Moss (00:01) Hello, this is Moss, and you're back with Going Human because robots can't. We've had a bit of a three-week unexpected but required break from our show. So I apologize for the for the few of you out there in my audience that were counting on weekly episodes and have gotten nothing for three weeks, but we're back on schedule today with a drop every Wednesday, and I'm hoping that you'll continue to join me and us in our pursuit.

to remain human in the face of AI. I want to start this episode just with an admonition that the the podcast is finding itself we're and by we, I mean me, we're coming to a conclusion that it's really easy to slip into the evils of the darkness and and blame and finger pointing. And even though I am a very big

AI proponent, but who also has concerns, I've felt that some of my episodes so far have been more damning than they have been promising. And so part of my three week delay, vacation, whatever you want to call it, was really sort of coming to terms with two things. The first was

How do I keep the tone and the arc of each one of these episodes positive and forward looking? Because we don't really have a choice. AI is here and it will be taking over a lot and it will be replacing a lot. And it's on us to invest and invent ways that we can take it to its rightful place for each of us. So I just wanted to start out with that.

Clear admonition and admission. The second thing that I've been trying to work more purposefully on is brevity. I've had a few episodes that were one as long as one hour and twenty minutes, and there's just not enough of me to go around to be interesting to anybody for that amount of time. So guessed or not, we're gonna be working to keep all of these episodes right at about thirty-five or forty minutes.

Okay, with that, let's get into our episode for the week. This episode is called Keep Your Shrink Wrapped Unicorn. And there's just a lot in that. And I don't know why I came up with that title. But this episode's about therapy. And it's about the tension that we have in our cultures that say

not okay to not be okay. And and so we're here to really sort of talk about that tension that exists with reality and and then how AI is coming in and and sort of what the arguments are for and against it. Because I think the more we think about and talk about these things, the more we can shape their development.

Okay, so I'm gonna start like I always try to start, which is with a visual in your mind's eye. So close your eyes or keep them open, as long as you can make a little mental picture in your head. And picture a long corridor. A long corridor that's aptly lit, but doors on both sides, and all of the doors.

On each side of you, probably twenty, twenty five of them, they say do not enter. They say closed.

Or they say X person only or Y people only.

And you're walking down and you're neither X nor Y, and you have nothing that you can enter. And the very last door, straight dead end, at the end of the hall. That one doesn't have any sign on it at all.

So you're sort of eagerly driving your legs toward that toward that toward that door. But you're also a little scared.

Your hand touches the handle and before you even try to turn it, you think to yourself, What am I doing?

Well of course when you try to turn it it's locked.

And you think to yourself, Why? Why?

And then all of a sudden you hear shuffling behind you and there's a lot of people behind you. They're they're in the same hallway and they're they're they're coming to the same locked door. They're talking to each other. They're asking you what's wrong.

And you're starting to get all bunched up there at the end of that hall. No way out.

There's a unicorn behind that door. That door is therapy. And that unicorn behind that door is not easy to find. And that unicorn behind that door is often really, really expensive.

So if you can afford it and you find it, you may get some relief. And I'm gonna give you some numbers now. The reality is that almost nobody gets the mental health care that they really need. The poorest half of those with depressive disorders, eight percent

Get in eight percent. So think about a hundred per a hundred people and and ninety two of them are locked in the hallway with me.

Think about the richest of people, right? So 33% of the richest people have access to reliable mental health care. So these are all these are all numbers that come out of a study, and I'll I'll cite the study in a minute. But these are real numbers, okay? And the ones who got in, those rich people, the thirty-three percent who had access and got in.

There are measurements that say only twenty three of them got therapeutic care that guided their depression through a therapeutic result.

And of the eight percent that got in of the poor people, only three of them, only three out of every hundred people got something that they found more helpful.

So it turns out that money isn't the gate, right? And there's a huge argument here about, you know, what's gonna happen? What's gonna happen if something takes over with the person behind that door that is the perfect fit for me that I can't find or afford? What's gonna happen if they lose their seat? So we're in beat one now and beat one of our stone is is

Me. Here I am. I've I've worked up the nerve. I've finally gotten myself convinced that being in a room with somebody and being challenged and and being asked about my history and my past and my family and my my response mechanisms and my triggers and all that. I've finally worked up the nerve. And then it's like, how do I find one? Right? Well, in the old days and n till recently, the only way was really to ask people.

Which had its own barrier because then all of a sudden you're telling people that you need help, that you're depressed, or even that you just need help.

So you've got a barrier there. Well, or you get a phone tree. You you your your general practitioner says, Here are the people that take your insurance, right? And then you you you call all of them and none of them are accepting patients. The rest of them don't accept your insurance. They make you pay and then they make you submit bills, which doesn't always go well. So sometimes you end up footing the bill after being promised that your insurance covers it.

So you get through all that and then all of a sudden you've got wrong fits. We're in the wrong fit. It's not the right person. It's not the right person. So I'm gonna start over and I'm gonna do that loop. And then something's wrong with me. Why can't I find somebody? Why can't I find somebody who I can feel open with? Well, somewhere between twenty and fifty percent of those people who have access and find it, they just drop out. Right?

So that's not included in the numbers above. The numbers above, the you know, the twenty-three percent that got adequate care, those are the ones that stuck with it. Twenty to fifty percent. So it's an old problem. It's not digital. This has nothing to do with digital. And it wasn't you. But you know, none of that was the therapy. It was just the cost of admission to maybe find therapy. And that's weird, right?

So beat two is our false door. So it's it's sort of this is not no blame, no foul, right? But the convenience era started bringing in betterhelp.com and the like, where where advertisements on the radio promise you that you'd be able to filter your your perfect therapist. AI matched. It's an easy front door. It's a very low payment per session. All these people are licensed. You can cycle through them.

You can you can keep going until you find your person. But at the end of the day, it's an unlocked door with a carousel inside. And the horses are going up and down and the therapists are sitting on them with a big smile. But it's still the same room. It's still the same limits.

And then in 2023, there was a 7.8 million dollar ruling against one of these places because they sold your answers to somebody. They sold your answers to somebody. So do you want the risk of telling somebody your darkest secrets and then finding out that they're out there in the world or that they're influencing anything other than your own future and how you develop? So

This kind of matching still takes tries, right? Sign up isn't help. Sign up is signing up. So in this case and more recently, they fixed the front door, but they left the room exactly the same, only on steroids.

Which brings us to beat three of our stone. This is the trial and error tax, right? So I do get in the door. I do get matched with somebody who I think, you know, this might work. I'm gonna start opening up, right? Well, now all of a sudden you've gotten through all of this and now you're dealing with somebody who has their own way of understanding you.

And so that's part of the fit too. And more often than not, these people are very bright book learners or people who have their own fans of sorry not fans, mentors that have really helped them understand their own craft. And so they give you books to read, right? Or they say there's this really good online tool that you can sign up for and every week.

You can go with your partner or you can go alone and it'll walk you through all this. So before you know it, you know, your your once a week, if you can afford it therapist, is giving you a lot of homework. And that kind of exchange does not really work for almost all of us because very few of us read anymore, which is sad. Even fewer of us are good at putting something on our calendar and adhering to it.

Perfect example is this is this podcast. I've had a really hard time getting my stuff together, getting my getting my anchor back so that I could do this show. So homework is hard. People don't want to feel like they're in school when they're just trying to get through depression. So people go three or four rounds of this and sometimes they fake that they read part of a book or they even read part of a book. But you don't read part of a book and get the book, right? So they bucket and then they quit.

They pay it in the money and then they pay it in hope. The free machine feels better, right?

Grant it, give it permission, give it permission to tell you what you want. But it turns out talking is cheap and homework you can't do isn't help, is it?

So beat four of our stone this week is the mirror, right? This is the one where we have to get kinda hard on ourselves and the ecosystem.

The machine did crack the door, right? Better help did get more people aware and it destigmatized mental illness and depression and depressive disorders. So that's good, right? Therabot RCT had a fifty-one percent symptom drop reported, over two hundred and ten pi people in a DARPMA study that was

You know, it was designed with some pushback, so there's there might be something to that number. But again, this isn't fifty-one percent of our population. This is fifty-one percent of the thirty-two percent that had access. Right? And they're self selected, right? And they self selected theropod. So these are folks who have a funnel.

who at the most narrow part showed that they might be more likely to get a therapeutic result than not by one percent.

So five out of ten people on average got a therapeutic result when they went through that entire funnel. And so the thing we need to focus on here in my mind is the word designed, right? These are mass versions of therapeutic vehicles that are optimized to please.

So that's one of our first problems and it's probably one of the biggest objections.

If we're going into a room

And we continue to go back because the inclination of the person behind that door is to make me feel good.

Is that therapy? And I'm not sure it is. Maybe it is.

But I'm wondering that, you know, friction, that moment where you're like, did you just ask me that question? Do I have to answer? Am I being honest with you anyway? Am I really being honest with you? That moment, that bravery that it takes to be brutally honest about the things that are likely

Cracks in your own mental rubric. That bravery is is is monumental. And if you can't take your moment of monumental bravery every time you're in one of these rooms, you are far less likely to come out of it and say, Therapy really saved my life.

So I'm just gonna say it again. Friction is the active ingredient.

So the APA, the American Psychiatric Association, s you know, ninety-four percent of the of the fellows surveyed in in in that in that cohort say there's no nuance in a in a bot. It's just an echo chamber. And that therapy with a real therapist who's trained, it's not an echo chamber.

But here's what I'm gonna say. I'm gonna say that the unicorn wasn't really the credential, it was that friction.

The unicorn was never the credential.

It's the friend. It's the person who's followed you. It's the one thing that you can look in the eye and know sees you back.

And you don't really need a lot of credential, a lot of education, a lot of training hours for that. Some people do it just by being intuitive.

So the mirror here is just this.

Keep your shrink wrapped unicorn if you can find it. Just know the unicorn was never the therapist. The unicorn's the person willing to look you in the eye and show you what you're not seeing.

And so we wrap our stone up this week with hope.

Because we can't have eight people out of a hundred get some relief.

I'm sorry, let me rephrase that. We can't have eight people out of a hundred

Have access to any mental health care and only three of those out of a hundred actually get any therapeutic help. That can't work forever. It's a private club. It's a country club for rich people. And honestly, the rich people aren't happy with their country club either.

So this is an area of AI that I think stands to bring one of the largest benefits if it's carefully managed, guardrailed, and curated.

My work in AI has told me has taught me a lot, not the least of which is that it only runs crazy if you don't tell it what it shouldn't do.

It can pick up nuance, it can create pattern matching with everything you've told it.

There's promise in this technology for therapy and it has nothing to do with the private country club and everything to do with reaching more than just three of those hundred people in the poorest parts of the world.

Okay, that's our stone. Thank you for suffering it with me. Now we're gonna go to our maelstrom, which I also call the fuckery. these are the things that we are constantly hearing on the news and I'm just gonna run through some. We're going to we're we're we're we're gonna hear the headlines now only, and I'm gonna tell you whether I think it's a a fuck yes, a fuck no, or a a fuck maybe, right?

so they're AA A they're AI designed proteins, right? From a from a company that are that is doing really forward looking things. proteins that are wildly engineered and they're in wet labs already now. So there's actual tissue being formed in wet labs that are that are devised and designed by AA models.

And there's a lot of promise in this for for us in scalable food and food engineering. And it's kind of on the heels of the of the last episode I did with my dear friend Greg Enos, the cucumber episode. Right. Like we have a we have an opportunity to solve some of our food supply problems with AI that can be highly optimized and sustainable.

We also have these wet weather models that are giving us more warning. We've mentioned those a few times, but they're getting sharper. This is moving very fast. So we're going to start seeing in the coming year weather forecasts that are far more specific and and that can touch literally microzones for the first time ever. And they'll agree with each other and they're and they won't be.

reforcasted. That's kind of exciting. There's this offline assistant now, right? People can run LLMs on their own laptops, no cloud, no connection to the internet. And we can train our own little bot on our own little laptop to help us. We don't have to worry about it, spreading our stuff everywhere, which is, you know, arguably not that big of a deal, but if we're paranoid about that. And

And we can start seeing what we can do to own this technology ourselves instead of instead of plugging into somebody else's version of what they think we want it to be. So those are my fuck yeses for the week and and I and I'm hopeful about each one of them.

So on my fuck no list, people are pirating things. They're stealing other people's IP. They're they're getting books and images and and even sound bites of things that they say, dressing them up in different packaging and selling them as their own. And these are the things where I believe regulatory control is really important because

It's not just, ooh, that person wrote a book and somebody stole it. It's worse than that. It's it's it's this really strong Senate candidate is having lies cooked up about them. It's having words put in their mouths while they're speaking them through a fake AI avatar. So it looks like them, it sounds like them. They're saying things, blasphemous things that are all untrue lies.

So that's actually happening now. We have people, especially on the right wing side of our government, fanatics, and contributors that are just normal, icky fanatic people that want their candidate to win. That'll they'll stop at nothing. And AI's gates are right there for you to open and exploit. And I think that's really dangerous. And then

Last fuck note is just sort of these efficiency layoffs that are happening everywhere. People are either stopping hiring because they think this magic, you know, wizard is gonna come in and make everything happen for free in their organization and they don't need people. But what's happening is they're laying people off and then they're hiring them back because the work still needs them. Right. And I think our job as we incorporate and integrate AI is not

not to expect a miracle, but to understand how it helps.

We can bring AI along. We can teach people its value and its value and its benefits. And we can grow our businesses all at the same time without killing people's livelihoods. And so that's my that's my last fuck no. It's just come on, people, let's let's figure out what we're doing with AI. Let's bring it in slowly, let's educate people so that they can become the drivers of using AI.

make our businesses more successful. This is all within our reach and it's all right in front of us. On the fuck maybes, this week, here's one. There are agents that you can set to your preferences, your your purchasing preferences and frequencies and all that stuff. And they will just start buying things for you. So

Obvious one here is shopping list for consumables that you know you're gonna get every week. it's it it's a little different than just going to Safeway and saying, Safeway dot com, deliver this every week to me, 'cause that's already there. This is people saying, you know what, you might w I'm gonna have you try a different kind of butter this week. So we're gonna put that in your cart and and I'm gonna buy it with your card. And maybe maybe that's good. I don't know. I that would scare the heck out of me.

But but that's also because I like the process of going to a market. Sometimes I shop four times a week just to get the freshest things and to see what's out there. Then there's this these films with no human cast, right? These the the these these films that don't require crews or anything like that. It's just small team of people in a studio with a bunch of screens and they're just writing stories and it's just coming to life on a screen.

And it's pretty real looking.

So is it good, right? It it brings it brings the creator economy closer to feature films. Right? Because small creators have no resources. They can't just go to a a big movie studio like some of the big actors and and producers and and directors and say I've got something I want to create. So there's a there's there's an access piece to that that is really interesting, but I don't wanna see that.

And I like hearing actors tell me their stories about the creation of the movies and what it was like to film and how they struggle doing their own stunts and you know the the the realism behind movie making that takes real people and the grit that it takes to get through it. That's part of the movie for me. there's this AI Tutor situation, you know, we're we're closing hospitals all over the place so that

People can get rich, very, very rich, and then people can't people can't go to the hospital. We're also closing down schools and or just making classrooms bigger and the few teachers that are willing to stay in these rural areas or these areas that are very quickly becoming education deserts, they have way too much. So enter AI Tutor. So this is basically an AI.

situation is really good at teaching kids and there's a teacher that can monitor now four or five even six classrooms as long as these kids are staying put. So is this good? Is it better than twenty kids with a real human being where they're having to learn how to get along with each other while they're learning, while they're getting through challenges, which is a model for our workplace. I don't know.

Is it a lot better than them getting a shit education? Yes. So that's a fuck maybe for me. And then the last one is weirdly interesting to me. Dating apps are starting to use AI to create practice dates for you. So if you see somebody that you think you like, you can you can you can pretend like you're on a dinner date.

And they're triangulating your preferences, your communication style, your long term desires for a for something, and and and they've combined all of that to come up with matches for you. And then when you have a match, they're gonna have you pretend like you're with that person so you can lubricate your first date with a little bit of confidence.

I don't think that's a horrible thing if if online dating is where you are, but but I also think again back to the friction, right? Part of the awesomeness of finding that perfect person that you end up spending more time with than less, part of that is going through that. I'm walking into a restaurant, I don't even really know what this person's gonna look like, and I'm gonna be stuck at a table with them.

Let's see if we can do this. And it's either really good or it can be really bad.

I don't know. I'm I'm a proponent of the human side of that.

As my fuck maybes. Okay, here we are. we're at our we're at our tsunami. And and and and tsunami is the is the is the last segment of our show where we just say to ourselves, what remains ours? And how can we feel what that feels like? And, you know, one drop in a bucket.

Doesn't even wet the bottom.

But a million drops in a bucket overflows and gets everything all nice and wet. And so the tsunami is that idea. The more of us who can find something that feels human.

The more of us that will influence humanity's grasp on itself in the face of AI, which is the theme of this show.

So we've had seventeen minutes of a mirror, we've had our room of one. The antidote isn't a better bot. Maybe it is.

But it's something in someone who is there.

And that's what brings this tsunami into our hearts right now.

Call your oldest friend this week, somebody that maybe you haven't talked to in a long time, but maybe somebody you talk to every week, somebody who knows you or knew you, somebody who has a mental picture of you from a time that will be fun. Well you'll find joy in in in in remembering with them. But call your oldest friend and

And see if you guys can't stumble into something to laugh about, something dumb you did together, or fun you did together, or scary that happened to you when you were together.

Just connect with somebody who knows you.

That's your drop.

And if we all do it in mass numbers, it'll be our tsunami.

All right. Well we've done it. we've we've kept it under forty minutes. this is our show close now. I really want to thank you again for being

Being kind to yourselves, listening to me as I develop and as I turn this into something that feels more and more legible for our hearts and for the times that we're going through. We do have a ledger on our website, goinghumanpod dot com. That ledger gives you a chance to vote on on select fuckeries that I that I've cherry picked. So go there and vote.

Leave a comment. We we graduate things from the ledger from time to time into fuck yes or fuck no. So these are the fuck maybes that I'd love for the community to give a chance to.

to to to to help me navigate.

Okay, you've got your ledger. Like, subscribe or follow. That's really important to me. The more I get, the more people will see me in their feeds and the more they'll try me. And hopefully the more of these I do, the more awesome they'll become. So like, subscribe, follow. Get to that ledger at GoingHumanPod.com. This has been Going Human. I'm Moss. Have a great week.

And I'll see you next time.