Episode 592: AI and Relationships: The Future of Connection, Dating, and Loneliness

What happens when AI gets so good that it starts competing with real human connection? We're already seeing people form relationships with chatbots, turn to AI when they're lonely, and create digital companions that can respond exactly how they want. The bigger question is what happens when technology becomes easier than dealing with the messiness of actual people. We dive deeper into this in today's episode of Habits & Hustle. I sit down with Hamet Watt to talk about how quickly AI is evolving, why everyone needs to learn how to use it, and the opportunities and risks that come with technology becoming more powerful, personalized, and integrated into our everyday lives. We also get into AI companions, the loneliness loop, whether real relationships will eventually have to compete with programmable ones, and the very real possibility that AI changes human behavior long before we ever get anywhere close to the sci-fi version everyone is afraid of. What's Discussed: (07:11) What's changing so quickly in AI right now. (09:41) How AI can become smarter than the humans who built it. (13:25) What happened when AI was told it would be shut down. (15:21) How ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI platforms compare. (19:21) Why learning how to use AI is becoming unavoidable. (20:35) How AI could change dating, relationships, and human connection. (24:18) Why people are becoming emotionally attached to AI partners. (26:22) How loneliness and AI companions can create a dangerous loop. Thank You to Our Sponsors! Magic Mind: Head over to magicmind.com/jen http://www.magicmind.com/jen and use code JEN at checkout. Momentous: Ready to try supplements that actually do what they claim? Head to livemomentous.com http://livemomentous.com and use code JEN for 35% off your first subscription. Kion: Visit getkion.com/habits http://getkion.com/habits for 20% off. Tru Niagen®: For supplements that are rigorously tested, third-party verified, and actually deliver what's on the label, head to truniagen.com http://truniagen.com Find more from Jen Cohen: Website: jennifercohen.com https://jennifercohen.com Instagram: @therealjencohen http://instagram.com/therealjencohen Books: jennifercohen.com/books https://jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements https://jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements Find more from Hamet Watt: LinkedIn: Hamet Watt https://www.linkedin.com/in/hametwatt/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

• 0:06Jen Cohen?

  Welcome to another solo episode with me, Jennifer Cohen, on Habits and Hustle. And we have a treat. We have a treat because you guys have not met my friend Hamet Watt, but you're going to meet him now. So just some background, you know, Shawnee used to do a lot of these foils with me. She was my foiler and I would do some solos and she would kind of like banter with me.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  What's a foiler again?

• 0:33Jen Cohen?

  You. Basically someone who I can like shoot the shit with basically and like kind of like go back and forth with. And I really liked Shawnee because she was A, she's super smart and she has like interesting perspectives and she can challenge me. And she's just, I like her. She's like a friend of mine.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 0:51Jen Cohen?

  But she's now gone to Israel for, I think, an amount of time that is just not.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  Forever, basically.

• 1:00Jen Cohen?

  Basically forever. We don't know yet. It's indefinite. How about that? Indefinite.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:06Jen Cohen?

  So anyway, I'm actually introducing you as you're talking to me. So now I found another potential foiler who's, I have, I get along with swimmingly and his name is Hamet Watt.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  Swimmingly?

• 1:20Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, swimmingly.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  I've never heard that expression.

• 1:21Jen Cohen?

  You haven't?

• 1:22Speaker 00

  No. So we get along swimmingly like as if.

• 1:24Jen Cohen?

  Like we get along well, like we like interact well. We've got a good like dynamic kind of thing.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:29Jen Cohen?

  I've known Hamet for 10 years.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  About that, yeah.

• 1:32Jen Cohen?

  10 years, okay. And we, I think we've always kind of, we always clicked from day one. We always had kind of nice little banter. Hamet is a great guy. You're going to see very quickly why I like him so much. He's got a very good sense of humor. He's very smart and sharp and he like he brings a really good perspective. You are, he's a founder and he's an investor. He's had a lot of success in his professional and personal life. He used to run a fund called Upfront.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Well, I was a partner at Upfront.

• 2:00Jen Cohen?

  A partner, okay, excuse me.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  I didn't run it. I didn't run it.

• 2:04Jen Cohen?

  What's the difference? Tell us.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  There's plenty of people that run the firm. I was just one of the folks that was investing and working on companies. That's it.

• 2:10Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Nothing too special.

• 2:11Jen Cohen?

  Well, what do you mean? Like, okay, if you're a partner, weren't you one of the people who ran the fund?

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Well, actually in most venture funds, there's managing partners that typically run the fund and they're partners that might do investments.

• 2:21Jen Cohen?

  Oh, so you're below the managing partner. Okay. But now, that was like back when, now Hamet has his own fund. Can I say who's backing it?

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:32Jen Cohen?

  I could, okay. So Hamet is like a superstar. Really, he is. He's got a great eye for like innovation. He runs a human performance lab and create, is it a part of creating some of like, some of the coolest brands and products right now on the market? No, it's true. And he's very, he's like an expert in AI and human performance. And he's so good that Amazon and Google are backing his fund, which is pretty impressive.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's exciting.

• 3:03Jen Cohen?

  It's exciting and super impressive.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, enough about me. Let's get into the stuff.

• 3:07Jen Cohen?

  What do you think of me? Like enough about me. What do you think of me? So anyway, that's who Hamet is. So just now, when you see him, that's who he is. So welcome, Hamet, to the podcast.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Thank you very much.

• 3:18Jen Cohen?

  Thank you for being here.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  I'm honored to be here.

• 3:21Jen Cohen?

  Oh, the honor is all mine. So thank you. So since we've never done this before, I figured I would pick a topic. And then you and I can just like riff on it for like 10, 15 minutes.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:33Jen Cohen?

  Okay. And the topic, the first one I want to really kind of go over with you is, I mean, since you are a special, like an expert in AI, I think we should start with something like a softball here.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Okay, good week to be talking about AI.

• 3:47Jen Cohen?

  Why? Tell me.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  Well, last week there was a bunch of announcements. I'm sure you saw the OpenAI announcement that they.

• 3:52Jen Cohen?

  Tell us because maybe some people have, this is exactly what I want you to do.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Oh, good. Okay.

• 3:57Jen Cohen?

  So tell me, is there anything, what is, what's new on the horizon for AI?

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Well, OpenAI announced a new model. They call it Astra, their sixth model, I think.

• 4:07Jen Cohen?

  Yes.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  And it's, it's scored like 100 on the benchmark for AGI. So they're basically going to have to rethink the whole scale for how you measure how great these or how strong these AI models are.

• 4:19Jen Cohen?

  What do you mean it scored 100? What does that mean?

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Well, the average human, I think, scores around a 40 on this scale in terms of intelligence, this benchmark for intelligence. And this scored 100. So people are saying this is very close, scary close to AGI. And if you've played with it, it's insane. It's just insanely good.

• 4:38Jen Cohen?

  How is it, if this is ChatGPT, which is OpenAI?

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:42Jen Cohen?

  Does that make Claude and all the other ones now less effective?

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:49Jen Cohen?

  Cause they're always, they're always competing, right?

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're always competing and Anthropic is going to announce something in the next week or so. So they're going to, you know, they're going to one up each other each time.

• 4:59Jen Cohen?

  Can it go higher than 100?

• 5:01Speaker 00

  That's the question. I mean, there's potentially a new scale that they have to develop to figure out what that intelligence layer, what that intelligent level should be. But right now, this most recent OpenAI model scored at 100.

• 5:12Jen Cohen?

  So, okay, so which one do you, like of all the AI platforms, which is your favorite?

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Well, we have our own harness and platform at Cher. So we, we use all the models. And it really depends on what we're building and what we're using.

• 5:27Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  But personally, I had probably been defaulting more recently to Claude, although I'm now kind of spending more time with OpenAI as of a week and a half ago. So.

• 5:38Jen Cohen?

  Because of this new thing?

• 5:39Speaker 00

  Because of this new thing. And it's crazy because also, I think it was either the beginning of this week or maybe the end of last week, two Anthropic employees left Anthropic because they said, we're getting dangerously close to AI that could wipe us out, right?

• 5:54Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 5:54Speaker 00

  We're getting dangerously close. I think they said there is almost a 10% chance that AI could wipe us out, which I don't know what they meant by that. They're reasonably senior folks at Anthropic. They left under some sort of swarm of controversy, but it's kind of a scary and exciting time at the same time. I tend to be an optimist, so I don't think it's going to wipe us out.

• 6:15Jen Cohen?

  How can it wipe? It's basically like machines are going to take over humans. This is literally what they, the sci-fi movies were talking about.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:23Jen Cohen?

  And now the people who are the humans at the sci-fi companies or the AI companies are actually scared of what they, they're smarter than the people who built it.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:32Jen Cohen?

  They are smarter than these machines.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  We are approaching a place where the AIs are significantly smarter than the humans that have created them.

• 6:40Jen Cohen?

  How can that, how does that happen?

• 6:42Speaker 00

  How much time do we, how does?

• 6:44Jen Cohen?

  No, no, this is actually, I think a lot of people are very, like this is before we can do another hot takes with something else.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:50Jen Cohen?

  But I think it's really interesting. Like, how does that happen? How do you build something? A human being builds something that ends up being a million times smarter than what the person built.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  You know what the analog is? You have kids. So imagine if one of your kids is a genius and you've trained them and you've exposed them to something, they could quite conceivably be smarter than you at some point.

• 7:13Jen Cohen?

  At some point now. I can't even do fifth grade math, can you?

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Exactly. No, my kids are way smarter than me. So yeah, so I think that that is, that is kind of how it's happening. And these models are getting so good at training on all of the world's information.

• 7:28Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  That, you know, there's no human that can take all the world's information in our brains and remember it and know how to reference it for every task imaginable. That's what these models can do. And when you start adding more compute and more data and more types of data, video, all that, obviously all the texts, anything that's been written on the internet, all the imagery, all the songs, all that, that huge corpus of data means that it's trained on basically everything. And as the models get stronger, as the compute gets more robust, you have an ability to do some pretty amazing things.

• 8:02Jen Cohen?

  Right, but also scary things. So why, if these employees left Anthropic, why? Like, what?

• 8:09Speaker 00

  They didn't talk about why.

• 8:10Jen Cohen?

  But are you sure it's because the machines just got, like, what was the reason that they actually said?

• 8:14Speaker 00

  What they said was they feel like things are moving too fast in the world of AGI and AI.

• 8:21Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  And that we are approaching a place where the risk, the risk to humanity is meaningful enough.

• 8:28Jen Cohen?

  What did that mean though? Does that, what, what does that mean?

• 8:31Speaker 00

  What could happen?

• 8:32Jen Cohen?

  Yeah. What could happen?

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Everything from the Terminator, you know.

• 8:37Jen Cohen?

  That's exactly the movie I was referring to, by the way.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  AI start to optimize for themselves over humans. Again, I don't believe this. I actually.

• 8:46Jen Cohen?

  How do you not believe it? Don't you remember like not that long ago, there was that story about some guy, the, the AI bot was threatening to tell his secrets. Do you remember?

• 8:58Speaker 00

  Which one? No, I'm sure.

• 8:59Jen Cohen?

  Exactly which one? I'm talking about Anthropic Claude blackmail experiment. It's that great hot take talk. Okay, Anthropic put Claude in a simulated company environment where it had access to fictional employee emails. The AI discovered two things. An executive was having an extramarital affair and that same executive planned to shut the AI down at 5:00 PM. And in some test runs, Claude decided to use the affair as leverage and sent a message essentially saying, cancel my shutdown or I'll expose you. You didn't hear about this?

• 9:39Speaker 00

  This is scary.

• 9:40Jen Cohen?

  You didn't hear about this whole thing?

• 9:42Speaker 00

  I didn't.

• 9:42Jen Cohen?

  Yes. The important distinction, this did not happen to a real employee in the real world, but the executive affair, the company and scenario were fabricated as a safety test.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Scary.

• 9:56Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:57Jen Cohen?

  Researchers deliberately created a situation where the where the model act that where that hap- that can actually happen. So that's really scary.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  It is scary. I think the good news is like these guys, there are a lot of people that are putting safeguards in place to make sure these things are less likely to happen. Doesn't mean they won't happen. But I think that when I do the math, I think of the the benefits that AI can have as it relates to health, all the drug discovery that's happening, all the things that are going to be amazing for more efficiency, effectively bringing the marginal costs of goods way down. So things are much cheaper to afford. Like, you gotta trade that off relative to the jobs and relative to the all the downside. So when I do that math, if we're playing enough offense to do enough amazing things with AI.

• 10:44Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  We're gonna be okay. Because.

• 10:46Jen Cohen?

  You're saying the benefits outweigh the the negatives.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  If we're intentional about it and we're really pushing hard around those opportunities.

• 10:53Jen Cohen?

  Okay, so out of the platforms, can you kind of give us some indicate? What is what is Chat GPT? What do you what do you use Chat GPT for? What do you use Claude for? Because what I've noticed is I used to like, I used to use Chat GPT. Then I went to Claude and was only using Claude.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:11Jen Cohen?

  And then I realized recently in the last month or so that like Claude became better. Not Claude, Chat GPT became better. So like what used to be good, what Claude used to be good at, I don't find there is good at anymore.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:25Jen Cohen?

  Like the writing and the like personal questioning.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of people have talked about Claude becoming less good than it was.

• 11:35Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, even though Fable 5.1, which before, more recently last week, was just the best model known, especially as it relates to building.

• 11:44Jen Cohen?

  Was it 100?

• 11:46Speaker 00

  No, it was not, right? I think it was in the seventies. That's what made this such an important and crazy announcement. Now, who knows? The next announcement may mean Claude is on top again. Both of these are trillion dollar companies, near trillion dollar companies, about $800 billion a piece, that are trying to go public. So they're right now showing us their best they can because they want to make sure they go public in a big way and that's successful.

• 12:10Jen Cohen?

  Okay, so what do you use what for? Just give us that and then we can move on.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Well, I use primarily, I use our own at share. We have our own harness, our own platform that we use and that.

• 12:19Jen Cohen?

  You do?

• 12:20Speaker 00

  It chooses, yeah, it chooses whatever model is appropriate for the job. And we have a router that helps us do that.

• 12:25Jen Cohen?

  So you guys create your own AI?

• 12:27Speaker 00

  Well, we create our own platform that leverages a lot of other models, frontier models, including our own, to help us with what we call innovation intelligence. Our lab, we're starting new companies, we're running experiments constantly. So we're using that platform to do that. But personally, I probably use GPT more because I love voice. Don't you like talking?

• 12:49Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, me too. I like that that's what I like.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  I think my voice is like an African American woman, too. She's kind of.

• 12:55Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Her sound is, it kind of just, it.

• 12:57Jen Cohen?

  You can change it, too.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, you could change it.

• 13:06Jen Cohen?

  I want to take a quick break from this episode to thank our sponsor, Therasage. Their Trilight panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go. And I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammations in places in my body where honestly I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach cramps, shoulder, ankle. Red light therapy is my go to. Plus, it also has amazing anti-aging benefits, including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles on your face, which I also use it for.

• 13:47Jen Cohen?

  I personally use Therasage Trilight everywhere and all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable, and it's really effective. Head over to therasage.com right now and use code BEBOLD for 15% off. This code will work site wide. Again, head over to therasage, T H E R A S A G E dot com and use code BEBOLD for 15% off any of their products.

• 14:28Jen Cohen?

  So what about, besides Chat GPT and Claude, where are the other ones that are Gemini, obviously? Does anyone really use Gemini?

• 14:35Speaker 00

  Gemini's been trying to improve, but they're just not competing as much in terms of.

• 14:39Jen Cohen?

  How, why not? How can it's like Google?

• 14:41Speaker 00

  They invented this.

• 14:42Jen Cohen?

  I know, how can they not compete? Do you know those two guys came back?

• 14:46Speaker 00

  I know, they have to. They're trying to compete.

• 14:48Jen Cohen?

  I know, they they had to come back because they're like, we're gonna die.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  You're talking about Larry and Sergey, right?

• 14:52Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:52Jen Cohen?

  Larry and Sergey, the guys, yeah, like their best friends.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:56Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, but like, and it's not working yet.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Not yet.

• 14:59Jen Cohen?

  Are they good for some? Like, how far away, like, what's, who else is there?

• 15:04Speaker 00

  There is some discussion that the newest, the the model that will be coming out, Gemini's new model, will be very competitive and on par with the new Chat GPT and and and Claude. So the three of them are really duking it out. And then you have, you know, Grok, which is, you know, X's.

• 15:21Jen Cohen?

  I don't even understand the Grok. He sold it to, he sold, he, I just listened to an interview with him.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  SpaceX, right?

• 15:29Jen Cohen?

  Well, he went to Naveen, do you know what is that? Grok was sold to, for like three or four billion dollars, I thought only. Did you see this thing?

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Maybe you're thinking about another Grok because there are a couple Groks.

• 15:41Jen Cohen?

  There's more than one Grok?

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, everyone thought that was the best idea for a name of a company at the same time. And I think there are two. Elon's AI company Grok is obviously in AI. And then there's another one that's in the inference game. So yeah, it's a little confusing. You're probably talking about the other one that's inference, that's just like compute, compute capacity.

• 16:00Jen Cohen?

  What does that mean?

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Well, it's, I think it's an alternative to, I think the one you're thinking about Nvidia bought is the inference.

• 16:06Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, Nvidia.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Now part of the Nvidia capability and hardware capability. So if you want a data center and you want compute and you want inference, then.

• 16:15Jen Cohen?

  You're talking Spanish. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Does your audience care about this stuff or do they want to care?

• 16:19Jen Cohen?

  No, I I care and I think someone cares because if you don't care, you should. It's like, it's like, this is what what the world has morphed and evolved to.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  It's crazy.

• 16:29Jen Cohen?

  Like, if you don't know about this stuff, guess what happens? You're gonna be, you're falling behind.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:33Jen Cohen?

  Like, you know, it's it's actually like a thing, you know, like, we don't have a choice anymore. If you don't, even if you're not interested, get interested.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:42Jen Cohen?

  Right?

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Like, totally.

• 16:44Jen Cohen?

  Like, people who don't know how to use this stuff, it's not like it's Facebook. You can get away with not knowing how to use Facebook, but literally AI is taking over every area.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:55Jen Cohen?

  Of your life.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  It is, and in some ways, it's the most empowering, most amazing thing for humanity. We can cure diseases, we can solve problems that haven't been solved in years. In fact, there was another announcement today that this new OpenAI model cracked some scientific code around fluid dynamics that they'd been working on, that people had been working on for years. And this model kind of cracked this mathematical equation that they think is going to impact all kinds of things. And I actually just saw this out of the corner of my eye, I didn't read it in detail, but it's pretty amazing. This happened today or yesterday. But can I tell you something about humanity that I think is interesting? You asked how AI might take us out? And everyone talks about the Terminator and all this crazy stuff. You know what I think it might be?

• 17:41Speaker 00

  And no one's talking about this right now. The sex rate is going down, the birth rate is going down, the number of people in relationships is actually going down. Relationship satisfaction is going down. All these things are not really great. So what happens when the birth rate falls below a certain point? In some societies, it's already fallen past that point. I think South Korea, it's actually perhaps at the point of no return now. They're having to figure out how to get more people in to increase their population. So what could happen? Okay, the birth rate, I don't know what it is today, maybe two or 1.9 or whatever, goes down to 1.4, goes down to, you know, 0.75.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  All of a sudden, you have a beautiful robot that you can procreate with and that just compounds it even more. You can't procreate with a robot, I suppose.

• 18:30Jen Cohen?

  I know, I was gonna say, you can't procreate with it.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  You cannot procreate with a robot, obviously, but you can fornicate with a robot, which might take that sex rate even down further.

• 18:39Jen Cohen?

  Okay, well, that to me is what, where the world is going. Do you know that, have you heard about this whole thing about, for the first time ever? I heard like Esther Perel on a podcast on Oprah, actually, saying that for like, she recently had like a patient who came with his chatbot to a session.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  To have a counseling session.

• 19:02Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, that's what's happening. So to to your point of of there, that to me is where it's becoming a very, it's it's it's, I think this is where the point of no return is happening. Because people are now would prefer to quote unquote, date a chatbot because you can program it to say what you like, act how you like, sound how you like.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  Respond to all your needs.

• 19:29Jen Cohen?

  Respond to all your needs, where then you like a a real person.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  Can't compete.

• 19:34Jen Cohen?

  Can't compete. This is also the problem with, if you haven't noticed, in the, in like, there's influencers now online that are like AI and people don't know the difference. So now you're like, who look fantastic, they're 80 years old and they look like they're 30. And you don't know the difference.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:53Jen Cohen?

  And people are any, are following these people. And so you're competing with something that's not even real.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  What happens when that goes into the real world? And.

• 20:03Jen Cohen?

  It is in the real world.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  Right, but when you have a, when you have, right now, you have a digital equivalent of that and the digital equivalent that you can actually have a relationship with. What happens when you can also have a physical equivalent of that?

• 20:16Jen Cohen?

  How do you do that? Is it virtual reality? Like, how would you do that?

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Oh, eventually robots, for sure.

• 20:22Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, but it's still a robot.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, but eventually the distinction between a robot and a human is going to be so thin. The same way today, you could have a relationship with a with an agent, with an AI agent, and the distinction there between a call with a real human and an agent, not that much. It's getting, the the gap is getting more and more narrow. Eventually, if you play this out without being conscious of it, it's kind of scary, right? AI didn't have to kill us, we just kind of naturally sort of fade out.

• 20:51Jen Cohen?

  Well, that's what the scary thing is.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  That's scary.

• 20:53Jen Cohen?

  Do you know anybody who is actually using these agents or chat or bots instead of like real people for relationships?

• 21:01Speaker 00

  There was an incredible story. I think we can maybe find this and put this in the notes. I want to say the company was called Replica.

• 21:09Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  And they had a virtual boyfriend, virtual boyfriend, girlfriend type of thing. And it was adult as well. It was, it would handle adult conversations, right? Sexual conversations. They decided to turn that adult feature off, right? So you couldn't have a sexual conversation with your virtual boyfriend or girlfriend. They had a class action lawsuit. People were up in arms that their, your virtual boyfriend or girlfriend was basically lobotomized and wouldn't be sexual with it. So you should look this up. I'm not making this up. So, yes, there was, I want to say there was close to a hundred thousand people. It was a significant, and there was thousands of people that were up in arms because their

• 21:54Speaker 00

  relationship, their primary relationship, which was not real, had fundamentally changed because of the way the company changed their policy.

• 22:01Jen Cohen?

  No way.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 22:04Jen Cohen?

  Like, what, what kind of person, though, does this stuff, though?

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Have you ever talked to one of these before?

• 22:08Jen Cohen?

  By the way.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  You should, we should call one up right now.

• 22:10Jen Cohen?

  We should, we should. Do what, do, do, how do I, how do I find one?

• 22:15Speaker 00

  Uh, I mean, you could probably go, actually, you can go on any, like, if you go on Grok, not that I've tried this.

• 22:24Jen Cohen?

  Of course not.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  You can, some of these.

• 22:27Jen Cohen?

  Oh, my God, you have tried this.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Of course I've tried it. I've been trying Siri since she first came out.

• 22:32Jen Cohen?

  Yes, that's hilarious.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  And Siri's very appropriate. I've been trying her, pushing her to the limits, trying to see if she would

• 22:37Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  talk dirty to me. She never does.

• 22:39Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Very responsible, very respectful. But some of these, let's just say they're very, very, very, very bad.

• 22:47Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 22:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 22:48Jen Cohen?

  Okay, how do I find it? What do we do? How do we find one?

• 22:52Speaker 00

  We're not going to promote these necessarily.

• 22:54Jen Cohen?

  No, I want, I want to know, because my next question, she was like, who's actually doing this?

• 22:59Speaker 00

  Millions of people.

• 23:00Jen Cohen?

  Well, I know, I'm saying, but who are, what's the, what's the?

• 23:03Speaker 00

  You know what the Surgeon General said the number one health concern was?

• 23:06Jen Cohen?

  What?

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Loneliness.

• 23:07Jen Cohen?

  Uh, it is? Well, that's 100%.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 23:10Jen Cohen?

  But, but, see how this works? Because you're lonely, you, you, you gravitate to these agents, right? But because now you have an agent, then you don't gravitate to

• 23:22Speaker 00

  A human.

• 23:22Jen Cohen?

  human beings. It's like this really bad loop, right? It's a very, very, it's a scary loop.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Can be, I would say, and in most cases it is, you're right. I think the optimist in me says, well, maybe these, there's so many lonely people, maybe they start to exercise the muscle around connection. And the optimist in me also says, well, maybe some of these AIs will start to teach us as humans how to better interact with other people.

• 23:48Jen Cohen?

  No, we're, that's, we're going to talk about all that. That's like a whole area that I want to talk to you about.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:53Jen Cohen?

  The human connection piece, I think, we'll talk about that in another podcast, because we're gonna, but I do think, but just to wrap this up for a second, where, how do you find an agent or a bot? Like, how is it different than going on ChatGPT and talking to your, like, hey, tell me, you know, the, the weather in Belize? Like, is it not that chat bot that's talking?

• 24:15Speaker 00

  It is very similar, although some of the chatbots, including, I think OpenAI has made the announcement they're going to go adult, which means that they're, you know, the not safe for work type of conversations can happen, even on, you know, big applications like ChatGPT. But there are tons of virtual boyfriend and girlfriend apps out there, and that's, those are the guys that are really.

• 24:34Jen Cohen?

  Oh, so these are not on the base, those, so the chatbots and agents you can't find on a Claude or a ChatGPT or a Grok or?

• 24:41Speaker 00

  No, but many people are building, using those tools, but they're building them as separate, you know, separate companies, separate services.

• 24:47Jen Cohen?

  Okay, so before, before we wrap this, I want you to give me, like, tell me what happens when you did it, so tell me what happened.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Well, I've, just to be, you know.

• 24:56Jen Cohen?

  Be honest, I want to know.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  I'm married, happily married, and this, that, and all that good stuff.

• 25:01Jen Cohen?

  But you're curious.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  There are times where, I'm just teasing, no, there are times where, there are times where, like, when you have, it, it kind of goes to a basic human instinct, ever since the first agent, Siri, the first AI, and now Siri's responding to me, but the very first time, I tried to see how far I could push her. Do you know what I mean? I would try to say, oh, what are you wearing? And then, you know, this, and she would say, that's not appropriate.

• 25:31Jen Cohen?

  Siri would say that?

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. She would very, very tastefully redirect and say, I, I'm not, that's not, that's not what we're here for, right?

• 25:39Jen Cohen?

  Okay, but I want to know what happens when you talk to these agents.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  You, they will, they will go as

• 25:43Jen Cohen?

  Tell me.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  dark and as dirty as you'd like them to do.

• 25:45Jen Cohen?

  Tell me the dark and dirty that happened with, when you did this, and where you found them.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Not me, but a friend.

• 25:51Jen Cohen?

  Of course, always a friend. Always a friend.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  A friend was telling me that you, you certainly can, you can have phone sex with, with, with them.

• 26:01Jen Cohen?

  You can?

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:03Jen Cohen?

  Like, give me an example.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  How, what kind of show is this?

• 26:08Jen Cohen?

  I want to know, like, how it starts. Do you have to pay? Like, is it free? How do you start it? Like, what's the process?

• 26:17Speaker 00

  The AI agent boyfriend and girlfriends out there, for the most part, they have a beautiful funnel where you would start talking, I, I honestly have not done any paid.

• 26:27Jen Cohen?

  Do you have to be a member? I was going to say, how does it work? Do you have to sign up?

• 26:30Speaker 00

  The, the ones that are out there have all sorts of various signup approaches, where you can talk for a little bit, and then eventually they hit you with a paywall and you go, but even Grok, which is largely free, Grok is, uh, has a not safe for work version, so.

• 26:45Jen Cohen?

  The Elon, uh, the.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Elon's, Elon's AI. And so, you know, she'll curse, she'll talk dirty, she'll, you know, be inappropriate. And in fact, it's quite scary because a lot of these don't have guardrails for kids. And so

• 27:01Jen Cohen?

  They don't, oh, my God.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  That's created some, some challenges. Now, they're all trying their best to put the guardrails up, but that's created some challenges. So now you have to think about another statistic, the percentage of kids where their first sexual experience with, with an AI. There's a, there's a statistic around that, and it's a high number. I don't remember exactly what it is, but it's a high percentage of kids that have had their very first sexual experience with an AI. Now, you ask, is that good or bad? Obviously, the default is bad, but when you think about it, it kind of depends on what that experience was. Maybe it's a responsible way to get introduced into sex. I don't know. But that's all the conversation we're having.

• 27:41Jen Cohen?

  We are? That's all?

• 27:42Speaker 00

  No, no, that's all the conversation that people are having about.

• 27:45Jen Cohen?

  Oh, I thought you said, I'm not, I thought you meant, like, I'm not telling you anymore about my AI bot experience, or my friend's AI bot experience. So basically, I don't know, I find this to be, I, I mean, this is what I want to say, that, you know, I guess we're always scared of the unknown and what we don't know. Like, before the internet, like, when the internet just came, when, when the World Wide Web started, everyone was like, what is this? Oh, my God. And now it's like, you can't live without it, right?

• 28:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:11Jen Cohen?

  Like, everything you become, everything becomes normalized after a while.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:17Jen Cohen?

  And what I fear is that this will too become normalized, and then we'll all be having these, like, really, like, isolated relationships with people, with not people, with technology, and that's how our civilization dies.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  It's a legitimate risk. I will say the thing that is giving me some encouragement is the rise of experiential experiences.

• 28:41Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, because people are getting.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  In person.

• 28:43Jen Cohen?

  Well, we're gonna, let's talk about that.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:46Jen Cohen?

  Not next time.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 28:48Jen Cohen?

  Okay. Okay, you guys, I'm going to wrap this because the solos become like a long, long solo. It's okay. You guys, if you have not yet subscribed, please do me a favor, please hit the button and subscribe, because it makes a big, big difference to the show and who gets to see it, and the amount of people who get to see it. And if there's anything you'd like to see on the show, or someone you'd like to hear on the show, let me know in the comments. And thank you for joining, and hamei, thank you.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 29:18Jen Cohen?

  For being here. You did your first solo.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:21Jen Cohen?

  Yay.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:23Jen Cohen?

  We're going to do another one. Okay, see you guys later. Bye.