:00:42Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think the questions of like how we collect that context to get the right personal experience. If I went, I can go on the long topic, which I know we're out of time for is always on the, do we want to have you essentially pick from a range of humans? Do we want to construct something very different or do we want to constantly be learning and constantly be molding the experience around what makes sense for you? Yeah. And I'm sorry, I was trying to say bye and I turned it in. I mean, we can stay longer if you can, but I do. This was awesome. Thank you so much. Daniel, where can people check it out?

1:01:18Talktoash.com. Happy to drop in the chat if you guys talk to Ash.com. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. We'll see you later. Grant, that was interesting. So cool. I mean, we have a whole document of questions we didn't even ask because the chat had such good ones. because the chat showed up with better ones in some cases yeah that were just things that i i even had overlooked thinking we should ask about uh yeah the truth is we'd had another hour we could have run through the other list and looks like we have a couple that we even didn't get to like uh i see we got a question from groggy rob by the way best name ever does does ash take into context cultural differences in class perspective yeah so i said that in the chat it uh that is something that they're working on uh i don't know if he said it was like a hundred percent rolled out yet but they're going from eight profiles to a hundred and that's the idea is that it's it's supposed to work with you within the framework um you know whatever frameworks that you come to the the app with like from your background and they're working on making that a bigger part of the model um and then there was another question is it web or cloud-based or all local he also answered this earlier so the processing is happening over the cloud but um your your data is stored in a like private cloud backup essentially so like they originally did it all local but then they switched to a model that was a little bit more sustainable um because like at a certain point if you have conversations with dash every day every week um it's going to just blow up your phone.

1:02:55Yeah. Hey, Ika, would you mind terribly grabbing any of the questions that we didn't get firm answers to? I mean, not firm answers, but that we weren't able to get to because of time? Because we could always email those over and maybe when Grant writes a story about this later, because you usually do, we could maybe squeeze some of those in. Yeah, for sure. That'd be great. Yeah, because I think we'll probably wrap up here unless anyone has any other questions that we can talk about or if you just want to share your general thoughts you know before we wrap yeah yeah we'd love to hear it's it's an interesting topic and uh uh and one that affects the people it does affect i'd say in a uniquely personal way you know and to me the real value here is about accessibility and timing like we've always had a shortage of therapists we've always had problems with accessibility to good mental health care whether that is for someone you know of their maybe it's to do with i'm trying not to say poor is there a nicer word with people who don't have lower economic background yes thank you i i was like my brain was just just absolutely slipping on me who can't afford it for any reason uh or people who are uncomfortable with the idea of talking to another person.

1:04:22There are absolutely people who might feel better talking to an AI because you don't have to worry about that judgment or the human sociological dynamics of, you know, oh, my therapist is a little different than me or just like me. This person's going to judge me. You don't have that necessarily. Yeah, I mean, Daniel asked both of us if we have been to therapy before, and I didn't get to answer, but I haven't. And one of the things that I wanted to ask him, it's something that I've been wanting to do for years and years. I desperately need to. And I wanted to ask him if this would be a good first step into it, if you've never done it before.

1:05:05I would say it's definitely better than nothing. Yeah, definitely better than having not gone. The truth is, I've been through a number of therapy bops over the years. And it's interesting because you kind of mature in your mental health over time in that you start to learn, like, these tricks work for me. These are things I do so that I am investing in my afternoon because if I do this now, I'll be less likely to lose my mind later and, you know, become the unreasonable jerk that once in a while I can. And as you do that, you really start to see, like, I've had bouts where I went back and thought, I need to be seeing a therapist again that weren't necessarily about depression and the major struggles, but were just about, I feel like I need to spend a little more time working on me.

1:05:56I can tell I'm not on my A game lately. I need some help with focus or I need some help with this. And truth is, I think everybody could benefit from it. Yeah, I mean, just last night, I probably stayed up too late putting together the Around the Horn Digest. shout out to the newsletter if you guys haven't been reading this around the horn digest i am working overtime trying to make this thing awesome i'm trying to i sent you a list of ridiculous stuff yesterday i i just i just collect i basically what i do is i just go to all of my typical sources i find everything that is cool and i just try to put it in one list because i'm such an info vore where i just want to i want to collect everything and put it in one place yeah But that need or whatever that is, is definitely something where I let that kind of take over and I could definitely use Ash, let's put it that way, to help with focus.

1:06:51And, you know, keeping things in perspective, right? Because all of this is moving so fast. The AI industry and how it's impacting the world is moving so fast that I feel like many people probably relate to this need of trying to, you know, perhaps get some control over it by trying to understand it all. And I really like what he said about how, you know, in the future, the AI is going to make a big impact on jobs and the way that we, especially here in America, view our self-worth through work. And if all of a sudden now there's less jobs or work changes, that's going to be a big change for a lot of people.

1:07:28Is it time to quit using the phrase in the future yet? Well, I think it's still a good framework for assessing like we are in the present and there are changes yet still to come. I would say we're entering the foothills. Okay, I like that. Yeah, I do think in the future is still right. I just, when you said it, I was like the future. Yeah, like July. And then I was like, that's so terrible. but yeah that's that's my two senses that i think is this very needed tool i can personally benefit from it so i'm definitely going to check it out uh i've liked daniel ever since i first learned about this tool yeah and i think it's awesome and we didn't go as in depth on why you don't want to use the current tools for this as much as possible but it comes down to ultimately this the sick of fancy thing and the the helpful uh assistant persona a helpful assistant is going to just help you do whatever you're trying to do, and that's not always what's best for you.

1:08:31Yeah, and it's been an interesting couple of years with all of the questions around that because I know there have been a number of lawsuits, there have been stories, they've hit OpenAI, it's hit Character AI, it's hit Google, it's probably hit just about everyone by now, at least to some extent. And I think there's a couple of things to know that the amount of cases that have gone really bad is, from what I understand, an extremely small percentage of things that have gone fine. I think that is important to acknowledge that that as a general rule for every one thing that goes terrible, there's there's a significant number that don't.

1:09:17but with that said these tools weren't designed for that I mean in retrospect it's easy to say they should have seen this use case coming but you know there are millions of use cases you can't see them all and I do feel like each of these companies has tried to take steps to remedy that I forgot all about opening eye for health until you mentioned it that like yeah that's a thing and there's yeah uh and and google's taken a number of actions there are resources in place and they're trying to do a better job of recognizing these things but the fact is you know it takes time they have to have data to pour through to verify they have to um i hope that it gets better over the years and i'm sure it will both both if you're using it the way people should not be right now as well as through these specialist tools and uh that are that are really going to zero in and be be good quality i hope um you know hopefully one day it solves mental health and is able i say solves you know solved solved it's like mental health is a benchmark and we're still climbing on it i think it would be really cool though you know it's people forget how far it goes.

1:10:41You know, I think a lot of people think mental health, oh, depression or a soldier that has PTSD. Those are like the two things people think of. And, you know, we're talking it impacts homelessness, drug use and alcoholism. It impacts your financial well-being. It impacts every single area of your life. It impacts your ability to be a good parent, to be a good spouse, to be a good friend, to be a good worker. spirals outward, right? Where like you, you know, if you're harming yourself or harming others or just causing disruptions for others because you're not treating this situation, then that impacts other people's mental health.

1:11:21It's like the spiraling, cascading thing. It's contagious. Yeah, exactly. When you think about those, all those tentacles that go out from the problems of mental health issues, as you tighten the, as like the feedback close the feedback loop or you close that feedback loop and the the cone of like accuracy improves and success is more grateful than it was it also impacts all of those other areas as well which you know uh is a absolutely a net good for society as a whole as much as it is for the individual getting the assistance i think for sure yeah so i'm very bullish on what daniel is doing i think they're going about it in absolutely the right way possible um and yeah i just want more people to know about it basically agreed well to everyone here watching thank you so much for joining us today it's been a lot of fun it's been a good conversation and it's funny it wasn't nearly our highest turnout but it was one of the most engaged chats we've ever had and i really appreciate every single one of you that that showed up that asked questions that, that had thoughtful ones.

1:12:33If you have followup questions, Grant, should they send them to where? Yeah. So you can do two things. So we look, we look at and personally read every comment on all the YouTube videos. So you could leave it as a comment if you're watching this later after the fact, or you can email team at the neuron daily.com with any questions. Just maybe put in the subject line, like question for the team at slingshot or questions for daniel with ash something like that even put therapy in the subject line because it'll be yeah need to search there you go yeah easy to chase them all down uh yeah and then we'll pass those on to that to ash um sorry to the team over at slingshot and we will uh try to get those answered for you and put it in the article that we'll write that goes with this excellent if you haven't yet please take just a minute to like and subscribe to the channel.

1:13:25We're super grateful you were here today and hope that we'll see you back again next time. We've got so much cool stuff in the works right now. We have so many great guests that are lining up by the day and, you know, maybe a little expansion here or there in the near future. We would love to make sure you're a part of that and around so that we can let you know what's next. But on that note, I guess, farewell Well, for now, humans, we'll see you next time. Thanks, everybody.