AI Mindset Coach with David Gull

David: The whole mission here is if we can get people to look at the things that are holding them back, whether it’s their stress or their anxiety or somewhere they’re stuck, or maybe some unprocessed traumas, whatever it is that’s going to unlock a new level for that person and really help them go out into the world and be their best self achieve whatever it is that they’re really trying to achieve. We know that a lot of our users are people that care about making an impact about doing something really meaningful in the world, but they have these kind of, like, underlying emotional challenges. Maybe they’re not regular self regulating well. And that’s where we can really make an impact.

Bruce: Welcome to the Future of Psychiatry podcast, where we explore novel technology and new innovations in mental health. I’m your host, Dr. Bassi, an addiction physician and biomedical engineer. Today, we’re going to be focused on AI guided meditation, and we have David Gull with us. He’s a co founder and CEO of Vital, which is a first AI guided meditation coach. By leveraging AI, Vital creates personalized, guided meditations based on an individual’s specific life challenges, meditation experience, and preferred techniques. Vital is expanding to become an AI powered well being coach and will include interventions, tools, and techniques beyond meditation, including conversational coaching, journaling, and other tools inspired by manualized therapy. Vital’s mission is to bring affordable one on one support to anyone who needs help with life’s difficult challenges and to help them unlock their biggest goals and dreams. Welcome.

David: Thank you, Dr. Bassi. Appreciate you having me.

Bruce: It’s awesome to meet you. I’m excited for this conversation to talk more about this idea, this, I guess, app. It’s on an app store, but I saw your demo where I think you were doing it on a web browser, which is cool. I guess we’ll just call it an app for short. so tell us a little bit about yourself first. Before we start to talk about Vital, I know you have a background in architecture. I thought that is such an intense field and I’m curious how, if there’s any elements to that education that got blended into your contributions at Vital.

David: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for that. So the origin story is actually from my architecture career and it was two  things. One was I actually found myself, working on hospitals and lab buildings as design projects. And so that’s where my interest in health and wellness actually originated. you know, I had to learn a lot about how those organizations operated patient care, you know, the problems that people were suffering from. So that’s, 1 piece of it.

The lab buildings was really around how are people researching the future of delivering better care? So that got me excited about all the possibilities.

And then the 3rd piece of it was actually, as you said, architecture is a pretty intense career.

 I was working like 60 to 80 hour weeks. My 1st year at a large architecture firm at a New York City and it was my, you know, obviously the beginning of my career.

About 1 year into that I hit burnout. I took a vacation from New York to LA to visit my brother and instead of being on vacation, I ended up sleeping 12 hours a night trying to get caught up trying to recover.

 And that vacation, quote unquote, was a wake up call for me that something had to change. I was clearly not going to be able to sustain this rate of, uh, you know, stress and work for another 40 years of my professional career. I look back on it as a fortunate happenstance because it led me to transform my life.

So I talked to some trusted folks around me and I started the paleo diet, which really leveled up how I felt. I started an exercise routine where I was going to the gym 3 times a week in the office that I worked at and I started a meditation practice. And so that’s, that’s the origin of it.

So to me, that became a daily practice that really made a significant impact on my self awareness. My regulation of stress and it was a place for me to sit with myself every day and really understand how I was feeling and what was going on with myself. And I really look at that as the origin of Vital because, later on in my career, I moved into tech and entrepreneurship. I got excited about the ability for tech , to change the world that kind of a more scalable way than architecture. And I was, working in real estate software at the time, and I hit a 2nd point in my career where I felt I’d call it like, if the 1st 1 was my mini health crisis, this 1 was more my existential crisis where I felt like something was missing for me and I felt like I wasn’t making a big enough contribution to the world. And not really working on something that was oriented towards helping other people. And so I sold that last business that I had started founded was really proud of the progress that I was making.

But ultimately sold that so that I could work on something where I could orient my purpose and my mission and my drive and my excitement for technology towards helping people and through the process of looking at what that might look like, really thought what what’s been meaningful to me and what’s changed my life.

And that was again these this shift around my own health that included diet. Fitness and meditation, sort of like a mindset fitness, if you will. And so that’s really the origins of Vital.

Bruce: Nice. Thank you for sharing all that stuff. I, can relate to a lot of that. I think, there’s a lot of life stressors out there and meditation can come in handy for a lot of people. I think a lot of people, a lot of my patients, when they hear of meditation, they, they’re frightened sometimes there’s a meditation induced panic attacks when people are sitting too long with their own thoughts, and it could sometimes backfire.

So I feel like every time I recommend meditation. They’re kicking and screaming practically to try to avoid that. I use a meditation app myself, and I’ve been getting into it more and more. I think it’s very helpful.

Was there a problem that you identified that you felt you can improve upon based on your experiences with meditation? And is that kind of what led you to doing AI based meditation?

David: Yeah. So I think you’ve touched on a couple of important things there. One is that meditation is something that people can resist. And so we’re actually framing it a little bit more as just guided coaching sessions. And with your eyes closed and closing your eyes really shuts off like 90 percent of your sensory input and lets you focus on yourself and on the voice.

And so that’s the 1st thing is, yes, it’s technically meditation. We kind of define meditation as sitting with your eyes closed, doesn’t have to be silent.

Uh, and then the 2nd piece of it is around how we think we Are doing this better than anyone else in the world right now. And the reason is if you look at existing meditation apps, they did a great job of elevating awareness around meditation, especially in the West and delivering it to people through, you know, an app, making it really simple to, to try, but what they missed is, and partly because the technology wasn’t available at the time, if you record a meditation and it has to cater to millions of people who might be the listeners, it’s actually resonating with zero people because it has to be sort of generic to resonate with that many people. And so if you create a gratitude meditation, that’s great. It can help someone sort of understand the concepts around gratitude, but it has no relevance to their exact situation in their life and what they want to feel grateful for and what problems they’re trying to solve.

Through their gratitude practice. So we saw a unique opportunity with AI to create the 1st personalized content. And it’s akin to having a meditation coach in your pocket, right? Someone who is with you 24 7 who gets to know and understand you, who gets to understand your actions, your thoughts, your behaviors.

 What’s going on in your Life what’s working well, what’s not working and caters the actual sessions to you specifically. So a great example, just continuing with gratitude that I just mentioned is you can do a gratitude meditation guided or with Vital, you can do a guided gratitude meditation that is exactly specific to something that you’re going through.

So for me, I did one this week that was for my father, Evan. So I tell I would like to do a gratitude meditation for my father, Evan, because I just found out that he has to get back surgery. He’s 78 years old. I’m starting to get a little bit worried about him as he ages. And I want to really feel that sense of gratitude and love for the person that he is in my life, right?

You can imagine that if someone, if a really great meditation coach heard that. When they give you that guided meditation, they’re going to do things like use your father’s name, speak to the situation, talk about love and mortality and all the things that might be related to that specific situation.

And that’s why this is so much more powerful. If you think about great conversations that you’ve had with friends, great conversations that you’ve had with coaches, great conversations that you’ve had with therapists, they’re basically Structuring those around making sure that you feel understood.

 And then giving you a little bit of a outsider’s third person perspective where they’re not so, emotionally attached to it. And then they might, guide you through thinking through it yourself. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with Vital.

Bruce: That’s awesome. Very fascinating. You made a distinction at the beginning of your answer about using the descriptor coach, and maybe we can talk about that now. Because I think it’s an important feature to bring up when I think of a coach. Obviously, I think of track coach. I ran in high school. They’re definitely giving you personalized feedback based on how you’re doing. It’s not like A textbook somebody reading off a textbook, they’re like seeing at your performance and then they’re giving you feedback. What was the thought process there with the company and trying to adapt the word coach and in the description of this AI based meditation?

David: Yeah, that’s, you’ve kind of nailed it, which is you think of a coach as someone who’s an expert at something that you want to achieve at, right? Whether it’s your, your health, your happiness there’s someone that has experience with it. They’ve learned they’ve coached other people, they have other other students that they’ve worked with and they have wisdom and experience.

 And then, as you said, they are then able to take that wisdom and experience. And customize it to your specifics of what you’re going through. And so, you know, I’ve had the fortune of working with great coaches, I’ve also worked with therapists. Part of this framing is really creating the sense that the app is a companion of yours that, that you can rely on.

That’s got your back. Right. And that’s where we think coach will, you know, really resonate with people in terms of that. And obviously there’s a whole coaching industry that has really started to flourish in the last 5 years or so, where people are really starting to realize, Hey, there’s lots of places in my life where I would like to be better.

But I’m feeling kind of stuck. And who helps with that? Is it your best friend or is it likely that your best friend maybe doesn’t give the best advice because they’re biased and they might not be an expert in what you’re doing. And so that’s where people are really starting to realize that there’s expert guidance out there that you can rely on.

And then, of course, there are books, podcasts, seminars, all of these other things that people are relying on for quote unquote expert advice. The problem with those is again that they’re fairly generic, right? So if you write a book on something, it has to be generic by definition, or if you record a podcast it’s never going to cater specifically to the individual that’s receiving that content.

Bruce: So let’s talk a little bit about the patient’s experience a little bit before we go into the technical discussion, because obviously this is a podcast and people can’t see any demonstration. But I, saw your demonstration. It looked like there is, an opportunity for the user to enter the situation that they wanted help with, and then session length, and maybe a couple other variables there. I think a lot of the audience is probably familiar with ChatGPT and how it works, and you can basically enter as much detail as you want for ChatGPT to kind of spit out an answer. How does it work for somebody starting off? And how does a user kind of progress as they become more accustomed to Vital? Can you explain that a little bit to people who don’t have the opportunity to see a demonstration at the moment?

David: Yeah, for sure. And so the first thing we do with users is we just ask them the simple question, what would you like help with? And that’s meant to be a little bit open ended, right? Someone it’s not, what do you, what’s going on in your life right now? It’s like, what’s important to you?

And so based on the user’s response to that question we generate this personalized guided session. And what we found is really that aha moment for our users is when they hear back the specifics of what they asked for. And there, you know, some people don’t necessarily realize right away that they’re not getting a recorded meditation, that they’re getting something .

You know, created just for them in real time. Once they’ve had that aha moment, typically the user journey is the next time they come back for another session, they’ll add even more details. And so that’s kind of getting people leveled up in it. As you said, the same way someone, a first time user of chat GPT might not really realize the power yet until they’ve seen it.

And once they’ve seen it they’ll know to ask more specific questions and it’s really the same. Our product roadmap is really detailed around how we want to improve on this process again, make it feel like you’re sitting down with your coach for the 1st time. You know, someone made an incredible introduction to a coach and now they’re getting to know you asking what’s going on in your life.

What’s working well? What’s not? So we’re going to have a conversational interface like that really teases out and pulls the threads and uncovers the real issues that people need to work on. And again, the whole mission here is if we can get people to look at the things that are holding them back, whether it’s their stress or their anxiety or somewhere they’re stuck, or maybe some unprocessed traumas, whatever it is that’s going to unlock a new level for that person and really help them go out into the world and be their best self achieve whatever it is that they’re really trying to achieve. We know that a lot of our users are people that care about making an impact about doing something really meaningful in the world, but they have these kind of, like, underlying emotional challenges. Maybe they’re not regular self regulating well. And that’s where we can really make an impact.

Bruce: It’s an interesting dilemma from a developer’s perspective, because on the one hand, you want as much customizable feedback to the user as possible. In order to get that you need input from the user, but you don’t want to overburden that individual with like an extraordinary questionnaire and asking them so many questions. You have to find that sweet spot where you have asked the right most high yield questions in order to give them that really beneficial meditation session. Am I on the right track here of how you’re thinking about developing this?

David: Yes, for sure. And so it has to balance the impact that you’re having. So really, it has to immediately help people feel better. And so if you burden them with too much effort then you may end up, having them trail off as users. So we really are trying to strike that balance.

Make sure that Especially 1st time users get to that aha moment where they really feel heard and understood and see their mindset shift just a little bit on 1 issue 1st. And then after that, we know that they’ll see the impact enough. To then dedicate the time and the resources into their next session and putting in the time.

And there’s things like we also want to do, you know, make sure that we’re tracking their progress over time. There’s a lot of like, surveys on life satisfaction or how they’re feeling, but we don’t want to present those as surveys. We just want to tie those questions into natural conversations so that we can get those benchmarks, but without people feeling like they’re being burdened as you’ve touched on.

Bruce: Gotcha. So the let’s track the user’s experience over their first 20 sessions. Obviously, initially, they don’t the algorithm doesn’t know the user very well yet. And then. After it gets more and more input how detailed is it like a creepy level of detailed about your father’s, I don’t know, surgery that he has coming up that, that it’s going to go into or how you must put some guardrails on the algorithm so it doesn’t, it kind of stays within, the realm of, of being professional, I guess.

David: Yeah, guardrails is a great term, you know, and we spent a lot of time with this to make sure that it doesn’t overstep into odd territory, right? And there’s a lot of effort that we put into it on that regard. but on the flip side, it’s deep understanding of you, and the things that are going on in your life is where the value is. Right? And you know, you may in a couple of weeks, you may say, Hey, actually, the thing I want help with is this, but the coach may go, well, has that issue where you’re really worried about your father? Is that really? Totally gone. Or is it possible that that’s kind of an underlying thing that’s still affecting you?

And so 1 of the benefits of AI is that it really is great at recognizing patterns, and it’s not forgetful. Right? So, even the greatest coach or therapist is ultimately human and not as capable at those two things.

So, that’s one of the benefits of having this relationship with your AI companion. Is it’s going to never forget. It’s also, by the way, never going to get tired or cranky or, you know, it doesn’t have to sleep. So if you’re up at 2 a. m. and you need help, you can get help. So that’s 1 of the benefits.

Bruce: What kind of feedback are you getting from users? And how have you incorporated that into your product development and improvement? What do you feel? I as a entrepreneur as well, I think it’s just interesting how we go into a journey and we have our own expectations for what people are going to like.

And we think like this is going to pan out. And then I think a really good in Entrepreneur is one who pivots , accordingly and is versatile and figuring out like what is really working and resonating with people. And maybe there’s not total congruence with what your initial expectation was. Have you had any surprises like that along the way here?

David: Yeah, I mean, we’ve had a ton of really helpful feedback from our users. It’s, a lot of it. Is encouraging because, you know, when someone takes the time to write up a list of feature requests, it means that they actually really love the product as it is, and they just want it to be better. So that’s 1 of the really cool things is we’ve gotten a lot of that.

We’ve also gotten a lot of, emails or notes of people sharing really incredible stories of emotional experiences that they’ve had using the app. And, we had a technical bug 1 week where the servers were down. And we had just a bunch of users emailing us saying, Hey, I hope, you know, this is down and be, can you fix this really quickly?

Because I need this. It’s really been and it’s been a, this supported me through losing a family member. Through learning that a family member got cancer through a breakup through an issue in my relationship through stress for my studies and for my exam. So the cool thing has been the variety actually of feedback and the variety of different people and how they’re using it for different things.

And what we realize about the product that’s so powerful is that. It’s got that range and that depth to handle different situations because it’s being personalized to that specific user. That’s been really helpful. I mean, we’ve gotten a bunch of ideas on where to go next. Some of the cool features that we’ve already implemented were based on feedback.

So the first one was multiple voices. We just had one voice in there to begin with. And now we have six coaches. And that’s just people have different preferences around how they want their coach to feel the different vibe.

We’ve also launched now with five languages. So we, got a lot of early feedback saying, Hey, I’d love this in Spanish. Hey, I’d love this in German, love this in French. So now we have all those. And so those have been exciting.

And the last. It’s just top of mind because we’re about to release it is to save the meditations, which we were kind of surprised by, because they are customized in that moment, but some of them are just so good that person is like I need to save this.

And I’m going to return to this particular one over and over again. So that was kind of a, that was a bit of a surprise actually for us.

Bruce: When you said that you added more voices, but then you said it was a different vibe. All right. Is the user also able to change the personality type

David: not yet, but we also have that, but yeah so currently if you just choose a different voice, like one of our AI personas named Arlo is he’s a bit stern, you know, he’s kind of like your grandfather, so to speak, and some people really love that and we’ve had people say, I love Arlo because he holds me accountable.

And then, you know, our other AI persona Aria is much more gentle. She’s, you know, like a very sweet woman. And then we have 4 other coaches that are all actually real world coaches that we’ve used our AI to clone their voices. And so they all have their own feel to it.

And then the last piece I’ll add that you just mentioned is yes, absolutely, on our roadmap, we do want it so that any given coach can be soft and gentle or more motivating, give you that kind of like pump up Type meditation. And again, at that point, we’re not even really calling it meditation. It’ll just be more like a motivational session where they might speak to you in a more excited and intense way.

Bruce: just to clarify the Arlo versus the female, it is the AI content generating the same words, or is it actually generating like a different set of words as well? Or is it the tone of the person’s voice? Or are you just getting user feedback saying like, Oh, this person’s more gentle because of their female voice?

David: Yeah, it’s currently just that it’s just the tone of voice and the style of voice, but absolutely our roadmap.

And this is something that that I’ll just throw out there, for anyone who listens and tries the app that we would love feedback on: we are experimenting with the idea of being able to design your coach persona, where you could give it, a backstory, a personality choose the voice and is that something that people would love to do? Or would they rather just kind of choose from these presets that’s one thing that we’re currently exploring and we’ll be doing some customer focus groups to do that.

And then the other one thing that we’ve actually heard from a number of users that we’re kind of excited about is having the coach be your own voice. And thinking of it as your higher self, that’s kind of, coaching you to excellence using your own voice. So that’s one, another piece of feedback that we’ve gotten.

Bruce: Nice. Cool. So sounds like, you know, the sky’s the limit really with where you can take this. And I, when I was giving the introduction, there were a number of features that you have coming up, I guess, in the future, the conversational coaching, journaling, other types of tools. How do you prioritize your resources?

You have a limited amount of resources and an infinite number of possibilities to take this. Is it mainly from users, from focus groups from research, from what other, I guess, competitors are doing, or, where do you go from here?

David: Yeah, honestly, it’s, it is the blend of all of those things. We certainly as a team have a vision, a very strong vision of where we want this to go. If we stretched five years from now we believe that we’ll be living in a world where everyone relies on AI on a daily basis.

And you’ll essentially have AI companions. But our belief is that the one that you care about the most and the one that you rely on the most will be the one that helps you with life’s most difficult challenges. Right the 1 that actually becomes emotionally intelligent understands real human issues and that we Vital are going to be the best at doing that because we’ve started from this place of really helping people through their issues.

Versus some of the other AI that really are going to be focused on helping you order your groceries and great. That’s sort of helpful, but is that really where everyone’s pining for help? I don’t think so. And so that’s kind of our long vision.

How we get there, yeah, is absolutely listening to our users, making sure we understand what they’re most excited about, what’s working well for them, what’s, what they’re not using.

We look a lot at just tracking of the user interface and what’s being used and what’s not. And if something’s not being touched, we just eliminate it from the app experience.

And then, yeah lastly is, really just understanding using the other apps out there looking at what works well and what doesn’t. And then through the lens of Vital, how can we adapt those into our approach?

Bruce: You mentioned looking at the patterns of, usage, I guess, of the app itself, and I was curious about creating a habit because I think in one of your interviews, you mentioned you want to make meditation a habit. And I think that was like the ultimate goal. I think of meditation kind of the same way of working out, you know, do you, is there an end point for when you can stop working out now? You kind of just keep doing it to feel fit. And I think of meditation the same way. And a habit should be something that you do repeatedly and You feel it’s successful and helping you in your life go through stressors. I’m sure you have like a power set of user a set of power users, I should say, what is that like there? Can you give me more information about that?

David: Yeah, so I think you touched on the most important thing, which is that the world seems to pretty clearly understand physical fitness, right? There’s a ton of awareness around how many steps are you taking every day? Maybe you shouldn’t be sitting at a desk all day. Yeah, I know I should exercise even though I’m not.

There’s just a ton of awareness around that. It’s now starting to become more clear that your mental fitness and your mental health is just as important, but people still don’t. As you said at the very beginning, some of your patients have resistance to the idea of meditation, but to me and where we’re hoping will help people get to, it would be crazy not to spend 5 to 10 minutes, which is nothing per day working on your mental fitness.

That’s it’s, you know, I think hopefully in 5 years, everyone will go, “I can’t believe that wasn’t the case.” And so we think that just by being highly accessible, highly affordable and then highly effective. I think that’s the most important thing is that people are going to want to use this because it makes them feel better.

And there will be not that resistance to it . And again, that’s where we’re calling it meditation, but it’s really just guided mindset sessions. And some in and a user can choose based on where they are with their skill level, where they are with their challenges to have it be mostly silence.

But if they’re new, they probably want it to be mostly guided to really help them through that. So the coach will certainly evolve over time with you as your practice evolves. So in terms of creating a habit we recommend to people, do this in the morning for sure, because that’s the way to make sure that it, nothing else gets in the way.

I do my personal practice right after I go to the gym every morning and habit stacking is really important. For people to think about. So pick something that you already do every day. It could be brushing your teeth. It could be going to the gym. It could be having your coffee. But if you can just tack on to start a five minute session on Vital, that’s where it’s going to just fit right into your daily routine.

And that’s just how humans work, right? We like to develop these habits and that’s the best way to add this, really impactful new habit to your life.

Bruce: Right now, you know, when people think of mindful meditation, they think of the big ones out there. You’re up against a lot of competition. And I could see maybe one of these companies rolling out an AI feature, perhaps in some of their mindful meditation. I know you’re getting a lot of positive feedback from users. But do we know yet if it’s more effective than the typical generic mindful meditation 2. 0 that you had mentioned before? Is there data on this yet? I’m sure technology is so new that we probably don’t have too much data yet, but is there anything like that?

David:

Yes so definitely our road map includes running whether, you know, I guess, clinical trials, um, of some form, where we can clinically validate the delta between the generic and a personalized meditation over time. In terms of, you know, the, Calm or head spaces of the world, we believe that they will launch AI and guided meditations at some point.

We’ve spoken to folks at both of those companies. In the long run again, we’re not really an AI meditation coach, we’re an AI coach. And so our vision is much larger than that.

A companion that really gets to know you understands you teaches you different tools and techniques outside of meditation. Everything that a coach would do to help you level up your life, we want to do with Vital.

And so those brands are really built around meditation. And so if you’re thinking of that as kind of the meditation app market again, that’s not really where we’re playing. We’re playing much more in an AI companion market that really helps you across your entire life. So think combination of, like, Coach therapist, nutritionist all of those things, and as an AI companion that gets to know you rather than just a meditation app.

Bruce: You mentioned a companion that gets to know you, and that led me to one of my other questions I wanted to ask about, because an AI model is really only as good as the input that it gets. If it has zero input, it really isn’t customizable to that user. And I think you mentioned in one of your other interviews that maybe down the road you can incorporate biofeedback.

I know there’s a company out there that does EEG based meditation. And you mentioned getting to know them. I know you want to do journaling, and maybe that could be another source of input into the AI model. What is the like the most high yield type of input? And what do you where do you see that progressing in the future?

David: Yeah. So as a company, Vital is going to do three things that are really like the pillars of what we’re going to do better than anyone else. The first is the human to AI interface. And this is where we’ve started, which is with our initial launch, can we create an AI that feels human enough that people don’t sit there and go, this feels like I’m talking to an AI, they actually feel like they’re being spoken to by a human.

And so that’s what our initial launch has proven, you know, the fact that our users are being brought to tears. In their guided meditations tells us that it’s a very human experience, right? No robotic AI voice could bring someone to tears. So that’s where we started. And that’s what we’ve cracked.

The 2nd piece of this will be building up that user persona . On the technical side, going to be called a user index where we take all of the things that we learn about you from again, where yes, wearables from your journaling, from your prompt inputs from feedback that you give us and we store it in a really trusted secure data vault and that becomes your user persona that then is the layer that gets interacted with by the large language model.

And the last piece we’re doing there that you touched on is there’s a process called fine tuning where on top of these large language models, you can give them more specific instructions on specific knowledge sets.

And so that’s around meditation around, The codified, manualized therapy methods, all of that stuff by feeding the model more specific data, we can help it do this particular problem set better than just a generic AI would.

And so it’s really those 3 things in combination that will be the special sauce of making Vital much more again, emotionally intelligent, personalized experience to that individual.

Bruce: Really interesting and it kind of leads me to another question that I had kind of maybe goes back to a question I Ask about a lot, given the theme of the podcast is talking about future development of new technology. What kind of challenges would you say lie ahead for the company? I can probably think of a lot, but from your perspective, if you could prioritize those challenges, what are the main ones for you in terms of growth of the company?

David: Yeah, like you said there, it’s so many all at once. We’re really excited to be in a fundraise. So the first is getting the company well financed so that we can just go out and build all the things that we need to build. And the second is raising awareness around the company. So this, you know, just even the opportunity to chat with you is great to start getting our name and our brand out there.

Because we know that the more people that use this, the more people are going to share about it with other people because they’re having impactful experiences. But on a technical side, it’s really yeah, it’s starting to get to that next level where it’s really feels like an emotionally intelligent experience.

And so that’s that is probably the most difficult technical challenge. There are great partners that we’re going to lean on for that. There are ways to use different technologies to listen to someone’s voice tone to detect underlying emotions. And there might be a dissonance between the words that someone says and how they’re actually feeling.

And a great coach or therapist could pick up on those, but a voice model currently could not, but will be able to in the future. And so those really like slightly harder problems and same with, uh, video, right? To be able to on video detect someone’s specific emotions right now, pretty good and getting better quickly.

And so our ability to tie all of these really incredible technologies together at an application layer for Vital is where we’re going to focus a lot of our technical energy. And that allows us to move quickly to build this, the best possible product for people. The way that the world works now with tech is there’s so many different ways to interlace an API into different technologies that we don’t necessarily have to build the underlying fundamentally difficult technical stack. We just have to tie them in together in a way that works really well for our end use case.

Bruce: What API do you use? Or is the Ai model developed in house for you?

David: Yeah, right now we are built on top of OpenAI, which is ChatGPT’s underlying model.

Bruce: And you mentioned you see the future as working with improving emotional intelligence and picking up on nuances and communication and speech. Is that what you would define as therapy or mindful meditation 4.0 and coaching 4.0?

David: Yeah, I think, in the future, this AI will be near capable of what humans are able to do right. And so, in that way, what I think would be exciting for your audience in particular to think about is how could an AI sort of replica of them support someone that they’re working with on a daily basis outside of the time that they’re able to spend with them in person.

And that way, you can really have this high touch with people because, you know, I, I mean, I’ve been through coaching. I’ve been through therapy. You can have a great 1 hour conversation with that therapist and then you have 6 days to go mess it up until the next time you see them.

So this is really, there’s a future where the impact that one really skilled individual can have is actually 10 X or 100 X. And they’re able to work with either more clients or they’re able to have a bigger impact on them. So it’s actually really exciting for, I’d say, the future of our species to be able to support people in a much more effective and efficient way.

Bruce: Awesome. So in kind of closing the episode today, I usually open it up to more general speculation about technology in general in mental health care and ask the same two questions. And one of them is about any recommendations that you have for anybody who’s interested in innovating in mental health.

David: Yeah, I think it’s, you know, look, for me, it was that process of Ikigai, right, which is finding the things that you’re excited about, that you’re passionate about, the overlap of something that you’re good at and, you know, something that someone will pay you for. So I think just doing that self introspection and trying to find the overlap of those things is where people will be most energized to help.

Right? So I think, that’s really the key. And then the last piece of it is just remembering to look at technology as the main benefit of technology is scalability. So try and think of a place where there’s a human process that slows things down, and that’s where you can innovate. I think that’s the lens through which you should look at trying to make a bigger impact in mental health using technology.

Bruce: That’s awesome. Very good advice. Is there any technology that you’ve come across in many sort of magazines, internet articles reddit, that you feel like is really like, Wow this is cool. I’m going to keep my eye on this type of thing.

David: Yeah, the one was they’ve had this kind of explosion of continuous glucose monitors over the last 5 years or so. And those are for people that haven’t seen them, you know, a battery powered needle that sticks in your arm and monitors your glucose over time. That’s been really impactful for people with diabetes, but then also just for people curious about their metabolism.

I read about a device that does the same for cortisol. And cortisol being your indicator of stress in your body, I’m really excited about the concept of a continuous cortisol monitor that would allow something like Vital to monitor your stress and in particular flag, a spike in your stress and then offer an intervention.

So I could see a world in 2 to 3 years where, your apple watch is able to monitor your cortisol and it can go, Hey, David your cortisol just spiked. Was there something that happened that might’ve led to that? And then, I can of course share, yes, I, was almost attacked, and it can say, well, that can actually be something that even though it seems like it might not be a big deal that can create a kind of an underlying stress response and we should sit down and deal with that. So do you have 5 minutes right now? Why don’t we go find a quiet place? You can sit down and integrate and go through what you just went through and offer an intervention that helps you kind of like, calm your nervous system back down so that you don’t live in a state of stress that was created by that.

So personally, I’m excited about that as a concept. I’m not enough of a hard tech scientist to know how close we are to that reality.

Bruce: That opens up a whole new world of possibilities in which you know, the world of HR, I could see that being an issue, like, that was a really high cortisol day that Wednesday because of that individual being in the office and also litigation too, like, defending harassment claims and suits like that.

David: yeah, it may open up a can of worms that I haven’t thought about. But, I do know that stress is, something that everyone experiences and your ability to really just handle it. So stress is good actually. Right? It’s a thing that elevates your body’s awareness to get you through a specific situation.

But what’s been problematic is really people’s awareness of when that’s happening and how to actually just settle back their nervous system. So, I think the right flag of that and intervention would be really powerful for people.

Bruce: Yeah, that’s a, perfect way of reframing it. Yeah, I like that. Your body’s way of kind of flagging a way or figuring out a way to help you get through a situation. But sometimes it goes awry when your amygdala doesn’t, no longer cares about what you think. And it’s just you need to be afraid of this neutral stimulus too.

Well, David, I thought this was a really interesting conversation. I think the technology you’re working on is really useful and could potentially impact a lot of people, kind of like what your initial goal was in going into this industry. And I really appreciate the conversation, both in terms of the general scope, the patient experience, and the technical development of the algorithm. and where you see things going in the future. So I’m really excited for you and appreciate your time. And I’ll give you the last word. If you have anything to say about where the audience can maybe learn more information and things of that nature.

David: Awesome. Thank you, Dr. Bassi. Yeah, this has been a great conversation. I would direct people definitely to just try the product. So they can go to joinVital.ai. And more importantly, we’re currently exploring how we can help clinicians and people that have professional practice or private practice offer Vital to their clients as a way of augmenting the impact that they can have.

And so I would personally love to hear from anyone in your audience that thinks that was something that they’d like to explore my email is david@joinVital.ai. And if anyone wants to just talk about that, you know, the general idea might be how can we offer like bulk licenses to clinical practices to be able to offer again to their clients.

And we think this will really have an impact and that doing it with professional guidance. Especially at this early stage will be the best way for us to have a big impact.

Bruce: That’s really cool. I like that idea. I’ve reached out to a couple companies before, and I think at the time, back in 2018 or 2019, they weren’t offering that, so I’m sure there’s going to be clinicians out there you know, who are interested in that, and I appreciate you being so open giving your email out. Yeah, thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate it. And if anybody has any interest in learning more, I’m going to put some links in the show notes in the description below. So, Till next time, thank you all for listening.

David: Thanks for having me.

Bruce: That’s it for this episode. I’d appreciate it if you please like and share this podcast with your colleagues. It’d be especially helpful for us. If you’d like, please leave us a rating on your favorite podcatcher. If you’re a clinician, I developed a course on how to start a private practice. And for patients, I’ve also developed a course on acceptance and commitment therapy and cognitive behavioral based therapy lessons for treating and helping anxiety.

You can find all these on our website as well. As well as the show notes and resources for each episode. Thank you so much, and I’ll see you in the next episode.