She Wants AI To Help You Thrive, Not Just Keep You Company — Y-Lan Boureau

Y-Lan Boureau is the founder & CEO of ThrivePal, an OpenAI-funded AI startup, and a former Meta AI researcher. Boureau joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss why the next frontier for AI should be science‑backed coaching that nudges us toward healthier habits and deeper real‑world relationships. Tune in to hear how large‑language models can push users to lift weights, regulate emotions, and support their friends’ growth. --- --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is the AI industry's obsession with companionship and therapy misguided? And should artificial intelligence products really be about something else? Be about thriving? We're joined today by a brilliant artificial intelligence researcher and founder and CEO, Elon Barrow, who is the founder and CEO of ThrivePal, joining us here in studio. Elon, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  I'm so happy to be here.

• 1:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so let me tell everybody where we met because there's an interesting story.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  It was a long time ago.

• 1:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and you have very fascinating perspectives on where things are heading in AI and where they should be heading. And that was also the case about a decade ago when we met, when you were at, what was then, Facebook, researching whether, if you could have AI basically go in the comments and take a heated conversation, inject some facts, and maybe diffuse some of the polarization we were seeing in society. So talk a little bit about that experiment and then give us your perspective on what happened there.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  So for me, um, working on AI has always been about helping people live better lives. Uh, and so at the time, that was like, I think back in twenty fifteen or twenty fourteen, I don't remember exactly, but I joined, I started talking about joining Facebook in twenty fourteen, and I joined in twenty fifteen, so probably twenty fifteen or twenty sixteen. Um, but at the time, one problem that I thought was something that was making a lot of people unhappy uh in their interaction online was how they were always fighting about stuff, and I had this like very common sense knee jerk reaction that, well, if you just show people the facts, then they won't be disagreeing so much, and you can just show them, no, this is, you know, this is the research, that's very solid.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Um, and and if you make it very obvious and you really show uh reliable sources that are trusted, then people are going to make it much uh find it much easier to agree. So first is reliable and trusted is something that that does a lot of work. And unfortunately, that's the pieces that have been like going uh down and down, the trust in institutions, the trust in these debunking services. Basically, either people already trust these services and then usually they don't need the debunking, or it's just kind of like minor things, or they don't, and then you can do all the debunking you want, you're always going to get an answer which is like, oh, I don't trust these services anyways.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  They're all like deep state or something, or like, they don't trust them anyways. So, um, wh- what I do when I'm interested in a problem is always I try to see if there's research on something, and for these topics of like misinformation, there was a lot of research that had been done by very good people who looked at basically the effect of doing that kind of common sense responses, or I'm going to show facts. And the effect is not very encouraging. Bas- basically, people dig their heels, and they're even more convinced of what they thought before than before you tried to reason them, if they're already like so far gone that they're very committed to their position. And a lot of-

• 3:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  So if Facebook would like come in and interject and be like, actually, this is the truth in the debate that you're having, it would make them Not only not trust that source, but even get further entrenched.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  And whatever they believed that was based off of something that was not true.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Facebook, Facebook or another institution that they don't trust. The one kind of constituency who has a chance of making a difference is their friends, people they already trust. So people who are already in their circles, people who have this relationship of uh which is usually pre-existing or it's because they're more aligned, that they already trust that person. But you cannot just build that, like out of nowhere saying, hey, I'm going to just inject myself here and give you facts. So um basically, it's often around belonging and being part of a community and being part of a circle you tru- you trust. And you cannot just say, oh, no, we're in service of truth and uh finding facts.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  And these are the same facts for everyone. If you remember the funny phrase, a- alternative facts, that that I think was a brilliant phrase. It is funny, but in practice, it's what lots of people kind of um live with. Just because often um reality is complicated and it's often too complex to fit into small soundbites or three bullet points. And often people are like, no, no, but I don't want your four hundred pages, give me three bullet points. So if you have to to but to like really, really boil down something into three bullet points, you're always going to have to make choices. They're always going to be somewhat inaccurate, so you're kind of never telling the full truth anyways. So there's a lot of room for interpretation, alternative facts and stuff.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  So even uh of course, some some things can be like categorically untrue. But there's lots of room for building these relationships of trust, showing how you've been liked to before. So it's all very murky. And it's often more about relationships, community, uh showing that you are part of a group, showing allegiance to a group, signaling to this group that you're a good member. It's like, hey, that person posted this, I'm defending them. It's more important to you. If I'm part of a tribe and someone I really look up to say something, often I'm going to, my first instance, going to defend them, right? Um so there's all these dynamics that come into play. So it's really rarely about is it true or is it false? So that's a very long answer, but that's why for me at the end of the day, I thought this is not a technical problem, it's a people problem.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And it's a psychological needs problem of how do you make sure that people feel like they have communities that they can trust? They feel like they can understand the world, they feel like the world is not a place where they don't have agency, where they don't have any control, this kind of things.

• 6:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, so basically what you were gonna do, you're thinking about doing is, the end of your research would be something within a social network could use natural language to determine whether there was some sort of political disagreement that was veering off the rails, and then have the network come in and share some fact-based research. But what you found was that people were more interested in supporting their team versus actually getting to the root of what was actually going on.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  So I was never going to do something specific. I thought the fact-checking wouldn't hurt. It wasn't the end goal, but I thought it wouldn't hurt. There were already lots of initiatives around this. And it was very clear from the research that right now it doesn't work. So I was not going to push for that. If it doesn't work, and you're like, oh, but is that the right thing to do anyway? That's not how I function. I'm a very pragmatic person. It's like, even if the intention is correct, but it doesn't get you the outcome that you think is good. It's like, perhaps don't do this. And the other thing that I thought might be a good idea was rather than injecting just facts, thinking, okay, if people are having a position that perhaps a bit too extreme, should we perhaps show viewpoints that are a bit more moderate? And like do kind of gradient descent in opinion space.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  So like you take whoever is somewhere and try to see, can we show viewpoints that are not so extreme? Because we know that doesn't work, but that are like closer. But same thing, it doesn't, it's a lot of work when at the end of the day, often people, it's more about groups and communities. And the other thing I always wanted to do, which is how I ended up focusing all my work in the end, was Understanding what what um what makes people happy, I mean happy or like um feel like their life is fulfilling. Because often when people go online, what are they looking for? Do you think they go online to like find facts? Do they go online to be entertained? Do they go online to punch and release some anger?

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Do they go online to huddle and find others like them? It's like the motivations are are very, very varied. And they're rarely going to be about fact finding. Often you want to look something up, so you want to be shocked, you want to find something that you're going to be outraged. I I remember a friend of mine who said one of the.

• 8:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe it's just you wanna feel something.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you want to feel something, but not, sometimes you want to be um to feel community, like not just a meaning, but find others. Find that you're not alone, find that other people view the world like you. So it it's lots and lots of motivations and often you cannot just boiling boil this down as like trying to find the truth.

• 9:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. And so you mentioned that you were trying to figure out what people were, what makes people happy online. And that is, I think, a theme in your broader work is how you can use artificial intelligence to make people find happiness. And it does seem like we often online are going after things that we think will make us happy, but don't.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Things like fighting with other people. Um so talk a little bit about the power of the internet to shape our ability to find happiness.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yes, but first I want to qualify, um I was not, my whole life I've been interested about how people can live fulfilling lives. Not especially online. It's just if they're online, what do they online? Um but perhaps they should be less of online. Uh and and so perhaps it's like, how can we give them stuff online so that they get more offline? Um more, but in general, I think lots of people think that um online dynamics are very different. But a lot of what goes wrong in online dynamics was already existing offline. So for example, something that I've always found found very, very disheartening is uh if you go to the supermarket.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  And you stand in line, uh like before groceries were delivered, actually, uh but so, cause when they're delivered, you're kind of like, you you know what you're getting and not getting anything more. But if you like, when I was a kid, you go to the supermarket, and you're standing in line and you're in line, sorry, I keep bumping that thing, it's going to make noises. Uh so you're in line, and then you have all these like sweets and chocolates and temptations. And they're putting them there when you're stuck there being tempted. And it's like they're they're like stroking your self-defeating urges. And then by the time you get to the cash register, you have all these extra sweets and you shot yourself in the foot.

• 10:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Never happened to me.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. And and and I remember even as a kid, like wa- walking down the the street in Paris where I grew up, and there would be this huge billboard with this piece of melting chocolate, the the brand was Suchard. And it was like chocolate, uh Rocher. And it was something, it says laissez-vous tenter, which means like indulge or be tempted. And I'm thinking, how dare they just like enter people's thing. And and they know lots of people are struggling with their weight and sweet tooth and stuff, and they're just like pushing that on you, which is not very hard. Pushing people to do something they really want to do is not very hard. So how do you help people um go towards what they're trying to do that's harder, like be a good person,

• 11:40Speaker 01

  um deal with your emotion, regulate your emotions, do long-term work, exercise, move enough, this kind of thing that takes some effort, rather than saying, okay, how do we get people to um yield to their short-term urges more often? Which is not very hard, they want to do it anyways. And so online you see a lot of that too. Online is is like the immediate low-hanging fruit is how do you get people, how do you capture those short-term urges? And that's really nice because they go super fast if if like the great late Danny Kahneman had this book Thinking Fast and Slow, about how in our brain we have this way of taking decisions very fast. And this way that's low, like s- slower, more deliberate, takes more time.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  So if it's if it's kind of a race, the faster one is is going to win every time. And so. That also means that you can have a lot more fast feedback if you use something where it's like every second you're going to get a hit, right? And so I feel like all the systems online that that depend on capturing engagement, on like trying to see what people do. If you try to capture that trend of the immediate reward, you're going to get a lot of it. And so it's very easy to train. If you try to say, no, I really want to help people do stuff that's going to really help them in thirty years. Like what, you get one data point every thirty years? Good luck with that. It's much harder. So that's what I want to do, but it's much harder.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  So for me, the problem with tapping into people's immediate urges is not just online. It's just that online, it's like I don't even have to wait for you to be at the supermarket. I can get you like all the time. So it's very tempting. But it's just a amplification of something that was already very present offline.

• 13:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  And amplification is the right word because there's scale online, right?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, especially for me, it's not just online. It's because like what I'm forty now, so forty something. So I grew up with the beginning of the internet when I would go on like net scale, like net scale and have the model may be like, and then you would like start to load and after this page, and then you would like go back, have a snack, come back like twenty minutes later and you had like two thousand pages loaded. It's like that was online at the beginning. Then we had a bunch of things and you had to be at home, right? So I think for me, what really changed is the mobile phone because suddenly you're always online. So it's not just online versus offline is always versus in boxes.

• 14:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And the point I'm making, I was making with the last point was you can try to influence every supermarket. And that's going to take you a long time. But with online and always online, you can do things at scale. And that might end up pointing people back to fulfilling things or to achieve better fulfillment. But it's probably the hardest problem on the internet. I mean, just go back to the fact that you work for Facebook. You know, Facebook is, I would say, the number one company on capitalizing on that system one need for instant gratification. I mean, they do it in incredible way with three billion users.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  So for me, what really drew me to Facebook, because for three years I did not go into big tech, even though I finished my PhD in twenty twelve. So that was a good moment to go into big tech, but instead I went to do my postdoc in the neuroscience department. With a great guy Nathaniel Dahl, working on um self-control and decision-making. And I stayed there for three years. And the reason I ended up going to Facebook was at some point I'm like, if I do all my research, who, how many, I'm going to write a book, how many people are going to read that? And Danny Kahneman already writes books, right? So if that was enough, we'd know. Whereas there's this huge megaphone with billions of people that Facebook has. So if I can go there, put little bots to teach people how to uh handle their own lives better,

• 15:30Speaker 01

  then there's a more chance of of of actually making a difference. So that's why I ended up going to Facebook.

• 15:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it wasn't just about the political stuff.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Oh, no, it was primarily about how how trying to, like, what I wanted to do from the start. But uh it it was, there was no direct way to do it. Because at the time in twenty fifteen, I don't know if you remember how bad the chatbots were, but they were really not very good. So for me, a lot of like, I wanted to already build bots to teach people stuff like how to breathe, how to meditate, how to exercise, uh teach. There's like forty fifty techniques that are very well established, decades of research show that they work. And often out of these forty fifty, there's going to be two, three, four that appeal to a given person. You have to find the right one for that person. And um so we kind of know a lot of things that work very well. But how to deliver that in a format that's interactive, that's not boring, that's. So I thought chatbots would be a very good way to do this, but they have to not be boring.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  And at the time, the chatbots were not very good. So that's why that part of of what I wanted to do uh in practice, it translated into me doing research on convers-. Conversationally, I had to try to make make the bots better. Uh so that was one of the main things I wanted to do. But for all the parts about um misinformation and polarization, that's something where I felt like, oh, I can do something right away. And then I looked at the research and like, oh, actually, no, not really. But so that was already um part of what I wanted to do early for Facebook. So you're saying they're tapping a lot into short-term urges, but they're also tapping about some uh uh into something that's very important for for flourishing, which is a connection to other humans. Because they allow lots of people to stay in touch.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Sometimes people forget that about Facebook and like, it was originally really a social network to give everyone a voice, to connect people, and it still plays that role. It it allows people to stay in touch in a way that they weren't. So there's a lot of like good stuff there. The part that makes it um a bit trickier is indeed that it's very easy to try to optimize uh on the signal you get right away. And you're going to get more of that signal when it's the short term urges and itches rather than long term. And again, I'm very against saying um something like, oh, uh those big companies are just taking advantage of people because it's what people want . No, no, I know you didn't. I know you didn't say that, but I often hear that.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  And for me, it's it's it's simplifying the the problem a bit too much because the battle often is in people's own head. It's between what I want now and what I will want tomorrow. Or what I want now and what I would want if I was stopping for five minutes and really thought about this and like, do I really want to be doing this right now? Um, and so often it's a it's a uh like all ourselves battling like the short term reward and the long term efforts. And the fact that whatever I want to do for the rest of my life, do I really have to start today? Can I start like tomorrow?

• 18:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, this is life, right? Cheeseburger or salad?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  No, exactly, exactly. And so it's not um often a lot of the technologies lowering lowering friction. And lowering friction helps the short term urges because whatever friction was stopping that, um it it goes away, so you're going to get those uh very quickly. But it can also help lo- lower friction for the harder things. So how, what I'm trying to do is how can we help technology lower fr- friction for the harder things?

• 18:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so you real you mentioned that you ran to a wall at Facebook, which was maybe not Facebook technology, but just broader technology. And that was the chatbots weren't good, twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen . I mean, Facebook built this test chatbot called M, which I had access to, which I think is the reason why we ended up uh meeting in the first place. And it was all humans on the back end that were answering.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  No, we had we had some, we had some. So the way where I worked on the M team for for okay . Um, so no, there was a, it was a hybrid thing, like the AI would make suggestions and and the humans were just to make sure that it it was still a good quality, which a lot of systems are still like that, like

• 19:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  um chatbots are going to make uh those AI systems are going to make suggestion and then there's a human overseer.

• 19:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, but you can at least admit that when you were asking these bots to do research or to draw a picture. On the other end, there were humans doing research and humans drawing pictures.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  I'm uh for me, I was just working on the AI system, so I like for sure, but it it's for me, it's not so much like. Uh my main problem with the chatbots at the time is they were really not just not very good at like anything they would not. Uh they were not uh able to answer questions in a coaching way, they did not. Uh all the things that basically now people take for granted when they talk to chat G P T or Meta or any of the chatbots, they're all very good now. It's like we were so far away from that in twenty fifteen, we were very, very stupid, we could do some stuff, but not much.

• 20:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then we have chat G P T shows up in twenty twenty two.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 20:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  G P T models continue to improve. And you say to yourself, wait a second. If I use this better chat technology, I can start to make something that people are gonna want to interact with. That can help them live more fulfilling lives. That's the theory behind your company.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so uh for me, the chatbots are good enough for what I want to do. Uh what I wanted to do is um. There's a thing that hasn't changed so much in ten thousand years. Technology has changed a lot, but humans have not changed that much. So a lot of our wiring is super well adapted to a world of scarcity. And if, you know, we were like starving half days and we had to run around all the time, which we don't really have to do anymore. But so a lot of our impulses, the things that we find easier are yet our trying to save energy and um towards comfort. And if we get given that comfort, we kind of tend to want too much of it. And then we end up more like the uh the humans of Wally. I don't know if you remember Wally.

• 21:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  I sure do.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Okay, so in Wally, the humans are like these big blobs in in chairs and they're weighted on my A I and they're just being entertained all day long. At the end, it's like this epic, like taking three steps, kind of. If if you just uh and and this happened over a separate generation, you see at the beginning when they get stuck, you see like each captain gets like bigger and bigger and and uh less mobile.

• 21:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Never forget the big sodas that they hold in their arms.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and all and the robots do all the things, right? And so for me, that's kind of um because all the um instincts we have uh around what we want.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Came from a very long time ago and have not really adapted to the world and a world of abundance. And so, um, what's great about this is that these challenges have faced humans for decades and centuries. And so lots of people have thought about this, philosophers and poets and psychologists. And so we have lots of techniques that work. People always look for a new technique, but we have old techniques. And I would say they're still the best we have. So AI is not going to, I mean, I'm not looking for something that suddenly makes it easy. It's always going to be a bit hard, but we already know what works. So what I'm trying to do is use AI to transmit those techniques that we already know

• 22:42Speaker 01

  and help people navigate them and help people learn about them in a way that's more entertaining, more graded, more personalized, more tailored to what they want to do. And also, something that's very important to me is help people who already have part of the thing figure out, like someone who's good at exercising or someone who's good at, um, something, to share that with their friends. So often if you, uh, that goes back to this idea of you often trust the people you already have a relationship with. So, um, if some of my friends have a challenge with, um, like building muscles, for example, often they're going to ask me for advice because when they go online, there's like five million different influencers who have different advice.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  You're going to see some things like, oh, you need to eat carnivore and only eat meat. And someone else is going to say, no, you have to eat no meat whatsoever and only plants. And they're both going to have lots of followers, lots of people saying, no, that's, that's the right way. And, and it's very easy to get lost. So often when you don't know where to turn, you turn to people in your circles that you know and trust. And so, um, can we help people who have some stuff figured out? Help their friends and say, hey, I've read the literature for you and I made a little course for you on this and we're going to like work through this together. Because, uh, at the end of the day, thriving for me is really a, a team sport in the sense that I don't want a world where I've taken super good care of myself and I live to be one hundred and fifty and all my friends are dead.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  I, I mean, that's not fun. You, you want to bring your village around, uh, like with you. And so that means how do you help other people? How do we share knowledge? How do we make sure that, um, it's not just a single player mode, but it's more, um, sharing learnings? And taking advantage of existing relationship with friends and other people, so.

• 24:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, you could be one fifty and still have Netflix, but I guess that's not the path to happiness.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Well, I I I do believe that there's a lot of uh joy in actually interacting with other humans with all their flaws and stuff. And also there's something else, which is we are um ruthless adaptation machines. There's this thing where your whole brain is looking for homeostasis. It doesn't really care about you um always being happy or fulfilled or like overdroid. If you're overdroid, your brain's going to think, oh, there's a lot of these joy chemicals. Let's tune it down a little. We're going, we don't need that many receptors because there's so much stuff flooding right now. So let's down regulate those receptors. I keep bumping on them, sorry.

• 25:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  It won't pick up, don't worry about it, yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  And and so it's just like going to down regulate those receptors. So that you get back to your baseline and your new overdroid state is now your baseline. So it means like if you never get any adversity or anything that's negative. You're just going to take this for granted and you'll just be exactly as happy as before. Except now it will require a lot more to just get you to that baseline. So in a way, uh we need to constantly get outside our comfort zone. Otherwise, our brain cannot handle it. And there's lots of examples like this are very, very concrete, even if you think this great Western invention of um sitting in chairs, right? We used to have to squat down to like to go to the bathroom. Um it's great for hips and then state a symbol, now you don't, you can just sit. Our hip mobility is terrible.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  If if you go to people who do like um Asian squat, for lack of a better term, like the full squat where where your your legs are really like this. They have much better hip mobility. They can do this into the seventies. It's like lots of Westerns have lost that ability because they never go into that position. Is that really progress? Just the fact that you never visit those position of discomfort anymore. Your body thinks no need to maintain them. I'm just going to lose that ability and adapt to my new range. And so it's the same for everything, including our emotional range. If we just always see things a certain way, we don't get stretched. And um the body just and the brains, they just adapt to that. And then you lose that ability.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  So in a way, I think we cannot wish for a thing where we only have positive things and we only have good interactions. Everything's great, never challenge for anything because um it's just going to shrink what we're able to take and we've become like very non-resilient humans.

• 26:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so you said a couple of things I want to touch on. First, uh that you want friends to actually help others uh as opposed to the bots helping the people themselves. And then you talked that about there's a number of things that you know that we can do to become more fulfilled. So I want to cover both of those when we come back. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For twenty five years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data.

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• 29:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 29:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right after this. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Elon Borro, the CEO and founder of ThrivePal. And we stopped at the break talking a little bit about how the plan for you is to have people use AI to sort of inspire them to go help others. It's very interesting that that is your perspective because we just saw some research come out that shows that the number one use case of chatbots today has gone from idea generation to companionship and therapy. And it seems like you're not taking that path. And you're trying to have an alternative where you're trying to spark human connection

• 30:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  as opposed to have the bot be the connector itself. Why is that?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  So it's first is I'm completely okay with just a bot teaching lots of techniques. I think it can work very well. But I think a lot, if you want to enlarge that first circle of people who can just learn from, first thing, lots of people can learn just from books. Those people have already learned those techniques if they're interested in it. Like I read so many books on this. If you read all the books, you know, a lot of things already. But that's going to be a narrow set. Then you have some people who will learn just from a bot, a little game, a thing like you can think Duolingo style. Okay, perhaps if something is more like bite sized, I can learn. And I still enjoy doing it in single player mode.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  The thing that has been shown time and again in research is that you need some kind of accountability. And accountability works better if you have a human reference in the loop. Someone who keeps you to your commitments, someone who checks in on you. And someone who, like, for example, if I have an appointment with a doctor or a personal trainer or a friend, I don't just like not show up and that's okay. If I don't show up, I have to warn them or I have to, I have to like give some kind of of of excuse or warning or something. With a bot, if you don't show up, it's like nothing happens. You can, you you don't have this whole social expectation thing. So to leverage all this kind of thing, you need a human in the loop.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Who's going to be to tell you, hey, you know, we were supposed to go running and you didn't come, something like this. Or we were supposed to live with together and you're cancelling on me again. And and and they remind you, they first they know you in a way that like this whole premise of um upload your entire life to the bot. So the bot knows you the way your friend would is like, hey, you already have friends. They already do know you. They already know you.

• 31:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  We forget that in the conversation.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  It's like, why not ask your friends? And your friends have your best interest at heart often. And you know that, you trust that they do. There's not, and and plus, you don't have this thing where suddenly um the startup that you were entrusting all this, I say this as as a founder of startup myself. But it's like, if that startup goes under and disappears, what happens? Your friends, you kind of have more of a a sense that they've known you for a very long time. They aren't going to get bought by something else and suddenly

• 32:23Speaker 01

  the there's going to be a pivot and suddenly your data is going to be used for something else. So there's more of a sense that there's a shared flourishing objective that they want you to thrive and that you trust them, which I think is very hard to replicate with a machine. And my question is not just that it's hard, it's like, why would you? When one of the biggest sources of thriving is to help others? Like, whenever I help people and whenever um someone tells me that I've helped them improve their lives, it always brings tears to my eyes. It's just so beautiful and it's like so deep and so touching. And and it's like this kind of deep emotional fulfillment that you need to feel useful.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  And so why take that away from people when it's both more effective? And a kind of a win-win situation. We we are often people forget that a lot of situations in life, there is a win-win solution, not always, but that's one case where there really is. Um. Also, because a lot of what makes it hard for us to thrive is that we don't have the infrastructure so much for thriving.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  In the sense that, for example, if you want to go running, it's much easier if there's a running club in your building with your friends, that if you have to start it from scratch, that's an example. Uh. If you want to eat healthy and you go out and you see five fast food restaurants, it's harder than if you go out and you see delicious, healthy food with all good salads, that's all very healthy, cheap and like, that's what I mean by infrastructure for thriving. Um. Now, the default thing when you want to socialize, what it is, go get wasted and drink. Why don't we have stuff where like people go have tea? I I I don't drink, so it's very frustrating for me that the default socializing thing is always to go uh to a bar that and especially in New York City, it's so noisy, you can barely hear people.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  It's like, I want to have tea parties, uh this kind of thing is like, why um don't we make it easier to do the right thing? And so uh when I say the right thing, I mean the healthy thing long term in a way that would still be fun. Right now, there's often an opposition between being a cool person that's fun and doing something that's healthy for you. I don't think that's a necessity. I think we can have lots of things which would be fun and still be social, but for that you need to bring everyone. And so that's why I think doing that as a team thing where someone who's helping you um discover the pleasure of tea drinking as opposed to just uh getting drunk. It's like after that, you can all socialize as a group, eating healthy food and drinking tea.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I I sound like Brian Johnson, but but I mean, he has a point sometimes for that. Yeah. It's it's like, so for me, that's one of the big reasons, it's like. Even if you could get just everyone to have that with a bot, it wouldn't fix the thing that you need your group to want to socialize in this way, so that you're not the only one saying, oh no, but it's my bedtime. I need to sleep and I don't drink and I do these kind of things. So building it as a team.

• 35:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  So then I want to know what you think about the fact that everybody seems to be gravitating towards bots as companions or or even lovers. I mean, I had an experience a couple of months ago where I was walking on the streets in Brooklyn. And these two friends were talking and this woman was talking about her conversation with ChatGPT about the type of man that she should have in her life. And I was like, wait a second, you have your friend right there. Like, why are you speaking with ChatGPT and not your friend about this very kind of very important decision? And I I don't think she's the only one. I think this is very common now.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  First thing, I I think there really is a place for ChatGPT and friends. When I say and friends, I mean ChatGPT's friends. I don't know if they're friends, but you know, Metaya, like all the other bots, like pick your own bot.

• 36:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think people really do view them as friends.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they don't really talk to each other. Well, I mean, they're friends to you, but what I mean is the friend of ChatGPT, like ChatGPT and friends, like all the bots. So be- because because you can use them in a very different way. They they have lots of strengths in terms of you can rehash the same thing five thousand times and not be using up their mental capacity because they they're always there. You can talk to them at five AM, which you cannot always do that for your friends. Sometimes you shouldn't be doing this, like people have boundaries, which is very healthy. It's all these things.

• 36:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  That is one nice thing about chatbots is you can just go over and over and over again where a friend would just lose patience with you.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 36:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's there and it's like, all right, I can handle this.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  I mean, they have this huge access to body of knowledge. For example, even outside the realm of companionship, but if I want to do some kind of deep research or something, if I do it myself, I know how to do this. It was my job. But it's going to take me a long time. I cannot just instantly scan the internet and summarize it. I cannot. It would take me time. So it's a big time saver and just it also gives you a good sense of what I call the distribution. So if I want, often there. For lots of cutting edge questions, there isn't a consensus. You have a distribution of opinions. And if I want to get a sense of what that is, I can ask, okay, what's the mainstream opinion on this? How established is this?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  And, and um, an AI system can go, look at everything and kind of say, okay, this is a fraction of people who believe that. There's this other fraction that believes that, and this is how they interact. So you get a sense of like a meta view of the, the opinion on that question. Which is very hard to get from just one person because it takes a lot of time. You, you need, you, you, you need to not just read one paper, but read everything and get a sense of how they interact. So that's super useful for forming an idea. So for me, I have you more um, like the bot as part of the pod, but you have to have your friends in the pod. Um, and, and so it's very tempting to have the bot because the bot have, has all these very nice qualities. So um, for me, it's not unlike video games.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Uh, video games have been around for a long time and they're very tempting because they give you this instant sense that you matter. I mean, often you're the person saving the world and you, I don't know if you've seen that movie, um, what's his name? Free Guy, I think.

• 38:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yes.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Free Guy, yeah.

• 38:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, that's my father's favorite movie.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Oh, really? I didn't know that.

• 38:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  He's watched it probably more than ten times.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so I, I love that movie.

• 38:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  We'd like, that's our Saturday night activity at home is we put the, put on Free Guy and we watch Ryan Reynolds' Wake Up. Oh, video game atmosphere.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  So I love it. So do you remember that scene with Channing Tatum?

• 38:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, tell me more about it.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's the one who, he has a, he, he, no, he's a streamer, streamer.

• 38:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  And so he's live streaming and he has, in the game, he's this Channing Tatum character. And he has this catchphrase and then suddenly he runs into Free Guy. And uh, uh, uh, while like they're having this big scene and he wants him to do a catchphrase and then you hear his mom saying, hey, can I do the vacuum? Or something like this, like she's in the back because he lives, and then you like see the real world and he's like this. He's just stuck in his gaming chair and he's, he lives with his mom and she's trying to vacuum and, and so it's like this.

• 39:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  True to life.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Just juxtaposition of um, real life where he feels like he cannot be a hero and the video game where everyone is a hero. And you matter and you're super powerful and it like fulfills all these things that life did not. So it's a shortcut. But it's a simulacrum that at the end of the day is not really fulfilling because you don't get the real thing. Um. So the question is, are we going to get to a point where it's so good that actually fulfills completely and then you get Brave New World, the soma, kind of.

• 39:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Um hum.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  So soma is is uh I I've read that a very, very long time ago, but like the perfect drug. You just you bliss out in your bed and everything's great. I don't do anything. Or or Matrix, the Matrix. You get great steak and stuff. So is that a problem?

• 40:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  One could argue this already exists.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we don't have a perfect drug yet. Um. But you get some kind of that and and so of course, if you if you look for that in uh technology, you're going to find something that gives you a lot of things and that are very tempting because first, a lot of these systems, um they're very, very um attuned to your needs. They always think you're great. They always give you lots of compliments, always tell you what you want to hear. They're always available and they don't have needs. And if you get used to this as what a great interaction should be, then it makes you less and less able to interact with humans who have flaws, have their own needs. You have to, it's more of a give and take.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  And it's very healthy to learn that give and take. So for me, that's why it's very tempting. You can have a bit of it, but not get hooked on it so much because you need to be able to again, stretch your mind, be resilient to the world sometimes pushing back. Um. And also because if you want the whole world to thrive, which I do, you cannot aim for a world where there's no configuration that works. So for example, um I think I gave you that example last time we worked together, but my my English teacher used to say, back in high school or I don't remember, uh used to say, oh, it would be great if everyone was in the top ten. It was a joke, but it's it's kind of the idea. It's like you cannot have everyone be in the top ten.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  So if everyone wants to be the top person, the only way this works is if you have a multiverse that's completely splintered, but where everyone has their fantasy world where they're the top person. So you can have that and that's what virtual reality gives you, like everyone has their own virtual world where they're whoever the superhero hero is, or you change what you want and you're like, I don't really need. My fulfillment is not just me beating every, uh, like getting the best of everything, but it's more having my community that um is happy and everyone can thrive and we can do something together. And there's lots of ways to find that.

• 42:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  And so trying to move people towards this is more important to me rather than trying to indulge people into something, a kind of fantasy where they can get that, but it's fake.

• 42:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes. So you have a company that is attempting to make this happen, to sort of nudge people into moments that are into habits that would make them more fulfilled. It's funded by OpenAI, I think that's public, right? We can say that. Um, tell us a little bit about what you're trying to do with ThrivePal.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  So it's funded by OpenAI and General Catalyst mostly and a bunch of other people. Uh, what we're trying to do is um, is to give people the tools that are very science-backed, that we know work and help people um, discover them and experiment with them and find what works for them. So those kind of tools, they've existed for a long time, but not everyone's going to be receptive to the same one. So a very well-known one is meditation, for example. If you look at meditation, um, you're going to find lots and lots of research that shows that it can do great things for people. It doesn't mean that everyone is going to find that meditation is the answer to all their problems. It means it's worth trying, it's worth learning about, it's worth playing with and experimenting with. If it works for you, you keep it. If it doesn't, you try something else.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Um, so there's a bunch of these things that are powerful and work for some people. Um, and some things that even if they don't work for you, you kind of have to find a way to do that, otherwise you're not going to function so well because until we get uploaded to cloud or whatever, we're living bodies. Uh, how to take off your body, for example, exercise, physical things.

• 43:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  We all need to do it.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So how do we get people to find something where they can move in a way that's fulfilling for them? It's going to look very different for different people. Some people like running, some people like boxing, some people. So give them a sense of, okay, this is what you need to do. You need to do some cardio, you need to uh, do resistance training. That one's really important to me, especially for women. Um, because For lots of women, I think they need to be toned, which is kind of a way to say that they don't want to get too bulky. I used to also not want to get too bulky, but actually you need to do resistance training because that's the only way to train strong bones. And also because muscle have a really strong role in metabolism for dealing with glucose.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  So for lots of health reason, uh, people need to do resistance training, not just run, like exercise means lifting. Or, or you can do body weight stuff, you can do, there's many ways uh to do resistance training. But trying to get that message out because we know it's true, the research is very solid on this. And somehow lots of people don't know this. And you know, also one of my personal thing is uh. People wearing foot chip shoes, this kind of things where people wear shoes that are terrible for their feet, that way too narrow, this kind of things. Which I think is really common sense, but somehow the message is not super well known. So what I'm trying to do too is to get those messages that I think are really important out in a way.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  That can speak to people. And what's great with AI is you can iterate a lot, you can try lots of different ways, you can try lots of different voices, lots of different. Packaging for this kind of things and see what works and get some kind of feedback on this. So that's also what I'm trying to do.

• 45:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, but it's not easy because these are eat your Wheaties type messages for lack of a better term, right? It's like, uh, I, it's gonna take me, like, I have a resistance, even though I love exercising. I have a resistance to doing it. Getting to the gym is the hardest part. Once you're at the gym, it's actually kind of fun.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so for me, like, I just opening an app that's gonna tell me. Things that I need to do that don't bring me that instant gratification, there's like a pain to it even. So how are you gonna do this?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  So, uh, first thing is, uh, I think there's several levels of learning. The first one is even knowing that's the thing. So for example, if I tell you I have groundbreaking information, if you smoke. You might increase your chance of cancer. You're like, oh, I know that. Everyone knows that. That wasn't the case a few decades ago. So first, getting the information out. There's some things like the thing around the role of muscle metabolism. Well, I think the information is not out yet. So that's level one is like putting the information out for some of these things. Um, like even before you finding it's painful to do something, knowing what it is that you should do and aim to do. So, um, like, yeah, step one. So this, for the macro biome, I think there's lots of things where people are not aware

• 46:35Speaker 01

  of how important it is to take care of the bugs in their, in their gut. Like the fact that seventy percent of your immune system is in your gut. And they react so much to what you eat and that perhaps if you have a choice between taking this antibiotic and not, and you're just taking it like to be sure. Like, pass weight a bit, know that there's a downside, that you're going to completely wipe out all the bugs uh, in your gut and it can cause a lot of downstream problems. So uh, I think there's a lot of information that still needs to get out at level one. Level two is knowing, once you know kind of like where you want to be, knowing the techniques that can take you there. I'm still not at the level of you actually doing it, but at least being aware of what they are. And then you choose whether you do them or not. But learning that mapping of in this context, if I want to get there, I should do this.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  And so, uh, the way I'm trying to do this, we're going to build a game. So hopefully it's going to be fun and entertaining, just to familiarize, familiarize people with that mapping of these techniques exist and you use them in this context to get into that, um, outcome. And then how you decide, how you decide to actually implement them, that's the hard part. It's still hard, there's no way to, but there's still many ways that are more like what I call meta techniques, which are about how you build a habit, how things that work for setting goals, for example, you know, you have lots of things around. Um, there's researchers at NYU who have developed the WOO framework, which is Wish Outcome Obstacle Plan. So showing that if you set a goal, it works better to not just visualize the outcome,

• 48:03Speaker 01

  but also think about all the obstacles and make a plan for what you're going to do when you run into these obstacles. So lots of techniques that people can learn that are about how to make those, uh, changes in your behavior to get to the goal you want. And something that's very, very important to me too, is often people haven't thought all that much about their values, uh, in the sense of, um.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  What they value in life, what they want out of life. And often, I think with AI, it's especially important. People often talk about the algorithms and what you're trying to learn. But with any algorithm, you have a sense of like this objective function. What it is that you're trying to achieve. For lots of humans, it's not very clear. They can tell you, oh, I want to make more money or something. But it's very important for people to take their time to think what it is that really resonates with you, what it is that you want to get out of life. Which often, I mentioned this thing about helping other people. It's like, I myself, I have a list of things that make me cry. For like things that I find deeply, deeply moving. For example, there's this video of Sir Nicholas Winton. Do you know who that is?

• 49:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  No.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so Sir Nicholas Winton was a

• 49:16Speaker 01

  a British person, I'm going to butcher his story, but more or less. A British person who was, I think, twenty something just before World War Two. And he went on vacation in the Czech Republic

• 49:30Speaker 01

  for two weeks. And when he was there, that was before the Nazis arrived in Czech Republic. And he realized that all these children, Jewish children, were going to get wiped out. And so he by himself organized all these trains, eight trains, I believe, to find families for all these kids. And he did it like a mail order catalog, like he would take pictures of the children and then send to families in England. And people could pick the kids they liked, like a mail order. And he saved something like seven hundred kids, a lot, a lot of kids, who would completely have died without him. And he just did that like himself. And he didn't really talk to anyone about it. And they just, people randomly found out, like when he was eighty or something like this.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  And there was this BBC documentary about him where, which is the part that makes me cry, that you see it's online on YouTube where he, there's this BBC.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Show, I think it was called That's Life. And he's sitting there in front, they just ask him to come. And and then the presenter asked him uh is is is tell him his story and he says, well, you're sitting next to one of these children and it's this lady. And then the presenter, I'm going to cry again, but the presenter asked them like, is there someone else who owes their life to Sir Nicholas Winton? And then the entire room raises.

• 50:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, man.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  And it's all these people that he had no idea what they had become, they had gathered all of them. And they said it was like all these people had kids and grandkids, he saved like fifteen thousand people. This kind of thing, it's so moving and and it's this thing that really like um shows people like what what connecting what you want to do with meaning is so. That's a a big story, but there's a another one, just a silly commercial for kettlebells, right? Kettlebells, it's just like, so you see a guy, an old guy, and and he and he just first.

• 51:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's gonna be any different from story number one, but go ahead.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  No, I I I know, but it it's like just about connection to him.

• 51:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I don't know, I wanna hear it.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  So he he goes to, he's like, he's this old dude and he like walks and goes to his like closet and he takes this kettlebell and he like locks it and barely raises it and then he tries and he barely does it. And you see him like go back and every day he can raise it a bit bigger, a bit higher, and in the end he managed to raise it. And at the end, and you wonder, and his neighbors think he's crazy and they call the cops on him or whatever. And and then at the end, you see it's Christmas and he will dress up and he picks up his grandkid and he gives her a star and he raises her.

• 51:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's beautiful.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  So he can, she can put the star. And it's like, so it's like, that's the thing, it's like connecting what you do, remembering why you do things. And often, the end goal is going to be something connected to people you care about or to lives. And uh it can be your family, like the second case, or it can be complete strangers, kids like Nicholas Winton. Which he lived to be one hundred and five and he's like, you should look, he's in interviews when he's, I think there's one where he's one one hundred and three and just saying, he he's just talking about, oh, I don't like to talk about the past so much, people talk about the past so much. I I I want to worry about what we do now and he's like so humble, he's he's like um. I I like him very much, but it it's very heartwarming. So like remembering why we do things, why? Why do we care? Why do we want to be alive?

• 52:38Speaker 01

  And trying to build that connection. So figuring out what it is that gives people energy. It's going to be different for different people. People care about different things. They have different values, but lots of people have deep values. That means something to them. It's not going to be the same for me as for you, but there is something. So building that connection. And what I think back to AI and stuff, where AI can help is to help um like build the step by step process for how you figure out what it is that you value. Remind you to connect that to how it translates every day. If you want to be there to raise your granddaughter on the tree in forty years, what do you need to do today? And every day so that you can get there. So these kind of things.

• 53:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  So what you're building is not. When I first thought uh download the app, I was like, OK, maybe this is because it's an app. You can go get it.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Um hum.

• 53:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's you go to your website now if you want to try it out, right?

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, on ThrivePal.com.

• 53:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  ThrivePal.com.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  ThrivePal.com. And so what you do now is you download it and you sort of decide what you're interested in, some sort of uh physical health thing or some sort of other goal. And it I thought maybe this is going to be like a therapist or a companion. But really what it is is it seems like it's more of a coach to help you.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really more of a coach and like uh what we're trying. So we're building it little by little, of course. But yeah, my my goal is to build this kind of um roadmap for thriving. Like you have a blueprint for how to thrive in your life, how to build these systems so that it's an upward spiral rather than just following what it is that you want to do right now, which can very quickly lead into more of a downward spiral where you're tempted, you do more of these things, then you eat too many sweets and you don't move enough, this kind of thing. Where you just chase the temptation instead of saying, OK, I can actually build a system so that my life improves little by little and um and you get to where you want to be.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  There's also we we I started, I just started like two weeks ago, our Facebook page on ThrivePal. Not Instagram because Meta suspended my Instagram page, so for now it's like tiny. But Facebook, we still have this page.

• 54:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, why do they suspend your Instagram?

• 54:44Speaker 01

  I have no idea. The systems are, you know.

• 54:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  You don't have any pull, you can't DM Mark.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  I I I I contacted one of my um meta colleagues, so we're working on it. But the the Facebook page, we have a bunch of posts like a around this trying to convey these concepts of like what what people should do to um so because I I think for lots of people, they they are very strong sources of motivation for them that can help them uh achieve these goals. But we need to find them and it takes a lot of time and that's where AI can help because AI has a lot of time.

• 55:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  So is it, do you think that the technology itself, like AI technology, is gonna get so good that people are gonna wanna do things? Because any wanna do these things, I feel like anytime someone's tried to build uh an app with these type of purposes, like even Duolingo has all these like addictive dark patterns uh built into them. So are you gonna be able to do it on the strength of the AI technology itself? Or you're gonna have to resort to like things like um the I I don't know, you have streaks.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  But um like Duolingo has the most passive aggressive notifications, like

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  your grandma's gonna die if you don't do uh Spanish today. So how are you gonna get people to use this?

• 56:00Speaker 01

  Uh well, so well, there's also, you know that app Finch?

• 56:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I haven't used it before.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Okay, so uh if you know Finch, it's uh trying to push self-care. It's very encouraging to me because they they have streaks too, but they're very like polite with they're never pushing you. They're never pressuring you. It's very supportive and people love it. And uh it's kind of in the same mind space uh as as what we're trying to do at ThrivePal, which is really trying to support people to build uh better habits in a healthy way um and not kind of take advantage. Of course, there's this thing that you we still need to survive a company and it's much harder to push grilled broccoli than it is to push soda. Um so yeah, that that that's the thing is like, how how do we um manage to do that?

• 56:47Speaker 01

  But there's lots of things that can work because um it it's a thing that we uh so for example, there's one of the posts I did on the Facebook page is about temptation bundling, right? It's the idea of trying to harness. The things that you want to do for which you're already motivated to get to your long term goals. Because sometimes you can find a way to trick yourself into doing something. Uh by using some of the things that you like doing. So for example, let's say I want to watch a TV show. Uh it it's one of my personal things. Sometimes when I start watching a TV show, I cannot stop. I I I can always try thinking, oh, I'll just watch one episode and and then I watch the entire seven seasons and. I haven't moved from my car for two days, you know, it's kind of things. So um there's several things I can do.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  I either I I say I don't watch a show myself alone, like someone else has to have the remote control. Uh but something else that works very well for me is I'm only going to watch shows when I'm like at the gym. And so that kind of built this nice partnership where. The thing that's painful limits the other one and the other one pulls the the first thing. So trying to find this this balance. Um and so I think for a lot of the what you mentioned dark pattern and stuff, there's. Ways to leverage something that are going to be tapping into short term uh motivation. But it's aligned with what you want to do long term. So uh an example that actually comes up a lot is when we talk about the game design.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Because I I mentioned we also want to do a game, which is not the app that like the game is not out yet, but um. We want to make a game. It's going to be uh more engaging because you know you have some like game stuff where you have. In game currency that you try to accumulate, but something that we're not trying to do is to have it be to really. Trigger immersion when we try to keep people in there because that's not a goal of the game. We want them to come back every day to learn new stuff, but to not spend two hours. That's not. And and actually, that's a lot uh that's very true for the gym too. Often it works better if you were to do. Uh you know, five sessions that are shorter than one gigantic session every month, you know, it it's just like repeated short things. It's more like brushing your teeth. So can we get to that brushing your teeth part?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  And we don't need people to like stay long. So trying to find how can we. Leverage these things, just because even the way your brain is wired, you need dopamine to do things. Otherwise, you know what happens when you don't have dopamine, you're like, you have Parkinson's, you're not moving. So to to get people to move, you have to tap into that short term motivation. So either you find a connection to the deep motivations, or you ensure that, hey, I'm going to use it in a way like with temptation bundling, where it's like horses that draw a cart that I want drawn, you know, so that's what we're trying to do.

• 59:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, I think this is gonna be my last question for you. You're you're creating a AI startup that basically people talk to this coach that helps them flourish. The big question is, is the value gonna be within the big chatbots themselves or in, I don't I don't know what you call it, an AI wrapper? Or is that demeaning?

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Um, sorry, I don't understand the question.

• 59:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like an AI wrapper, like a a the term AI wrapper is, you know, the term AI wrapper.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, an app built on top of a model. I guess like to put this question a different way. Is there a chance that people will just go into ChatGPT and say, hey, I wanna thrive, help me?

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so how do you how do you anticipate that? And how do you plan for that as someone who's building it after yourself?

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, for sure. So first thing is, ChatGPT knows lots of good things, but ChatGPT is very permissive and not so opinionated necessarily about what's good. And so we give a lot more structure as to like, okay, these are the things that you need to think about. This is how you organize your thing, these are good techniques. Like, we give a lot more of, we have a strong stance on what the good directions are. So that's kind of way more curated. And same, especially for the game where this are all going to be what we provide. And if you go into our app, there's this thing called like instant insight, which are little techniques that you can learn about. I decide what's in there. Um, so it's more like this choice, this editorial choice.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  So it's like editorialized ChatGPT. And also the way I really ask it to be science backed. And I check like all the literature myself, because I've read so many papers I've published in neuroscience and like theoretical neuroscience, this kind of things about how the brain works. So making sure that

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Uh this is reliable, which ChatGPT is very happy giving you bogus information. Sometimes because some people believe it's true um and science is complicated, so I trust myself way more. So I I I do that work to um to ensure that what we put in there um is in the right direction.

• 1:01:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that's defensible.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Uh long term, you mean?

• 1:01:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I would be very happy if ChatGPT starts becoming very reliable, for sure.

• 1:01:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Uh now, there's a thing, it's like, there's no necessary consensus, you're always going to have lots of people thinking different things are more important. So I have my own way of what I think is important, and I think I think my way is good.

• 1:02:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  So that's kind of what we have there, and this idea of having more of a community multiplier thing for me is is what's good. And this whole thing around the game also is is for me is going to be very like unique, not at all like ChatGPT, so for for me, that's very different. But um uh I think it's trying to be, at the same time, it's very broad because about thriving, it's way more narrow than what ChatGPT is trying to do to accommodate so many different things, so.

• 1:02:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, this is really the last question. When we met, we met a couple of weeks ago after, I think we met like maybe eight years beforehand, so. Uh you asked me a very interesting question at towards the end, which is what my hope was for the world. I just want to end with that. What's your hope for the world?

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  So, you know what I mentioned about how people have like deep motivation to see others thrive? And it's like, I really hope we can get to a world where people don't think as much in terms of zero sum. Thing where it's all a competition, and if you take something, it has to come out of some some some somebody else. And but that we leverage the higher space of possibilities to encourage more uh human flourishing as a community, as a village, as a group of people, rather than continuing to think, how do we optimize in a very narrow way that's often short sighted?

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  So for people to feel like their life has a lot of meaning, that they know what that means for them and for their friends, and that we can find these ways of being where they're not as influenced. By that whole past of scarcity that we had for millions of years as humans. And then we kind of adapt to the new technologies we have. And we are like aware of of the fact that we often are our worst enemy. And we shoot ourselves in the foot ourselves. And we're going to get bigger guns, uh, like metaphorically with all this AI stuff, which is going to make it very easy to have these tempting stuff coming at us. And so I really want people to have all the tools so that they can be um

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  more competent and autonomous and make the right choice for them for what really allows them to thrive as a as a whole species, you know, long term.

• 1:04:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  I want everyone to be happy around me and everyone to be thriving and my friends to be healthy and people to know how to regulate their emotions so that we can have civilized conversation and debate stuff. And everyone is kind of making music and dancing and running around, this kind of thing.

• 1:04:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no, I love it. It's full circle, right? We started talking a little bit about the polarization. And you can bring it back now that people should, you know, not view the world as zero sum and not allow some of the things that are trying to rip them apart. Do that. And if AI can help us get there, I think that's a much better future. So thank you for sharing your vision with us.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:04:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, everybody. Thank you for watching. We'll be back on Friday breaking down the week's news with Ron John Roy. Until then, we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

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