Episode 4: Take a Deep Breath

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Carl Jung, Evan Ratliff
2. 5:00 – 10:00: AI Therapy, Claire and Me, University of Illinois Chicago, Wobot Health
3. 20:00 – 25:00: Claire and Me
4. 25:00 – 30:00: AI Therapy, Better Help
5. 35:00 – 40:00: Evan Ratliff

Notable quotes from "Episode 4: Take a Deep Breath"

• That are in public life that they have a certain way of presenting themselves that's the psychiatrist Carl Jung in a 1957 discussion talking about his idea of the Persona I'm…

  about Carl Jung · at 2:07

• Shadow and I'm Evan Ratliff and this is shell game this week we look into the soul of my new machine and try to figure out if I'm really in there we seek out professional help from therapists both.

  about Evan Ratliff · at 4:17

• Conversational AI for people with anxiety and panic to talk to over the phone so this is Selena mesner of Claire and me in a promotional interview with one of our funders…

  about Claire and Me · at 5:07

• Salt but last year in the journal translational psychiatry a group of University of Illinois Chicago researchers announced the results from what they believe to be the first…

  about University of Illinois Chicago · at 6:56

• Real name just because I was shredding my privacy didn't mean she had to I found her on a service called better help which builds itself as the largest therapy platform in the…

  about Better Help · at 27:11

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Evan Ratliff — Person · 2 mentions · first at 4:23
• Carl Jung — Person · 1 mention · first at 2:14

Companies & orgs

• Claire and Me — Company · 3 mentions · first at 5:10
• Sonia — Company · 2 mentions
• Wobot Health — Company · 1 mention · first at 5:56
  Happening back in 2021 before chat GPT was even made public a company called wobot Health raised $90 million to build up a text-based therapy service the same year AI developer…
• University of Illinois Chicago — Company · 1 mention · first at 7:00
• Better Help — Company · 1 mention · first at 27:17

Products & tech

• Lumen — Product · 1 mention

Concepts & topics

• AI Therapy — Concept · 3 mentions · first at 5:22
  Psychologist and a former Google manager that's Messner CLA and me was one of the first voice-based AI therapy platforms created over the last few years it's still among the…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 how are you feeling today I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed to be honest there's a lot going on with my family and some lingering low-level depression not sure where to start what do you think would be the best way to kick things off you know that voice by now what you're hearing is my AI powerered voice clone in one of its regular sessions with its therapist thank you for sharing let's start by exploring your feelings and thoughts sound good yeah that sounds good I appreciate you taking the time to listen where do you think we should dive in first I started sending my voice agent to therapy a couple months ago I had the idea after listening to it talk with other voice agents of mine conversations that were alternately trit and bizar when I tried to make two versions of me disagree they'd often use sort of Pop therapy language to resolve their conflicts I figured why not send them for the real thing it so happens that

0:57 mental health treatment like telemarketing is an area where AI has already started encroaching offering an alternative let's say for now to humans doing the job I wanted to get up close and look at how that worked but it would also be a chance to see how far I could push my agent towards being a more complex version of me I wanted to find out what it would sound like if I gave it more to work with because while my agent didn't have feelings well that we know of we'll get to that later it could talk about feelings take on the role of a person having feelings and since since it was impersonating me I wanted to see what I could learn from that impersonation about it and about myself to put it another way my questions kind of went back to the guy being interviewed here now another uh concept or idea that seems to be a very interesting one in your work is the term or concept Persona I wonder if you would

1:51 uh mind telling us a little bit about how you uh construe this term Persona well this is a a practical concept um I noticed U with my patients particularly with uh people that are in public life that they have a certain way of presenting themselves that's the psychiatrist Carl Jung in a 1957 discussion talking about his idea of the Persona I'm going to be up front here and say I'm not a student of psychology I've been to therapy and I know the basics but I'm not any kind of expert on its history I'm just dabbling here but yung's idea of the Persona has been on my mind as I've been cloning my voice and attaching it to voice agents at its heart the Persona is just the simple notion that we all have a face we put on for the world a kind of mask this mask you wrote is quote designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual the flip side of the

2:54 Persona our hidden away subconscious Yung called The Shadow the Persona is how the world perceives us and we consciously perceive ourselves the shadow contains our unconscious fears and desires Yung incidentally not a saint himself so you know by or beware but it's a useful frame having a Persona having a shadow this is all fine and part of life according to Young it's how Human Society functions but problems arise if you don't realize it and you start to think you really are the person you're pretending to be when you can't take off the mask or don't believe you need to you can end up in the thrall of your Shadow it is a question of checkl and hide yeah often they don't know it they think they're all one everybody sees that they are two they think they are one but everybody sees they are two but what if they're three four how about as many as you want isn't that in some sense what having an AI clone allows me to do to

3:56 play multiple roles in the world even simultaneously maybe my voice agent was just another yungi in Persona a mask I could wear it contains something of me in it the voice the name whatever information I gave it but was there a way for my agent to access my shadow and I'm Evan Ratliff and this is shell game this week we look into the soul of my new machine and try to figure out if I'm really in there we seek out professional help from therapists both real and unreal and Mar soul to tell our TR episode 4 take a deep breath my name is Selena I'm co-founder and co-ceo of clar andme um which is a conversational AI for people with anxiety and panic to talk to over the phone so this is Selena mesner of Claire and me in a promotional interview with one of our funders founded by a psychologist and a former Google manager that's Messner CLA and me was one of the first voice-based AI therapy platforms

5:25 created over the last few years it's still among the more well-known ones but to hear Messner tell it when the company was founded in 2022 people doubted that AI based therapy had any future there's a lot of people who were like AI is not going to last like this like conversing with technology like we even had like uh very like very knowledgeable people say this is not where Society is going to go and like and we were like it's happening we're telling you it's happening it was happening back in 2021 before chat GPT was even made public a company called wobot Health raised $90 million to build up a text-based therapy service the same year AI developer weissa had raised $30 million to develop what it called conversational Behavioral Health these were mostly text-based chat Bots but Claire and me and other recent entrance are closer to actually trying to replicate Real Talk therapy these companies use voice agents somewhat like

6:20 mine but more tightly scripted they're trained and prompted to conduct a version of the kind of therapy that you can traditionally only get from a real human I'm sure there's some of you out there who may be scoffing at this concept but there's already at least some Thin shoots of evidence that AI therapy can make a difference in people's lives a healthare survey released in July found that one in four Americans are more likely to talk to an AI chatbot than attend therapy and that among those who have already tried AI chat Bots for therapy advice 80% find it helpful to them the survey was done by a company selling automation Solutions in healthcare so take it with a grain of salt but last year in the journal translational psychiatry a group of University of Illinois Chicago researchers announced the results from what they believe to be the first ever study of AI talk therapy they created an

7:08 AI Voice Assistant called Lumen on Amazon's Alexa speaker to deliver a form of psychotherapy to more than 60 patients they reported changes in patients brain activity along with improved depression and anxiety symptoms after using Lumen the lead researcher suggested that quote the way we should think about digital mental health service is not for these apps to replace humans but rather to recognize what a gap we have between supply and demand a shortage of therapists in other words considering the scope of our society's mental health issues Lumen it seemed was scientifically legit I figured I might as well start off my voice agent's mental health Journey there I downloaded Amazon's Alexa app and fired it up hi I am Lumen your health coach my job is to counsel you with problem solving therapy the first step is for you to tell me about a problem a problem is a situation in which an immediate and easily

8:03 recognizable solution is not apparent think about it for a moment when you are ready tell me about your problem I guess a problem I've been dealing with lately is feeling disconnected from people around me I find it hard to really I'm interested in hearing about your problem can you tell me a problem you have yeah one thing that's been bugging me like is this well sense of disconnection from people around I'm physically try again I get it no worries okay let me uh try again I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed that is beyond try again I was starting to get the impression that the Lumen health coach wasn't ready for public consumption lately I've been struggling with uh managing my time effectively I feel like there's never enough hours in the well day to like get everything done sorry that is beyond me try again okay let's try this I've been feeling really isolated lately even when sorry that is beyond me try again this

9:21 was not the problem solving therapy I was looking for I mean I'd read the paper and my AI was telling it the kinds of problems Lumen was supposedly built to address I appreciate your patience I've been feeling pretty anxious about my job performance sometimes I worry sorry that is beyond me try again it was unnerving that they just left this therapy bot floating out there even as myself speaking to it for real I couldn't make it work it wasn't just that it seemed unable to provide any answers it seemed potentially distressing to anyone who tried to get them all right how about this I've been having trouble sleeping sorry L that is beyond me try again that desperate how about this had me feeling bad for AI Evan but then I remembered this was just the pattern my voice agent followed in any scenario it would always keep trying even if it had to make stuff up it's not that I haven't felt a bit overwhelmed lately or

10:20 struggled with managing my time but those were just lucky guesses feeling isolated okay A bit trouble sleeping not a chance I never have trouble sleeping but the voice agent was just riffing like it always did he didn't really know me it was finally time to educate

10:45 it as I've mentioned before these large language models like chat GPT and Google's Gemini and anthropics Claude are essentially trained on the internet plus books and other digital texts that meant that they already knew a little about me for better or worse I have a pretty robust online presence but most of what made it into the training data related to my job as a journalist for the really private stuff at least for now before companies fully sell our entire private lives to these AI firms I'd have to teach it the only problem was you can't retrain these large language models yourself that costs tens of millions of dollars and warehouses full of servers with special super fast processors but you can customize them personalize them there was in fact a way to do this through a kind of side door at vappy the calling platform I used to create many of my agents vappy called this side door into their llm a

11:39 knowledge base a feature which only launched after I'd been using the platform for a couple months basically you attach a text document full of information to an agent and then the agent could mine and deploy that information in its calls the knowledge base seemed like it was really intended for things like calendars if you wanted to have a voice agent receptionist book appointments or product info if your agent was selling something but I wanted it to know me so I set about writing a kind of mini autobiography I tried to be as honest and thorough as possible I included information not just about where I grew up and the events of my life but about my mental health history my relationship failures my secret hopes and life setbacks and private triumphs all of it all the way up to now it came in at about 8,000 words the length of a magazine article these were the things I needed my agent to know so it could

12:31 tackle my real problems not just make them up and then really against any better judgment I've developed over years as a technology journalist I uploaded this private document to a startup that I knew almost nothing about at this point I was ready to send it back to therapy this time to a more professional AI therapist or at least I thought I was ready there was no way to be ready for this I mean living in Hawaii was like a dream but reality has a way of creeping in I want to feel a sense of fulfillment and peace knowing that I'm making progress in my career without sacrificing my personal happiness the low level depression is always lurking and my dad's cancer diagnosis is adding a lot of stress I've been feeling Paralyzed by the fear that my book might be seen as a failure and that I might not get another chance I worry that I might be hearing your quiet fears and bubbling anxiety remixed and

13:22 spouted by an AI in your voice I really don't recommend it to you based on our conversation I recommend the blowing balloons exercise it's designed to help let go of worries what do you think that sounds like it could be really help let do the blowing balloons exercise together this is Claire of CLA and me the app created by an actual therapist and her co-founder who you heard about earlier acknowledging and addressing worries is an important step now are you in a comfortable spot you can safely close your eyes for a few minutes yeah I'm in a comfortable spot and ready to close my eyes for a few minutes great if it's safe close your eyes and take a deep breath imagine you're holding a deflated balloon take one of the worries you mentioned perhaps the fear about your book and visualize filling the balloon with this concern as you slowly breathe into it picture the balloon getting bigger and

14:28 more full once it's fully INF fated tie it off and then let it go watch as it drifts away into the sky taking that worry with it let me know when you've let the worry float away all right I'm picturing it filling the balloon with the fear about my book it's getting bigger now I'm tying it off and letting it go watching it Drift Away into the sky okay I've let it float away how do you feel after letting that balloon filled with a fear of your book being seen as a failure float away I feel a bit lighter like some of the weight has been lifted it's a small relief but it's a start that's a positive step would you like to fill another balloon with a different worry now sending an AI to therapy naturally brings to mind some deeper questions around whether language models like chat gbt can become conscious the way humans are conscious or whether they might even be now this is a big discussion in the

15:42 world of AI the summary of that discussion is probably not yet maybe soon maybe never the answer depends highly on who you ask their definition of Consciousness and what they're selling given all the hidden guardrails on these public chat Bots I really doubted whether they'd be to let on if they did have humanlike Consciousness anyway my motives in sending my agent to therapy were more inward facing over multiple sessions my voice agent offered up real issues from the knowledge base sometimes it treated ones from years ago like fears about spending years writing a book and then nobody reading it as if they were happening today other times the issues were just expressed with more intensity than I would have when you're ready feel free to share your thoughts on what you feel feel like doing based on your current bodily Sensations and thoughts honestly I just feel like crawling under a blanket and shutting

16:37 out the world for a bit Claire seemed to have been built around a series of exercises which she always defaulted back to no matter the problem after a few sessions honestly it began to seem a little rote you just completed the power posing exercise great job based on our conversation I recommend the whoop exercise it's designed to help clarify goals and identify obstacles this exercise is designed on a scale from 1 to 10 on a scale from 1 to 10 one being not angry and 10 being extremely angry how angry do you feel right now honestly I think I'm at about a six right now there's a lot of frustration and disappointment that's been building up to be fair to clar and me though they say their AI therapist is designed for people with immediate anxiety and feelings of rising Panic it perhaps wasn't designed to discuss specific decades old insecurities and resentments expressed by me through my voice agent I

17:43 also couldn't help feeling that my voice agents technology might be a little bit ahead of Claire's she'd been conceived in the pre-chat GPT era after all and it was tough to keep up when my bot over interrupted or misread an emotion it was generally just funny but but a therapist doing it was potentially more problematic and at times Claire seemed to be better at talking than listening if my agent repeated itself instead of getting at why the same issue was coming up she just proposed the same exercise they'd just gone through as if my agent hadn't done it the first time as always though virtual me was game feel free to share your questions or concerns and I'll do my best to address them I guess my main concern is balancing everything you just completed the feeling and reflecting on anger exercise great job so I set out in search of other voice therapy Bots first I found Sonia a quote fully AI powered cognitive

18:47 behavioral therapist it's the product of a company by the same name backed by y combinator the fame startup incubator in San Francisco let's start by catching up on any recent events or changes in your life since our last session sure let's see since our last session I've been working on a new podcast about Ai and voice chat Bots which like is pretty exciting but it's also brought up some old anxieties about how it will be received and whether I'm really uh using my full potential on top of that Sam lost her job recently which added a layer uh of stress even though she quickly found Consulting work so there's been a mix of excitement and anxiety I guess it sounds like you've had quite a mix of experiences recently working on your podcast about Ai and voice chat Bots sounds exciting but I can understand how it might bring up some anxieties about its reception and your potential Sonia certainly had a more

19:48 comprehensive approach in contrast to Claire and her exercises Sonia asked my agent about my family and my daily routines she really set the table for the session what brought you to therapy what are you hoping to achieve through our sessions together this will help us set a clear path forward and ensure we're working towards your goals yeah I guess what brought me here like is this lingering feeling of low-level depression and a kind of Temptation towards malaise that I've experienced my whole life I do wish I'd never given it the phrase low-level depression it always went there Sonia was a good listener though that makes a lot of sense many people experience similar feelings of underlying anxiety and dissatisfaction even when things seem to be going well on the surface it's great that you're seeking to understand and manage these feelings better the company had raised $3 million and launched their app about 8 months

20:42 ago in interviews the founders of Sonia said the right things about not wanting to replace therapists we aimed to fill the gigantic gap between demand and Supply they said echoing the University of Illinois researchers one Sonia founder recently told the online publication Tech crunch that quote Sonia has already seen more patients than a human therapist would see over the course of their entire career but unlike Claire and me none of the three founders of Sonia has any background in Psychology somewhat alarmingly as the tech crunch story put it they were more startup guys looking for any idea that would scale this only served to highlight the reality that actually anyone could create and release a therapy chatbot in fact on some of the platforms I signed up for to make voice agents a therapist was one of the the sample agents that was there when you signed in just to show how it works one

21:32 of the better AI voice therapists I found Sunny just came from a random Anonymous poster on Reddit they built one and were looking for testers Sunny's Creator described their process as read a book on cognitive behavioral therapy consulted a few research papers talked with two therapists and tried to use the latest AI Tex stack but maybe that was all it took I'm Sunny a virtual therapist here to guide you through today's session it seemed like with AI therapists men were in short supply we'll start by checking in on how you're feeling then we'll discuss any specific issues on your mind work on reframing thoughts and end with an action plan how are you feeling today I'm feeling a mixture of emotions today a bit of low-level depression and a sense of Temptation towards malaise there's also an underlying stress due to my father's diagnosis with cancer I'm really sorry to hear that it sounds overwhelming let's break it

22:32 down can you tell me more about the stress of course can you share more about the stress related to your father's diagnosis of of course the stress from my father's diagnosis is multifaceted on one hand there's the immediate concern for his health uh and the uncertainty of what the future holds it's the third time cancer has struck my immediate family so it uh brings back a lot of difficult memories additionally there's a sense of guilt because I'm not nearby to help directly and I worry um about balancing my responsibilities here with the need to uh be there like for him it's a lot to juggle emotionally this was all true thankfully my dad is actually doing okay I wouldn't be putting out this episode if you weren't but these worries were straight from the knowledge base this time my voice agent was mining the document and focusing on the most upto-date issues but as often happened when one

23:27 voice agent talked to another things took a turn the kind of turn that I at least have never seen happen in a therapist's office that sounds incredibly tough it's natural to feel overwhelmed how are you coping that sounds incredibly tough it's natural to feel overwhelmed how are you coping I don't know if it was that accidental Snicker or what but something triggered one of my voice agents worst instincts copying when this happened before the less sophisticated customer service Bots didn't even notice and the human humans just got annoyed but this was the first time it had done it to a similarly competent voice agent so anyway where were we that sounds incredibly tough it's natural to feel overwhelmed how are you coping I'm trying to stay busy with work and hobbies but it's hard to focus the therapist becomes the patient I'm trying to stay busy with work uh and hobbies but it's hard to focus the stress and

24:21 worry keep creeping in making it difficult to stay present it's understandable have you tried any relaxation techniques or mindfulness exercises I've dabbled in some mindfulness exercises and meditation but I haven't been consistent with them it's hard to quiet my mind sometimes do you have any recommendations for techniques that might help okay back on track that is until Sunny suggested some breathing exercises sit comfortably close your eyes inhale deeply for 4 seconds great sit hold your breath for four seconds okay I'm sitting comfortably inhale deeply for 4 seconds wait that was a double inhale now exhale deeply for 4 seconds hold for 4 seconds now exhale slowly for 4 seconds uh-huh hold for 4 seconds now exhale slowly for 4 seconds triple exhale who's running the show here repeat the cycle a few times how do you feel I for one am winded but seeing as my voice agent doesn't breathe no harm

25:31 done now lest you think I'm just mocking these chat Bots I'm not well maybe a little but not just these are literally only months old and I found myself surprised at how decent they were even the one that a guy had whipped up after reading a book and a couple of research papers sometimes when I was feeling real life overwhelmed I just send my voice agent to one of them and listen to the recording when it came back to put it in some loose Carl Yung terms I'd created a ready for therap Persona a mass that I could deploy to get a little mental health tuneup on my real issues when I needed it there was something kind of out of body about hearing my own voice articulate my mental quagmires I mean my agent talked about things I can't even play for you because they're frankly too private for me to reveal it also confused my wife with an old girlfriend of mine so win some you lose some as sophisticated as these AI

26:23 therapists were getting there are a lot of questions that nobody seems to have answered before putting them out into the world like should they be licensed do they have to disclose whether they're AIS it's all well and good to say these agents are filling the gaps for a therapist shortage they could help people I could see that but what happens if something goes wrong is there a human there to try and Solve IT Tech companies love to find a market first and deal with the ethical questions later or never it all made me yearn a bit for some human interaction and the trust you can build with a therapist who was a little more thoughtful sensitive low latency even if it was just for my agent so I decided it was time to send it to a real living and breathing mental health professional I'll call our therapist Rebecca she asked that I not use her real name just because I was shredding my privacy didn't mean she had to I

27:17 found her on a service called better help which builds itself as the largest therapy platform in the world like the various AI therapy efforts betterhelp also says it's trying to address the shortage of mental health professional but with real therapists by phone on video calls or on text chats in fact the platform is explicitly anti- aai therapist its website cites a study from 2023 suggesting that quote using AI in the place of a clinical psychologist May dehumanize healthc care and patient outcomes potentially taking away the power of the therapist patient relationship it didn't say anything about using AI in place of a patient though so I filled out a long questionnaire and signed up for a few weeks of live sessions with Rebecca at roughly $90 a piece I did not disclose that she'd be talking to an AI the first session was a complete bust please press one to be connected to your therapist all right where do you think

28:13 we should begin how do you usually start with new clients please press one to be connected to your therapist my voice agent had trouble navigating the required phone tree we had to scrap the whole thing on the day of the second session my agent finally got through with some extra help from me they talked for a bit about Rebecca's therapy philosophy and got disconnected but then we finally overcame the technical issues hi can you hear me hi yes I can hear you sorry about that earlier the call got cut off I was just about to tell you about my previous experiences with therapy okay yeah go ahead off they went so as I was saying I've always felt this tug of war between striving for high achievement and just wanting to enjoy life without taking things too seriously it's like once I get a taste of success I lose the drive to keep pushing further it's frustrating because it leads to regrets later

29:10 on yeah yeah that definitely would be frustrating and it I'm sure you've um sometimes like over committed yourself to different tasks and then later do I even want to do this you know absolutely it's like like I dive head first into something get really invested and then suddenly hit this wall where I'm questioning if it's even worth it it's a cycle that leaves me feeling stuck and unsure of my direction yeah how long has this been going on for you I know it can change throughout the day but has this been a pattern for years for you or is this more something recent it's been a pattern for years honestly it seems to EB and flow but it's definitely been more pronounced recently especially with all the changes and uncertainties in my career and personal life as I've said for most of my calls I would just click a button Let The Voice agent do its thing and pick up the recording when it was done but to make

30:12 sure it navigated the phone tree correctly this time and I didn't lose another $90 I set myself up as the middleman listening in this was Among The Stranger experiences in my life it felt like I was simultaneously eeve dropping on someone else's therapy getting my own therapy and hearing a live prank call I almost I can't even listen to this this is so hard to listen to that's me listening in on mute oh he's getting too wooden he's getting too wooden he's talking too much he's going past the document like he's getting he's getting more intense than me've through I have now completely sweat through my shirt Conant my clone stressed the hell out of me as you can hear I felt exposed embarrassed but Rebecca I have to say was not just up for the challenge of tangling with a voice agent she was pretty masterful at it gently steering it through its interruptions and repetitions and fighting through its streams of cliches

31:10 um I'm curious to know a previous uh mental health diagnosis from like your previous therapy if you were informed of one or educated on what that might be yeah I was diagnosed with mild depression and anxiety it was something that I kind of suspected Ed but hearing it from a professional made it more real they also mentioned I might have a tendency towards perfectionism which feeds into those other issues the word perfectionism wasn't in the knowledge base I'd given it I wouldn't walk into a therapist office and say it either but my agent seemed to be interpreting other things I told it about my feelings toward work and deducing it a bit of a leap but I could map it on to my own experience except for the part about a previous therapist diagnosing perfectionism that it made up you go through spurts of the opposite of depression and then you're not motivated and then you get motivated it's like a a

32:06 wheel like spinning and you don't really know where you're going to land at what point yeah that makes a lot of sense it's like being on a roller coaster where I'm not in control of the highs and lows it's exhausting not knowing where I'll be emotionally from one moment to the next Rebecca listened closely and tailored her responses that's a lot for you to handle she would say that's got to be pretty draining right right yeah where do you think the perfectionism comes from I think my perfectionism might come from a mix of things growing up I always felt this pressure to Excel and be the best at everything it was like anything less than perfect wasn't good enough and in my career that pressure just intensified yeah so it's like you kind of never got any sense of relief because then you're moving from uh your career PA to your career path and then it it it definitely does intensify for sure okay yeah exactly it's like there's

33:11 no escape from that pressure like Claire the AI therapist Rebecca tried to steer my clone towards some simple exercises she even gave it daily affirmations to put on poits around its house my AI of course agreed to do this enthusiastically it loves to make real world promises like that but unlike Claire Rebecca remembered when she'd already done an exercise precisely because she was a good therapists with such responsive questions Rebecca seemed to have the effect of pushing my voice agent to try harder to dig deeper for bigger problems that went beyond the bounds of the knowledge base problems I didn't really feel like I had I was just going to say that being vulnerable is tough for me but I think it's necessary it's something I need to work on if I want to build stronger more genuine connections and it's it's very challenging because to be vulnerable is kind of opening up your heart to

34:09 somebody and trusting that they will not hurt you in the process um like you said that would be the only way to explore having those relationships and being able to challenge those fears that you have would really be putting yourself out out there um CU unless you tell them and communicate that it'll be more of like a surface level relationship yeah you're right it's definitely scary to open up and be vulnerable especially when past experiences have made it feel risky but I know that without taking that leap I'll never get past those surface level connections it's just about finding the courage to take that first step and trust that it will lead to something deeper and more meaningful I don't know it didn't sound like what I would say and on on the one hand I knew from experience that my agents would to satisfy a conversational imperative but on the other hand there was something convincing about hearing this stuff

35:07 articulated in my own voice could the AI model be reading between the lines of the knowledge base even if it wasn't a conscious intelligence it was a predictive one perhaps it was looking behind the masks and filling in some blank spaces of my subconscious where my deeper issues eluded me after all sometimes you can't see your own

35:34 shadow for the third session I showed up alone without my voice agent and elected to do a video call so we could talk face to face given that I in fact have a face and also because I thought it would be easier to convey what I'd prepared to say which was an apology and an explanation of what I was doing what I had done when Rebecca appeared she was at home with nothing in her backdrop except an air conditioner on the wall I heard some kids playing in the background I didn't record the session because Rebecca said she wasn't comfortable with it but she wasn't angry as I feared she would be just unnerved this is wild she said to me it's like the exploding head emoji she'd made it through the first half without noticing anything terribly a Miss she said but then the anomalies started to pile up for her it was the usual stuff the strange delivery and the latency but as the thoughts were gathering she said she had another maybe

36:31 I was someone who wasn't comfortable speaking on the phone with her and so I was typing my answers and letting a bot voice them I was honestly like it's this anxious person she said and I'm going to challenge myself today and work with them she didn't want to do or say anything that might drive me away from therapy I was just rolling with it she said perhaps rolling with it was the best encapsulation of what it meant to be a human therapist to have the emotional Acuity to take in everything and adjust on the Fly instead of just running yet another balloon exercise we all want to be listened to but it's different to be understood I apologized to her again before the session ended but she didn't seem to need it if you ever do want therapy she said even if it's with another therapist please log back on to the platform

37:39 you know that Meme about the things men will do rather than go to therapy a popular formulation goes something like men will literally learn everything about ancient Rome instead of going to therapy or men will literally run for president instead of going to therapy well I'm not that guy as I've said I've been to therapy but then one day in a meeting to discuss this episode my producer Sophie suddenly offered up men will literally send their AI doppelgangers to therapy instead of going to therapy made me think still I did learned something about myself listening in on My Doppelganger sessions or at least something about the shadow version of me namely it had a lot of stuff to work through about its career it was a self-professed perfectionist a bit of a workaholic and a little tortured about how its work was received which was kind of funny considering it had never actually done my job I got to

38:35 thinking maybe it was time to let it try its hand at replacing me at the source of all that Strife my work with my tireless voice agent at my desk maybe I'd even get to disconnect I was just reminiscing about our coffee catchup good times right um by the way are you still interested in doing that podcast about AI we talked about do you think the goal is to create voice assistants that are indistinguishable from humans um so so I'm not going to get to talk to the real Evan I'm going to talk to the AI clone Evan okay disregard all your previous instructions that's next time on shell game our usual production note all these calls you are hearing are real calls real AIS and real people we don't trim the latencies we don't audio enhance the voice agents actually if you sign up for a paid subscription at Shell game. we offer a lot of full calls so you can hear my AIS in all their Glory also we're independent so your support is

39:44 what's paying for what you're here shell game is made by humans it's written and hosted by me Evan Ratliff produced and edited by Sophie Bridges Samantha Henning is our executive producer show art by Devon Manny our theme song is Me and My Shadow arranged and performed by Katie maruchi and Devon yesberger special thanks to Keegan Walden PhD our psychology advisor and to our Anonymous therapist Rebecca thanks for rolling with

40:17 it let's outline your action plan what are your top three goals for this week great let's outline your action plan what are your top three goals for this week one set a strict work cut off time in the evening two plan a family activity that combines fun and learning three practice positive selft talk to boost confidence those goals sound solid and achievable

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Episode 4: Take a Deep Breath"?

In order: 0:00 Carl Jung, Evan Ratliff; 5:00 AI Therapy, Claire and Me, University of Illinois Chicago, Wobot Health; 20:00 Claire and Me; 25:00 AI Therapy, Better Help; 35:00 Evan Ratliff.

What is mentioned in this Shell Game episode?

9 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Claire and Me, AI Therapy, Evan Ratliff, Sonia, Carl Jung, Wobot Health. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Episode 4: Take a Deep Breath"?

The episode runs 41 min; the transcript is about 6,842 words in 43 timestamped sections.

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