Bruce Bassi#FuturePsychiatryPodcast discusses novel technology and new ideas in the field of mental health. New episodes are released every Monday on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, etc.
Summary
Listen to Emil Jimenez, founder of Mind Bank, an AI based digital twin app, talk about why he started this company and what privacy and security means to him. There are so many questions pertaining to digital twin that easily come to mind – how does it work? what do they do with the data? how do they expect it to improve in the future? why do we need it? Emil feels very passionately about users’ rights to data.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
05:05 Target Audience
07:01 Insights Using the App
10:08 Development in the Field
13:57 How To Analyze User Input
16:40 Greatest Fear in Digital Twin
18:25 Decentralized Data and Data Privacy for Users
22:46 Biggest Surprise
26:39 What Makes You Most Excited?
Transcript
BASSI: Welcome to the Future Psychiatry Podcast, where we explore novel technology in mental health, psychiatry, and psychology. We speak to guests to better understand their contributions to the space and dig deep into underlying motivations for key features, technical challenges, and future directions. We look behind the curtain to see how these creations were made and how they expect them to evolve in the future. Today, we’re speaking with an extraordinary individual, the founder and CEO of Mind Bank, an artificial intelligence based app that allows you to create a digital persona, or a personal digital twin, as they call it, through the process of answering prompts and then subsequent self reflection. So, Emil, can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you got started in this field? It seems like a kind of a niche to get involved in.
Introduction
JIMENEZ: Sure. Thank you for having me on the show, Bruce. So I studied psychology. My mother is a psychologist, and I’ve always been around in this area. As you can imagine, growing up with someone in the home, that that’s their life, right? First as a guidance counselor, then, and before that as a teacher. So she’s always been in this world. And I went into the psychology field because I was wondering, OK, what do I want to be when I grow up? Right? And when I was in my undergrad, I saw that under psychology. With psychology, you can do a lot of things right. You can go to business school, you can go to med school. So I said, okay, let me study psychology. And I was always fascinated by the brain in the mind. But as life returned, I kind of chose a different career path. I studied later on, I moved into communications industry and went into marketing, which still has a lot of psychological components to it, right, as you can imagine. And then the twist of fate in 2020, when my daughter was four years old, she had what I call a transformational moment for me with her on her iPad. And that’s really what started and spun off the concept of Mind Bank. I saw her interaction with Siri, right, where she was asking Siri a bunch of questions. And the first one was what really struck a corner with me the most, where she said, siri, do you have a mommy? And then she continued asking Siri these questions, and at one point, she said, Siri, I love you. You’re my best friend. And at that moment, I saw that she went from having a transactional relationship to having an emotional relationship. But you start analyzing it in a split second. I just started thinking about what’s her future going to be like when she’s my age? and how can I always be part of that world, right? The world’s going so fast, and ultimately you start analyzing siri is just an interface to a database. How can I become that database so that my child and my children and my children’s children can always have a conversation with Daddy, right? And all these stories that compose our lives. You tell it in word of mouth, but you don’t really write it down. You have a few posts here and there on Social, but it’s those stories of, like, how did you meet Mommy? How did you end up in Prague? Or how did you go to Miami? When you graduate, all these things that compose your life. You tell your kids and you tell your family and friends through word of mouth. But all that data is lost, right? And that’s kind of what makes us who we are, really. And I said, we have the technology today to be able to store that data and index that data and extract value from that information. So that’s where the story of Mind Bank came about, where it’s like, okay, let me build a platform so that I can store my wisdom and so that my daughter could always have Daddy, so always have access to Daddy. And ultimately, if you think about it, this data can live on forever as your digital twin so that you can have a conversation with this entity and in the course of this journey, right? I got this idea January 17, 2020. And for, like, nine months, I was just letting the idea marinate and talking to people in different industries just to get a sense of, how do I go about doing this? And one of the things that kept popping up was, how do you make it engaging? And then at the time, it was covered time, right? So I was the only exercise I was getting was going running in the park here and there. And I started realizing, wait a second, when you run and you’ve got, like, a nightcap or strava, you get that instant data feedback that you ran. You did this many miles and this much time, and that’s kind of what kept you motivated. And those incremental gains in your physiology and your physical fitness is what keeps you coming back. I was like, wow, we can do that with the mind. And we figured out how to use these algorithmic models to create a dashboard of the mind, for lack of better words, so that you can become much more data driven about your psychology, your personal development. And really what we want to do is move the industry from healthcare to self-care so that people are much more empowered with their mental wellness data.
Target Audience
BASSI: So I think that was very insightful that you had that revelation when speaking with your daughter when she was mentioning that, when she was basically talking to Siri. My son, he’s 15 months old now, and his first name that he learned was Alexa. And we mentioned Alexa. He would completely turn his head around and look right at the screen. So he started to learn about her from a very young age. It makes a lot of sense and switching to thinking about the business aspect. Who’s your target audience right now for this application? I saw that you get involved a little bit in the B to B side as well.
JIMENEZ: Yeah, definitely. So when I launched Mind Bank, I had a few assumptions, right? We weren’t focused on the B to B at all. We were strictly a B to C play. Because I just saw my story, right? I was, okay, I can understand me and people like me, so let me go on that journey. And we went out and did like, I’m a marketing guy, right? So I went out and did market research. I got some feedback in terms of the positioning and all that. My hypothesis was 35 plus are going to be really interested. And it basically came out to be answered, which is what I call the sweet spot is those who are young enough to have children at home, like yourself. Right? And you start remembering what it’s like to be a child again. Right. These little flashbacks of your childhood started coming when you have small children, right? It’s quite amazing. Yet at the same time, we’re starting to take over some responsibility over our parents, whatever that means. So in my case, I help them with their finances and just kind of manage stuff for them here and there. Take them to the doctor once in a while, these type of situations that you start realizing their time is limited, right? And then you also start realizing that this life is so important that’s just starting to come into this world and we’re in the middle, literally, right? So that’s the sweet spot. The person starts getting that self, you know, actualization of like, OK, I’m a father and a son at the same time our daughter, and what have I done with my life? What will I do with my life? How can I leave a legacy for my kids? You know, all these questions started appearing in your life. And that’s the sweet spot because you realize that there’s a value to your life, to your information, to your wisdom, and also those of your parents. Right. You also want to keep a piece of them around as well.
User Insights from Using the App
BASSI: Right. So I saw when using the app, you get a lot of cognitive insights about your personality type. What other insights beyond that does the user hope to gain from that experience of using the app?
JIMENEZ: Excellent. Yeah. So we started with a framework that people understand, right? So the Big Five framework is what we’re measuring now. And we just analyze all of the Big Five traits and within those is another eight. There are traits like neuroticism and agreeableness and all these things. In the first and foremost, what we’re looking for is let’s do self awareness very well. Who are you, who am I, and how do I develop? Right. And what we want to build into this are the insights into not only who you are, but who are you in perspective to someone else? Or why is it that this level of anxiety is high? Or what can you do about these things? Right? So getting more into this insights and help guide people towards self understanding, right. There’s also other things that we want to add on to it. When it comes to one feature that’s coming out, it’s actually built right in our video, what we like to call it more of a gamification of it, where it’s like, how are you in respect to someone else in history, right? So are you similar to Einstein or, I don’t know, Genghis Khan or something like that? And this is more for engagement, once again, right? And so, once again, understanding who you are versus someone else and getting these personality types is the first step. We also want to use a personality type as part of the when we develop our, let’s say, linguistic models for conversational AI to build a personality into the digital twin. Right? So are you more agreeable? Are you more neurotic or whatever the case may be? Right. What was your personality? Because ultimately that’s what we are, right? It’s not wrong to be neurotic. It’s okay.
BASSI: How do you set the dial on that, though?
JIMENEZ: No, we’re just measuring that right now. We’re really straight data, right? We’re data capture mode. There’s no messaging at all. It’s just like OK, because we need an aggregate score. And also what’s interesting is that people are different when they speak about different topics, right.
BASSI: And different audiences.
JIMENEZ: Exactly. So if you’re speaking, for example, we did an analysis of how people speak on podcasts versus how they write on their blogs. There is a personality change. There is. It’s not like night and day, but you see that there’s a shift. I guess if you think about it, it comes down to the fact that you self edit when you write. You think about what you’re going to write and you come back to it. And however, when you speak, you just speak. That’s yourself. Right? And then I’m sure, Bruce, when you speak to your kids, you’re not the same as when you speak at work. And so there is this little slight changes, but ultimately you want to get an aggregate score of OK, how does Bruce talk about work versus family versus religion versus love? Right? And you start and we’ll start gathering these days. That’s why we have it by topic as well, so that we can start gathering this type of information and seeing where it goes. Really, it’s amazing how when I started this journey in 2020, how it’s developed in the last two years. It’s crazy. It’s astonishing how fast it’s going. I’ll give you an example. When I first started in 2020, doing desk research, Gartner’s Hype cycle, if you’re familiar with it, right. But the digital twin of the person to be a transformational technology where one to 5% of the world will have a digital twin by 2027, roughly, right. Something about seven to ten years, right. And a $182 billion market by 2030 is what I saw. But that’s the new number, right? So the new number now is that last month I spoke to them and actually spoke to them, and they said that the new numbers now 15% of the world will have a digital twin by 2024. And it went from 9 billion market size roughly to $182 billion by 2030. And this is just two years.
The Need for a Digital Twin
BASSI: Why does society need a digital twin? What do you think the reason is?
JIMENEZ: I think they are data hungry. Think about our lives, right? Our car, our phone, our websites. Everything is so data driven, right? Except us. Think about that for a second. Except our psychology, or let’s say personal development, really.
BASSI Everyone is collecting data ON us, but we’re not actually ever seeing the data.
JIMENEZ: We’re using it for our own personal development. Other than, whatever, your school grades at school. What reference point do you have that you’re saying I’m getting smarter, I’m getting better. So there’s that whole space of personal data. Not for personal data, for privacy reasons. Let’s use it as a tool, right? Personal data, so that I can become a better human being. What does that mean to me, becoming a better human being? We have tons of data on our physiology, right? I’m wearing an Apple Watch, got my heart rate. If I want to know how much my oxygen I have, I can do all that, right? Can you tell me how am I feeling emotionally right now? No, but someone that talks to me can say “Emil is having a bad day,” right? Or when he speaks about this particular topic, it definitely still hurts him. You see what I mean? And that’s the role of a psychologist, really, if you think about it, or a counselor or whatever. But how do we make that so that it can become, let’s say, decentralized from this professional and self empowered as well, right? Just like we have fitness apps that help us go run and work out. We also have trainers to help us on that journey. And I think that’s the role of Mind Bank, where it’s a tool that you can self care and at the same time provide your professional a lot of more data around your psychology that they can listen to, understand. And quite interesting, Bruce, when we first launched back in March, April this year, I asked a few psychologists, I said hey, you know what? Give it a spin. They tried it out. They’re like, yeah, you know, I said, listen, I think it’s a good way to give homework to your patients because you see a psychologist once a week, once a month, or whatever the case may be. What about all those other days that they’re just still trying to deal with the issue, right? But when Mind Bank– I guess what you realize is that you’re able to talk to yourself about the issue, document it, reflect on the data, and how you interpret the data is up to you. Right. If you see the neuroticism is off their charts, you start asking yourself why, what’s going on? Then you start looking at the words that you’re using to describe that emotion. And it’s in the words, right. Like the way what we say says a lot about who we are. And that’s the whole psycholinguistic genre, right. The whole industry, right? Right.
How to Analyze User Input
BASSI: And give us a little insight into that because how do we decipher neuroticism from somebody’s tone of voice? Is it the cadence? Is the pitch? Is it the variability of the pitch? I mean, let’s get into the weeds a little bit about where you start when you have a blank canvas. How did you actually build or maybe it’s proprietary, but–
JIMENEZ: I won’t dive too deep into the models and stuff. But let’s put it this way. There’s tons of research out there around psycholinguistics, right, and uses the pronouns. What’s being measured are the actual words. The cadence and that stuff– We’re storing the voice file in order to get to that level, too. Right? What we can do now is measure the speech to text, right? So we take this voice file converted to text and that text gets analyzed for those properties and that’s what’s being analyzed. The cadence and the pauses and the voice and all of that has a lot of value too, we’re just not there as a company yet to start analyzing that deep enough, which is why we’re raising this funding round and to build out a team that can specialize in that space as well. Because voice says a lot about your emotional state, right. The quivers, the pauses, just a pause, right. And we have it on the voice file We don’t have it on the data yet on the analysis. But really what it comes out to, we measure the actual words and it creates the models, create the dashboard.
BASSI: I think that would be really huge because I remember on some video I was watching, say you have a simple sentence like, “did you take the grocery–” “Did you take the trash out today?” And if you put the emphasis on any one of those words, it’s going to change the meaning of it. Did YOU take the trash out today? Exactly. Did you take out the trash TODAY? It has a totally different meaning depending on where intonation is. And so if you just do speech to text, I feel like you are missing an element there. So you probably graded the words and based on the emotional charge to them after and then kind of get a strict based on that number.
JIMENEZ: Yeah. And all things like using the words being more “I” focused, “I did this” and “I did that,” versus we or he. Then you start seeing where are the pronouns and where is the subject and how is that in relation to the topic? So these are the things obviously there’s aggressive words and “I hate it.” All these things come out right, so that’s a measurement as well. And I’m sure once we start analyzing the voice file, it will just even become much more richer in that context, for sure.
Greatest Fear in the World of Digital Twins
BASSI: Yeah, that’s so true. You have something like a huge trajectory in front of you. What is your greatest fear, perhaps in terms of how maybe it would be misused or maybe people misinterpret the company or the intentions of the company? Do you feel like the purpose is appropriately communicated to our society and to the mass audience who might be using it?
JIMENEZ: Well, we definitely have a long term job to do in that sense, because we have to educate the market. The topic of the digital twin, personal digital twin is a very new topic. I always say, tell people it’s kind of like as if 15 years ago I was talking to you about cloud computing. You’d be like, wow, we’re putting my data in the cloud? Are you crazy? That’s exactly what’s happening now. And those are the conversations we have. And it’s interesting. So the biggest to say fear is data privacy, right. Because the data we ask is quite private. Right. It’s very personal stuff. That’s a limiting factor, too, by how much people are going to open up to this app. Yeah, exactly. But what we do see, too, is that those who do open up and have a need to open up their power users, right. They really dive in and feel comfortable with it because ultimately you’ve built a trust to the company, to some extent built a trust to me because my intention is always been for my daughter. Right. So, like, there’s no money in the world take over that. I come from a world of marketing, too, so I know how it can be misused in that space. So I’ll give you an example. One of the things on our governance is that I have 100% voting shares, although we sell shares to the company when it comes to the business. And the vision and the ethics buck stops here. Right. And you need that kind of governance, especially at this stage, because you could easily say, oh yeah, we’re going to sell the data to make some money. And no, that’s not my intention. Two: the whole business model is not advertising based. Right. Our business model subscription. And what we really want to do is decentralize this very soon so that you can become part of the marketplace. So if an opportunity does come that someone wants Bruce’s data, I would just say, hey, Bruce, this company a once your data, would you be willing to pay or sell it to them? And now that’s your transaction with them. We facilitate it.
BASSI: That’s a totally different mindset.
JIMENEZ: Completely different, yeah. And that’s your business. Right. That’s your data. We just facilitate that transaction. And that’s where we are going with our Web Three migration. So right now, we’re in the first– we took the first baby step into that. So we actually have a grant from the Definity Foundation that gave us a small grant to start that process. So we started that process right, because that’s our short term goals. Not even a long term. The end of next year is our target to be completely decentralized.
Privacy Policies and Confidentiality
BASSI: Oh, that’s pretty fast. On that topic of privacy, I posed this to previous guests that I had. I’m a physician, and when I obtain informed consent, we have the standard that we have to meet where we can assess whether the person understands what they’re agreeing to, medication or procedure, what have you. They need to understand the risk benefit of doing the procedure versus not doing it. And I need to document that understanding is there. And they have competence to understand this issue that they have. But in privacy policies– and I’m guilty of this too– I’ll just agree to a privacy policy. I don’t even read them. They’re 15 pages. I want to start using the service. I’m not going to read through every line. How do we improve this informed consent of our data privacy? I feel like it’s just an area that we need to improve upon as a whole to start to rebuild that trust among the tech giants and consumers.
JIMENEZ: Yeah, that’s a very good question. It comes down to liability, really, when you see these 15 pages, it’s because of the liability issues. Right? And I think once that becomes decentralized, so literally, the prototype that we have, the data is yours. It’s not like, let’s say, the transaction that was mentioned before, it’s like, Bruce so company X wants your data from January 1 to February 1, whatever the date range. So we would make it as simple as possible, right, to be understood. And then the risks would be obviously, hopefully outlined as well. And it shouldn’t be 15 pages long, but if it’s 15 pages long, it’s too complicated, it seems way too complicated. It should just be, this is what you’re giving and this is what you’re getting. It’s a transaction, right? But in the primordial soup of this space right now when it comes to this. But fundamentally, right, fundamentally, it comes down to ownership, right? Who owns the data? Keep in mind, use TikTok, use Facebook, use all those apps, the owners of the data are those companies, right? And that’s the shift that’s happening, where we need to respect the ownership of the data is not Mind Bank’s. It shouldn’t be Mind Bank’s, should be Bruce’s. I call it we’re the guardians of that data. That’s kind of even on our mission statement, vision statement, it’s like we want to be the world’s most trusted guardian, not owners, right? Guardians! There’s a very big difference between the two. It’s about protection and guidance, right. Not ownership, right? The whole industry, it’s moving in that direction because it has to. People are wanting it. And lastly, the technological infrastructure is at a place that it can be there. Remember, before, this whole blockchain webpage didn’t even exist for us to even get to this stage. And even today, it’s still too early for us to do a complete migration, right? The infrastructure is not there. We’re literally building these things out to get to this space because it’s so new, and hopefully we do it in a way that it doesn’t break a year from now. You got to kind of like, literally, the way we see this, a bit like this, right? We’re here, we’re transitioning into something like that, right? And there’s going to be a bit of an overlap and then eventually it will just be that web three decentralized journey. It’s a transition, it’s not an evolution.
Biggest Surprise
BASSI: Right. What has been the biggest surprise to you? Either from a business aspect to technical aspect? I’m sure there’s been a lot, but what is the most interesting surprise that you’ve had on this journey? Where you’ve had to pivot, perhaps, or you’ve encountered some sort of challenge and you need to come up with a solution you weren’t expecting?
JIMENEZ: Yeah, I guess there’s a few. The first one is the uptake in B to B interest was the first one. And that’s kind of back to the conversation. I saw it as a B to C company, but then all these B to B conversation started happening and I was like, okay, this is interesting. So that’s an interesting we have at least at least ten to 15 companies on pilots pretty soon. We’re going from two languages to 20 by the end of about a week and a half. So global interest. Oh, very global interest, yeah. And it comes also from my background, right. I’ve lived in Prague, Czech Republic, for the last 17 years in Europe. And obviously when you live in Europe, Germany is 3 hours, Austria, Poland is next door, and you have this multilingualism already. And also when you do these businesses in Germany, or rather business in Europe, you have to have at least five, six languages in your product because everything is fractured in that sense. Whereas in the US, it’s one language, maybe two Spanish, right. And then you’re talking, but the rest of the world is not like that. Right. You need to really to internationalize, you need to do multilingualism. And also for my backstory, I speak six languages myself.
BASSI: Wow.
JIMENEZ: I’ve always said that language is a window into their culture, right. And back to this whole psycho- linguistics, it’s a fascinating field because you start when you speak a lot in languages, right. And in my case, I was born bilingual, practically, you understand that the way one culture thinks and the way that another culture thinks. Like, I learned Czech, right, which is a very different language structure and everything else Slavic based. And then as I was learning Czech, I was like the psychologist in me was like, oh my God, I get it, why they’re the way they are. It’s in the language, it’s the way it’s structured, says so much about the cultural heritage and the way people act and the way they think. And I don’t want to say group thinking, but culture is there is a “group think” of a culture, right? That’s what makes it a culture. Shared history, shared background, shared language. So I think it’s very important that Mind Bank is multilingual also because I don’t want it to be another technological divide, right? This technology has an impact, has a potential to impact humanity tremendously. And we always look at the world from Anglo Saxonized almost, right? Western perspective. When you start looking at languages and culture, it’s important to be accessible in French, Spanish, Portuguese, portuguese from Portugal, Portuguese from Brazil, right? All these little nuances. Arabic, and you’ve got Egyptian, Arabic, and you’ve got Saudi, all these different languages. So we’d want to be as global as possible. And once again, like I mentioned, the market is going to blow up. If we want to capture 15% of the market by 2024, we have to go into multilingualism today.
BASSI: I appreciate that. That kind of just made my mind race and all the potential follow up questions that I have, but we don’t have time for it’s. A very interesting topic. I feel like there could be a whole podcast episode about the cultural variations of communication, and impact on AI and psycholinguistic analysis.
JIMENEZ: And then we’re getting into that field, right? We’re going to hopefully, Bruce, in about a year or two, I’ll come back with some data and say, hey, Bruce, this is what we found out in the last year. Let’s see. But I know from my personal story that there’s a lot of difference, for sure there’s an impact there.
What Makes You Most Excited?
BASSI: So what makes you most excited about the field of mental health in this AI space?
JIMENEZ: What really gets me excited, this whole concept that we have of moving the industry from health care to self care. Really, what I mean by that is like empowering people to be much more self aware. And if you look at our history as humans, we have religion and we had all these different structures of society to help us in our journey, right? To develop as a child, to develop as a young man, to develop as an adult. And we have these rituals, but once we in the modern world, all these things started coming off and being replaced by pop culture and these other things, right? So I think technology has a chance now, at least Mind Bank has a chance now to help us go back to that self awareness. If you think of prayer, if you think of these rituals of becoming like cultures have the “Walk About.” All of these are ritualistic behavior to help us in our development. And I think Mine Bank has a way of in a micro way of helping people be much more self aware and hopefully help you learn about yourself so that you can enhance your humanity. I like to call it AI. Enhance humanity. How can we embrace AI to become a better human being.
BASSI: I like that. So thank you very much for joining me today and speaking with me, Emil. It was a pleasure. I think we’re going to have to follow along on your journey of this interesting self and holistic discovery that you have going on here. I think you’re a thought leader in this field and you’re going to be paving the way for the other individuals and companies in this space in the future.
JIMENEZ: Thank you for having me. It’s great. It’s good fun.
Resources
You can learn more about Mind Bank at https://mindbank.ai/
